Financial troubles have dogged former Lightfoot aide at center of City Hall hiring, contracting scandal – Chicago Sun-Times

When Mayor Lori Lightfoot hired Paul Goodrich as her chief operating officer in 2021, he’d had three IRS liens for unpaid taxes. Goodrich is at the heart of a recent inspector general’s investigation and now might be called to testify about Mayor Brandon Johnson’s proposed ban on giving any more city work to a contractor that gave Goodrich’s son an internship.

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Order Must Be Restored – The Memo

Retired police chief Tom Weitzel: “Chicago has the officers, resources, and authority. What it lacks is the will to tackle juvenile chaos, transit violence, and unchecked disorder.”

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America’s Presidential Libraries: An Arms Race Landing in Chicago – Chicago Contrarian

“The progression from birthplace cottage, to preserved home, to federal archive, to monumental campus tracks the growth of the presidency itself. America’s presidential institutions preserve history, but they also manufacture memory. Their buildings tell us not only who presidents were, but how they and their admirers want the nation to see them. The tension between scholarship and commemoration will persist, because every library must serve two masters: the historical record, with all its complications, and the presidential image its founders understandably hope to promote.”

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Advocates worry new law will raise drug prices, harm self-insured businesses – Center Square

The Pharmaceutical Care Management Association filed a complaint June 16 in Springfield federal court against the Illinois Department of Insurance and Ann Gillespie, its director. “There are many ways to lower prescription drug prices and deliver affordability to patients and employers. But prohibiting the use of tools proven to lower costs and deliver cost-efficient, high-quality pharmaceutical care to patients and imposing onerous reporting burdens is not one of them,” said David Marin, PCMA president and CEO.

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New Department of Early Childhood launches full operations – Capitol News IL

As the new agency was getting off the ground, some lawmakers expressed hope that consolidating multiple programs under one roof would result in administrative savings and that the total budget of the new agency would be less than what the state had been spending before. But Illinois Department of Early Childhood Secretary Teresa Ramos said, “The goal of the new agency is really to deliver effective services for the families with young children who want them across the rich racial, regional, cultural, and linguistic diversity of the state, and that’s how we’re going to really track our success over time.”

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Column: Teacher pension problems continue to get bigger – Champaign News-Gazette

“When you hear framings like ‘schools are underfunded’ or ‘schools are overfunded,’ usually those are missing the point. It’s that a growing share of what we already spend never reaches students, and until that problem is directly confronted, even the largest tax increases will struggle to deliver on their stated promises,” write Joshua Rauh and Gregory Kearney of Stanford’s Hoover Institute.

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Sanctuary city policies face scrutiny ahead of hearing – NewsNation

Three people are scheduled to testify before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security and Enforcement: Jessica Gorman, whose 18-year-old daughter Sheridan was shot and killed in Chicago earlier this year, Joe Abraham, whose 20-year-old daughter Katie died in a hit-and-run crash in Illinois and Gary Redman, the sheriff of Amador County, California.

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