Among the investigations, Kaegi’s office is now questioning a tax break it granted to Armando Saleh, a City Hall lobbyist who formerly was chief of staff to a Cook County commissioner. Saleh has been getting the senior assessment freeze on two Chicago apartment buildings — even though the break is available only for a senior’s primary residence. And at 54, he’s 11 years too young to qualify.

Since 2020, 330 police officers have been shot at. Thirty-eight of them, were shot, injured, or killed.

In a video posted earlier this week, Chicago Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7 President John Catanzara said Officer Martinez’s family had asked Mayor Johnson and Gov. JB Pritzker not to attend. Catanzara said this had also happened with the funeral for Chicago Police Officer Luis Huesca—who was shot and killed back in April.

“We’re likely to be facing a yawning deficit this time next year as well, and the need to right-size a city government that grew explosively while it had well over $1 billion in federal pandemic assistance at its disposal will be even more urgent. The mayor needs to be much more open to views outside his echo chamber.”

The 13 therapists and six clinicians currently on staff have heavy caseloads as they try to help a police department with almost 12,000 sworn members.

The Building Owners & Managers Association of Chicago has initiated the process of proposing a business improvement district, or BID, that would cover the greater Loop, the group announced yesterday.

Johnson’s recommendation duplicates the $82.6 million that Mayor Lori Lightfoot put on the books in late 2019 for her administration’s first budget, even though the costs soared last year to a record $150.8 million.

A Cook County Circuit Court judge Tuesday nullified the 2022 referendum that Evanston voters passed in support of a ranked choice voting system, siding with the county clerk in ruling that Illinois law prohibits ranked choice voting and that the 2022 referendum was “vague, ambiguous, and not self-executing.”

Asked about the legalization of cannabis and then expunging records of people with minor marijuana convictions, Foxx said, in part, “From an equity standpoint, legalization and allowing everyone to be treated the same was critically important. Where we are now is that we don’t see those prosecutions for marijuana, but when you talk about going further, we still have in terms of the business model where people who are benefiting from legal marijuana sales are not reflective of the people who were harmed from the prosecutions in the past.”

“In an unprecedented action, the council pulled out the annual property tax vote from the overall budget process to reject a tax that would have helped close a $982 million shortfall in Johnson’s $17.3 billion 2025 spending plan…. Now begins the hard part.”

The mayor defended his record on the consent decree but did not otherwise indicate what’s next for the hundreds of proposed cuts across the offices of constitutional policing, community policing and more, beyond calling “for us all to look at it and reflect on it.”

“The precipitous decline in the value of Chicago real estate represents just a small portion of the cost of us having elected poor political leaders,” said billionaire financier Ken Griffin, who left Chicago decrying crime and in a feud with Illinois Governor JB Pritzker.