Late last year, Cook County dangled a carrot for suburbs to play a bigger role by creating a $100 million disaster response and recovery fund largely to help migrants. About $20 million of that fund is earmarked for suburbs to apply for in grants. But so far there’s been little appetite from suburban leaders. In a county with more than 100 municipalities, only Oak Park has applied for funding, the county confirmed.

The announcement noted the city would not incur any cost for the new shelter. The Archdiocese of Chicago is leasing the space to the city, which is subleasing the school building and convent to the Zakat Foundation, a Bridgeview-based charity founded by Muslims to help address poverty internationally.

These are the fourth and fifth Senn students shot this year. At least two other shootings have targeted CPS students in recent months.

Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott Jr. pointed out that, unlike Chicago, Hammond is not a sanctuary city. “Indiana has been spared from this debate that you all are going through in Chicago right now. I don’t want it to start in Hammond,” he said.

After the second-worst quarter of demand in at least 16 years, the downtown office vacancy rate increased to 25.1% at the end of March. It’s the first time the share of available office space downtown has topped 25%, marking a new record high for the seventh straight quarter and for the 12th time in the past 14 quarters. Comment: Note that this is rate is about space under lease, as opposed to actually day-to-day occupancy, which has been hovering around 55%.

The complaints, already under investigation by the Illinois Department of Human Rights, state that a former female employee alleged retaliation, sexual harassment and discrimination after she raised concerns about an apparent non-consensual sexual encounter between her and an unnamed village trustee during an economic development trip to Las Vegas last May.

“We’re going to ask folks to pay more taxes for another $100 million,” said Brendan Reilly, a Democrat and alderman on Chicago’s City Council, “yet I still can’t get a straight answer on where the $200 million we allocated for this year has gone, where it’s been spent, and if there’s been a return on investment. The mayor’s agenda has “been aggressive against the business community here.”

Mayor Brandon Johnson’s Cut the Tape report details 107 recommendations to make Chicago’s development process more efficient. Among the top 10 recommendations are creating a new director of Process Improvement role at the Mayor’s Office and adopting zoning changes that would eliminate minimum parking requirements.

Together, the two women-owned businesses will be responsible for cutting down on greenhouse gas emissions. The duo is interested in finding ways to reroute untouched food to help food insecurity in local communities, and repurposing as many of the materials that go into putting on an event of this scale as possible.

“What has to happen instead of having this focus on reparations, is we need to have a focus on how we can educate our kids,” Pastor Corey Brooks said. “Let’s create some systems and some structures to make sure that our kids are reading and that give them that chance at the American dream and stop focusing on someone to give us something and give us a handout so that we can somehow turn things around. That’s never going to happen.”

Next year’s budget will be the last to benefit from federal COVID money, and officials have said there’s about $300 million remaining for the coming school year. Those relief dollars will be used to help plug the district’s projected budget deficit and will help reduce the shortfall to $391 million, officials have said. In order to further reduce the budget gap, the district is looking for cuts at the central office level, instead of making cuts to schools to balance the budget, officials said, and also seeking a larger funding increase from the state.

Frank Bilecki, executive director of the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority, said the Bears are eyeing the same portion of the hotel tax the White Sox hope to use to fund a new stadium in the South Loop. “Both teams appear to understand that the continuation of the 2 percent hotel tax is unlikely to pay for two new stadiums and pay off the legacy [outstanding] stadium debt,” he

Although it may seem like a labor movement is sweeping the country, overall union membership has fallen dramatically since historic highs in the 1950s. In 1983, the union membership rate across the country was 20.1 percent, according to BLS figures. In 2023, it’s at 10 percent. There’s no simple answer to explain why. Public opinion about unions was at its highest point since 1965, according to a 2022 Gallup poll.

The Chicago Department of Public Health has not specified how many cases are from the Pilsen migrant shelter but they have said it is not the source. “Clearly we’ve had a lot of cases come out of that setting,” Dr. Brian Borah said. “But I think it’s an open question about how measles came to be in that setting.”

Roger Roache, 18, is the second high school student to be charged with possessing a machine gun inside a Chicago high school since March 20.

Dates of exposure go back to March 5. Symptoms of measles can take 7 to 21 days to appear.

“As an aside, it’s interesting to see that (Mayor Brandon) Johnson, whose first year has been rocky to say the least, has gotten a better reception from those outside his progressive cheering section for pursuing ideas spawned by the Lightfoot administration than those he’s championed on his own. LaSalle Reimagined is but one.”