The zoning committee on Monday approved plans to convert a large Downtown office building into residential units and the construction of a data center on the Southwest Side.

CPD has fully met just 9 percent of the court order’s requirements in the more than five years since it took effect, according to the most recent report by the monitoring team.

The “Hellholes” report cited Illinois court statistics showing that as recently as 2022, 54,544 lawsuits demanding more than $50,000 in damages were filed in Cook County Circuit Court. That accounted for 91 percent of all such lawsuits filed in all of Illinois’ 102 counties. The report noted that Cook County accounts for 40 percent of the state’s population.

“If someone has a better plan than eliminating the debt, building a stadium with visitors and billionaires that the city of Chicago would own while creating more space and creating jobs for the young Black men who are signed up at community colleges, if you have a better plan than that, see my senior adviser, Jason Lee,” Mayor Brandon Johnson said.

Despite a $2.9 billion increase in total grant collections since 2019, largely because of an influx of pandemic aid in 2022, the city neglected to use these funds to solve its fiscal issues. At the same time, its non-personnel spending continued to balloon.

Chicago speed cameras collected $28 million less in ticket revenue through September than during the first nine months of 2023, but two things could drastically change that. First, city leaders have considered lowering the citywide speed limit from 30 to 25 mph. Second, Mayor Brandon Johnson has an initial OK for more speed cams to raise $11 million next year to restore police positions related to the federal consent decree.

All together, the 2024 property tax bills for the Pritzkers’ Chicago properties — an Astor Street mansion and a neighboring house, and the pair of unfinished penthouse floors on Walton Street they bought from fellow billionaire Griffin in November — come to more than $1.285 million

“Affordable housing advocates have gone so far as to describe aldermanic prerogative as a ‘tool of the new Jim Crow.’ A U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development investigation gave that criticism more weight: The nearly five-year civil rights probe found that Chicago had turned alderpersons into mini-mayors of each ward.”

The city’s ward boundaries were redrawn in 2022, after months of contentious City Council meetings where alders accused one another of gerrymandering and backroom deals. Community organizer Marj Halperin and other residents said the current ward map subdivides the Near South Side in a way that creates confusion, distracts their alders and dilutes their political power.

Aside from the property tax hike, the biggest revenue boosters to help close next year’s budget gap include a boost to the personal property lease tax from 9 percent to 11 percent, and the amusement tax on streaming services from 9 percent to 10.25 percent. The lease tax is charged on cars and equipment as well as software and cloud computing leases, and boosting it is expected to bring in another $128, while the streaming upcharge would bring in another roughly $13 million.

“We’re going to start right here in Chicago, Illinois. If your Chicago mayor doesn’t want to help, [unintelligible] to step aside,” Homan said. “But if he impedes us—if he knowingly harbors or conceals an illegal alien—I will prosecute him.”

“Cook County is home to a disproportionate amount of the state’s litigation and nuclear verdicts,” the American Tort Reform Association said in the report released Tuesday morning. “No-injury litigation, including claims filed under the state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act and consumer protection laws, also contributes to Cook County’s sustained appearance on the Judicial Hellholes report.”

A move to increase an unusual tax on cloud computing risks adding to a broader technology industry downturn to derail progress in the third-largest US city.

Chicagoans should not “tolerate” a budget that makes cuts to city services and orders thousands of layoffs, leaving city officials little choice but to hike taxes by a total of $234 million, Mayor Brandon Johnson said Monday. “The other thing that’s important in this budget is that clearly there are a lot of human needs and these human needs are rights …”

“The frustration in New York City and Chicago stems from the same root: poorly enforced immigration laws coupled with soft-on-crime local policies.”