As a $103,488 per year “senior adviser on community safety,” Alyxandra Goodwin, 33, helped lead the administration’s charge against ShotSpotter; She has been heavily involved in “social justice” initiatives for years, and has referred to police as “the muscle of racial capitalism.”

The council was supposed to hold a special meeting Wednesday on Mayor Brandon Johnson’s overhaul of the school board, calling on the current and future board members to appear for questioning, but not a single school board member showed up at City Hall.

Pedro Martinez says he met multiple times with the mayor’s staff and the mayor himself April 30th, asking him to authorize sending Chicago Public Schools $462 million in tax increment financing surplus funds.

“Borrowing the money to pay operating expenses would be the equivalent of like a person taking out a second mortgage on their home to buy beer and cigarettes. That’s how irresponsible that action is. … Rather than make the hard and important decisions, the city is hoping to trick people into letting it borrow more just to pay the bills and leave the problem to someone else,” State Comptroller Susana Mendoza said.

“CTU members deserve to know where their money is going. After four years of silence, it’s time for transparency,” said plaintiff Phillip Weiss, who has been a CTU member since 1998. “This lawsuit isn’t just about us—it’s about the more than 25,000 educators across Chicago who rely on the union to uphold its commitments.”

More than one in 10 households in the south and southwest suburbs still owed taxes in 2024, a 27.4 percent increase from the previous year, according to the recent report by Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas.

“What City Hall, the new Board of Education and the state of Illinois must do is renegotiate the terms of these terrible toxic swaps, and, with the support of voters on Nov. 5, immediately move to change the Illinois Constitution to allow for a 3 percent state income tax on income of more than $1 million per year. This tax on high earnings would provide property tax relief to working people and fully fund our schools.”

There have been 28 shootings, five of them fatal, in the neighborhood since July, according to city crime data. During the same time period last year, there were 16 shootings that left one person dead. Pablo Galvez, a violence intervention manager with West Side violence prevention organization BUILD, said there have been more turf wars between gangs in Humboldt Park and West Humboldt Park since summer, resulting in more targeted gang violence.

The lawsuit accused the City of Evanston of violating the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, which says all Americans are given equal protection under the law with its reparations program. Evanston’s latest motion to dismiss states that the suit’s plaintiffs do not live in Evanston, do not own property in Evanston and did not apply for reparations in a timely manner before the program’s 2021 deadline.

Ald. Brendan Reilly is among the City Council members pushing for state lawmakers to make a change. “Given what’s going on right now, with the reconstitution of the school board, the council needs to have a role in the approval process,” Reilly said.

“He (Mayor Brandon Johnson) knew we had the votes to override [the veto], and he didn’t want to fight,” Ald. Anthony Beale said. “And so this way he’s trying to save face by just saying it’s an illegal ordinance, which is not true. We will force the mayor’s hand in order to do the right thing by the law.”

The union said, instead of tax increment financing (TIF) money going to developers or big corporations, it should be spent on CPS students. CTU wants the city to end all TIF districts in the city, and send any funds not already dedicated to specific projects back to the various taxing bodies in Chicago, including CPS.

When looking at only teachers, the total was fairly steady: 23,290 teachers in 2012, 23,979 in 2024. The increase in teachers is much more modest at 689 or 3%, but stands out given the precipitous decline in student enrollment.

“We are short police officers, and we’re having trouble recruiting police officers. So to pull the rug out from under those who were ready to be trained is a big mistake ,” said Ald. Brian Hopkins, the mayor’s hand-picked chair of the Council’s Committee on Public Safety. “If you’re making operating cuts right now, you need to use a scalpel — not a sledgehammer.”

“When victims and witnesses do not feel safe and stop coming to court, cases are dropped. This is why having a defendant appear in court is imperative to the justice system functioning for all parties; it is critical to public safety. We keep forgetting the victims of crime in reform conversations.”

“Mr. Mayor, when you said on Monday, ‘The power does not have to be flexed, the power just is, because I have it,’ you sounded more like Vladimir Putin than the progressive mayor of America’s third largest city.”