According to CTU’s own filings, $380 million from a property tax increase and $211 million from the state went specifically to shore up the fiscally weak Chicago Teachers Pension Fund. And revenue from the property tax hike is expected to bring in almost an additional $100 million a year on top of the $380 million.

That, for those who know how to add, makes up more than two-thirds of that $1 billion in increased tax dollars. For pensions. And for those who have forgotten, CTU members pay just 2 percent of salary for their defined-benefit pension.

The survey found 49% of voters either strongly or somewhat support a walkout, while 38% are opposed.

While the “exclusion zone” for recreational pot shops would stretch slightly farther north under the revised ordinance, dispensaries could now open much closer to the Magnificent Mile on Michigan Avenue.

After months of unapologetically and fiercely demanding solutions at the bargaining table that the mayor has said don’t belong in a labor contract, Davis Gates says she isn’t looking for attention or power. She says she’s just fighting for the same thing she has been for years: Permanent social and educational justice

The CTU’s latest offer would allow the district to phase in changes to class sizes and staffing over the life of the contract.

After recently telling fellow trustees to ‘shut up,’ Trustee Susan Buchanan’s comments spread on social media. She also told Mayor Anan Abu-Taleb, a native of Palestine, that his “skin was white enough,” when he tried to intervene.

Comment: The socialist publication seems mighty proud of the CTU. “CTU has established a new gold standard for unions, teaching labor what a “rank-and-file” strategy means in practice.”

Comment: A can-kick and a horrible idea in our view, but Chicago will be tempted.

The CTU won’t agree to the money until it gets the other items on what Jackson calls its “social justice bargaining” agenda.

That includes everything from affordable housing and a dramatic increase in “community schools” to enforceable caps on class size, mandatory hiring of support personnel written into the contract and more teacher preparation time with potential to shorten the elementary school day.

A threatened strike by Chicago teachers would be the latest test of teachers’ unions strategy to expand contract talks beyond members’ pay or benefits and into broader classroom issues.

“This is a very, very good example of the difference using a racial equity lens when creating laws and codes for this village and not doing, how something can gently become a real problem,” said one resident. And from another: “If we’re truly a progressive community, we should be limiting police interaction.”

Comment: Chicago not mentioned, but it’s no doubt another factor challenging the city. “For the fourth consecutive year, U.S. census figures have shown that thousands of millennials and younger Gen Xers are leaving big cities.”

Lightfoot said she has two priorities for the veto session: a casino fix and authorization to raise Chicago’s real-estate transfer tax on high-end home sales.

It’s known as uncompensated care – the amount of medical care Cook County Health provides without getting paid for it – and it’s set to hit nearly $600 million next year.

“The principle challenge that we face is around uncompensated care,” Preckwinkle said. “Believe me. That’s something that I’ve talked to our health care managers about and intend to talk to the board about. What is their strategy for addressing this significant challenge?”

As for solutions? To be determined, she said.

Preckwinkle laid the blame for the county’s health care problem on other hospitals, President Donald Trump and former Gov. Bruce Rauner, “bless his rotten heart.” She was at a loss to explain how she planned to handle a looming nearly $600 million cloud next year for health care that the county provides but for which it is not paid.

Must-watch. “You shouldn’t have an opinion on that. That is the point. Why do you have an opinion on equity? You’ve never experienced oppression so shut up…. Just stop… You are not oppressed…. Enough… You stop it! You are a white male. Your skin is light enough. Stop it.”

If you think smoke-filled back rooms are a thing of the past for Chicago-area politicians, think again.

An upscale cigar shop and lounge in southwest suburban Countryside is proving to be an intriguing — and, until now, little-known — link to political players involved in an ongoing federal corruption investigation.

The business,

Federal authorities subpoenaed Schiller Park for records about the $5,000-per-month lobbying contract the northwest suburb had with retired Chicago Ald. Michael Zalewski, the Better Government Association and WBEZ have found.

Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi is under fire from a court-appointed monitor for delays in implementing new hiring policies meant to keep politics out of his office and failing to understand what needs to be done to escape the federal microscope.

Susan G. Feibus, the Shakman monitor for the office, said in her report, which was filed in federal court last week, that Kaegi’s office has “not grasped the level of scrutiny” that comes with being under federal oversight.

Comment: It’s called pedophastry. See our article linked here.

Highest. The City of Chicago is the only city of the five in this analysis that charges an additional surcharge on home share rentals.

According to Michael Frisch, Lightfoot’s point person on the contract talks, just the pay hike she’s put on the table would cost the district $350 million over the five years in play. CTU’s proposals to hire hundreds of other staffers and slash class sizes would cost more—in the billions, according to some board sources

“The prevailing attitude among black people in Chicago is that, to move up, you’ve got to move away.”

Comment: Miller apparently took a smart, careful look at the redactions in the warrant to come to that conclusion, which confirms what he is no doubt hearing on the grapevine, which is consistent with what we, too, hear.

A venture capitalist who bankrolled City Hall deals that secretly benefited Patrick Daley while his father Richard M. Daley was mayor has agreed to a court settlement that will see him repay less than 10% of the $290,596 he owes the U.S. Small Business Administration.

After eight years of legal wrangling, the SBA has given up on trying to collect the money from Patrick Daley’s friend Joseph M. McInerney, whose firm Cardinal Growth was seized by the federal agency eight years ago.

For some reason, the same towns have been having the same problems for decades, despite federal investigations that try to throw the bums out.

“The Chicago Teachers Union President is the only person we contacted who failed to respond to our inquiries. We made multiple attempts to contact him by phone, by email, and through his assistant and office, during both our preliminary and follow-up evaluations,” Hickey wrote in a footnote to her 134-page report.

Prosecutors have said Boone-Doty, Morgan, and a third man — Kevin Edwards — plotted to kill Tyshawn because his father was a member of a rival gang they suspected of killing Morgan’s brother weeks earlier.

In the fall of 2006, Chicago held an auction to sell taxi medallions, the permits that let people own and operate cabs. The city raised millions of dollars. Officials declared the sale a success.

But there was something strange about the auction: None of the winning bidders lived in Chicago.

Almost all of them lived hundreds of miles away, in New York.

Over the next decade, New York taxi industry leaders — fleet owners, brokers and financiers — steadily seized control of Chicago’s medallion market and squeezed it for huge profits. Using

Comment: Whoa. Lightfoot said citywide lead pipe replacement is a “complicated issue,” potentially costing $8.5 billion that the city does not have.

The socialist perspective.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot said Thursday that the city would not add extra school days to make up for possible time lost in a teachers strike, a decision that would break with past practice in school walkouts.

“No. There’s no plan to make up any days,” the mayor told reporters at City Hall. “If you look at the CPS website on contingency plans, there’s zero plan to make up any days that might be lost as a result of a work stoppage. We want to make sure we get a deal done.”

Will become the Kenneth C. Griffin Museum of Science and Industry. His $125M gift is the biggest in the museum’s history.

“The looming threat of a Chicago Teachers Union walkout confounds rational work-a-day folks who can’t understand why a government contract packed with a 16 percent pay hike is strike-worthy.”

“Imagine these three different groups of workers all being on strike together in the city of Chicago. That has the potential of being an extraordinarily disruptive moment.”

Federal agents who blitzed several southwest suburban towns last week were asking questions about a politically connected red-light camera company, the Chicago Sun-Times has learned.

Through September, there’s been a 10% reduction in the number of murders for the year. Shootings were down 11 percent.

That’s Chris Cleveland, the GOP committeeman of the Lincoln Park 43rd Ward, who announced in recent days that the search is on for his successor because “the time has come for me to get back to the private sector,” specifically running the software company he owns.

The Principal: “While we recognize that Halloween is a fun tradition for many families, it is not a holiday that is celebrated by all members of our school community and for various reasons. There are also inequities in how we have traditionally observed the holiday as part of our school day. Our goal at Lincoln is to provide space and opportunities for all students to be part of the community — not to create an environment that may feel exclusive or unwelcoming to any child.”

Several schools have eliminated Halloween events this year as part of a commitment to equity and an inclusive environment.

Charles Thomas: “I can’t believe that her administration does not have its arms around this [fiscal] situation already,” he said, noting that while Emanuel claimed to have fixed the city’s structural deficit, he left his successor with a larger financial deficit than his predecessors left him.

Instead of assisting DHS upon request, officers are instructed to wait for their supervisor to arrive, the memo said. Once the supervisor arrives, “if the request is to assist with an immigration arrest or detention, CPD personnel will leave the scene as directed by the CPD supervisor,” according to the memo. CPD confirmed the memo came from an internal superior but would not say if the directive came from the mayor. “See what happens when that happens and a DHS agent is injured because of a lack of response by CPD. Sickening what’s happening here,” a ranking CPD source told Fox News.

A measure of business conditions in the Chicago region contracted for the third time in four months, reflecting ongoing struggles by American manufacturers as well as the two-week-old General Motors workers strike.

Thank you, Richard M. Daley.

The Chicago Department of Housing proposed at a Sept. 11 City Council committee meeting a series of reforms to the Chicago Community Land Trust, which provides affordable homes to city residents that meet certain income restrictions.

Strenuous opposition came almost immediately from the very neighborhood groups Lightfoot had courted throughout her campaign.

“Local political leaders act as if mismanagement just doesn’t matter. Could there be lessons here for Chicago?”

Comment: In short, nobody has a plan.

Democratic State Senator Martin Sandoval represents both communities. Federal agents searched Sandoval’s offices earlier this week, reportedly looking into whether Sandoval, who chairs the senate’s transportation committee, received kickbacks from companies. But it’s unclear if Thursday’s raids were connected to the Sandoval investigation.

The Chicago Teachers Union should accept the latest offer from the Board of Education, a sweet deal that most Chicagoans would love to get

Chicago among the places hardest hit. “The scar reverse mortgage failures leave on neighborhoods can be seen on a drive through Chicago’s South Side with longtime resident and community organizer Pat DeBonnett. A cluster of six ZIP codes together have endured more than 1,000 reverse mortgage foreclosures over the past five years – higher than many entire states. Boarded up homes and empty parcels followed.”

The single family home index credits the area with a mere 1.5% annual appreciation rate, the lowest rate in 44 months.

When Ald. Susan Sadlowski Garza (10^th) signed on to Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s City Council leadership team, she did not agree to forfeit her independence or sever her deep roots at the Chicago Teachers Union.

“That’s right, mother-f—er!” Garza said, raising her fist in the air.

After describing herself as the first CTU member ever to win a City Council seat, Garza shouted, “Queen Mother of God, I see people ready to strike. Right out here.” On Wednesday, Garza acknowledged she “got carried away” introducing Bernie Sanders and probably should not have used profanity.

“It wasn’t appropriate.

Quit the fighting and work it out. That’s the bottom-line message of an unusual letter sent today to Mayor Lori Lightfoot, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and others that urges prompt approval of a proposed pilot program to boost transit ridership on the South Side and south suburbs by slashing fares on Metra’s Electric and Rock Island lines. Signers include the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club and the Metropolitan Planning Council. Also aboard are the Active Transportation Alliance, the Center for Neighborhood Technology and the Environmental Law & Policy Center.

“Let’s look at Evanston, Illinois (home of Northwestern) and Naperville, Illinois (western suburbs of Chicago) and their two different approaches to achievement.”

Chicago’s park district workers announced Tuesday evening that they have voted in favor of a strike, putting added pressure on Mayor Lori Lightfoot as she’s already facing looming teachers and school support staff strikes. SEIU Local 73 also represents the more than 7,000 school support staff workers who also have voted in favor of a strike. The CTU, meanwhile, is in the middle of its own vote on whether to enact a work stoppage.

A little more than 7.8 percent of Chicago-area homeowners with a mortgage had negative equity, meaning they owed more on the loan than the home was worth on the current market, according to a Sept. 20 report from property information firm CoreLogic. That’s more than twice the rate of “underwater” homeownership nationwide.

In addition to the Chicago-area homeowners who have negative equity, nearly 1.6 percent were in the “near negative equity” range, meaning their home equity was under 5 percent.

Together, the two groups total 9.4 percent of Chicago-area homeowners who can’t afford to put their home on

A recent survey of real estate investors doesn’t give Chicago much respect, but at least the place is more popular than Hartford and Buffalo. The Chicago-area market ranks 48th out of the 80 largest U.S. real estate markets in PWC’s annual “Emerging Trends in Real Estate” survey. That’s up one place from last year, but down from 2017, when it ranked 42nd, and 2016, when it ranked 19th.

The full PWC report is linked here.

“Once you start seeing dispensaries pop up on pinnacle real estate corners in Chicago, it’s going to have a real impact on culture and it’s going to bring a whole new set of folks into the space.”

Investors welcomed the opportunity to meet and hear directly from Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, but they remain hungry to see the details of how she will tackle an $838 million deficit.

The Chicago Police Department will soon join forces with the video doorbell company Ring — potentially giving cops access to thousands of cameras fixed to residents’ front doors around the city.

Police have “no hesitation” to partner with Ring and will announce a pilot program soon, a Chicago police spokesman says.

Chicago is one of six U.S. cities on the list.

Representatives of the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America (CDSA) engaged marketgoers in discussions about the campaigns they are involved in, from lifting the ban on rent control to establishing single-payer healthcare. But one effort in particular seemed to catch the most attention.

“We’re trying to bring ComEd under municipal control,” CDSA member Matthew Cason told Patrick Petranek, a Logan Square resident whose eyes lit up at the prospect of Chicago’s largest electricity provider, Commonwealth Edison, being taken over by the city. Petranek said he supports more transparency around fees and signed a petition in support of

Our condo was just off Michigan Avenue facing east, with a view of the lake and the Bean. One day my husband said “We need to sell this condo now before property taxes go up and we lose money on it.” I thought he was kidding. He wasn’t. We bought a to-be-built house in Las Vegas in October 2014, moved into that house in September of 2015, and the condo closed in December of that year.

Our cost of living has gone down 40%. Our current property taxes are 1/3rd of what the condo’s taxes currently are. We

Progressive aldermen are teeing up their proposals to plug the city’s $838 million budget hole, including a $35 head tax for businesses with more than 50 employees, asking “wealthy nonprofit organizations” to begin making payments to the city and boosting the hotel tax.

The mayor in recent months has floated a variety of “help us” proposals, the most viable of which is to have the state assume unfunded Chicago pension liabilities as part of a package in which it also would help underfunded plans in numerous municipalities around the state. She’s facing a projected $838 million budget hole.

But a wide range of Springfield insiders say that’s not going to happen, at least not in the General Assembly’s fall veto session. Instead, a more limited plan that excludes help for Chicago is being teed up for consideration.

Activist teachers formed a national committee and prevailed on the National Education Association to adopt a resolution of endorsement. Thus was conceived the BLM at School National Week of Action, to be held annually the first week of February to set the tone for Black History Month. The following year, school districts in more than 20 major cities, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Boston, and Seattle incorporated BLM at School Week into their curricula.

“You didn’t read about it? Probably not. That’s because it happened in Chicago.”

There’s nothing wrong with putting a casino in Chicago. But counting on it, as Lightfoot put it in last month’s speech, as “a structural solution to address long-term problems”? That’s as short-sighted as playing the slots to pay your bills.

Jeff Carter: Remember the Facebook status on relationships, “It’s Complicated”? That’s the status of my relationship with the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois.

In a perfect touch of further irony, the lawmaker, a Chicago Democrat, said “That’s what happens to my constituents. They get s— on all time.” (Yes, he really said that.)

A Chicago teacher: “Now my eyes are open, and I can see just how far CTU has strayed from the mission I thought I was funding: supporting teachers.”

“Reparations could take many forms, but the most straightforward would be cash from the government.”

“In their 2012 strike, nearly 30,000 Chicago Teachers Union members planted a flag for labor militancy in public education. Today, they’re again on the verge of another strike — and they may be joined by 7,000 SEIU education workers, says socialist magazine Jacobin. “A strike by the SEIU and CTU together this fall could land a blow against everything wrong with our schools and much more besides: racism, poverty, inequality, union-busting, and the contempt of the city’s 1 percent for the workers who make Chicago run.”

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot will speak directly to the municipal bond market’s buyside at the city’s annual investors conference on Sept. 20.

Nice collection of the empirical evidence by Greg Hinz: “The weakness is in capital flows, the amount of money spent to buy or sometimes build new structures. Consider it a sort of leading indicator as to whether investors consider a given area worth the risk of plunking down their money in exchange for returns that can be many years away.

According to a new report by real estate investment bank Eastdil Secured, office building capital flows here dropped a heart-pounding 87 percent in the first six months of the year compared to last year…. Similar research comes from RCA/CBRE…. A

If congestion pricing’s main objective is to fill a general budget deficit, then it is simply another tax. If that is the reason for it, let’s not wrap it in the virtue of reducing congestion in downtown. The brief life of the county’s tax on sugary drinks should have taught us that lesson. Without the proper groundwork, congestion pricing will amount to little more than an unavoidable tax levied on those who, by choice or necessity, drive into the city for work or play.

“Teachers, don’t be goaded by your strike-hungry union leaders into a walkout. It’s unnecessary. Kids shouldn’t be locked out of their schools for who knows how long to feed an ego-driven demonstration of power by CTU leadership. You have a fair contract on the table.”

In a sharp break with City Hall convention, two Chicago aldermen fronted measures for now-indicted Ald. Edward Burke that steered millions of dollars in property tax breaks for Burke’s law clients in his Southwest Side ward.

That would appear to leave the mayor with no alternative but to cobble together a budget that includes: a hefty property tax increase; an increase in ride-hailing fees; a smaller version of Emanuel’s $10 billion pension borrowing and another round of “sales tax securitization” bonds; a tax increment financing surplus; and, perhaps, cuts that include permanently eliminating the 3,000 vacancies that existed at the time she ordered her hiring freeze.

For tax and tech wonks.

Federal authorities have opened a criminal investigation into the Rev. Leon Finney, Jr., a clout-heavy Chicago minister and longtime affordable housing advocate, according to documents obtained this week by WBEZ.

The decision in Retirement Board of the Firemen’s Annuity and Benefit Fund v. Chicago stands to impact state grant intercept requests filed with state Comptroller Susana Mendoza’s office by all four of the city’s pension funds.

Inaccurate data prevented the inspector general from making a thorough assessment. But the results he did produce were, nevertheless, alarming for a department charged with overseeing 425 city buildings, 10,000 vehicles and pieces of equipment and purchasing new vehicles while maintaining old ones.

The department known around City Hall as “2FM” did not meet the industry standard of at least 95% “fleet availability” in 2017, according to the audit.

Even more troubling: Only 12.9% of preventive maintenance was performed in a timely manner in 2017.

Comment: In a sense, this isn’t actually “news,” and it’ not among the topic we cover, but it somehow seemed like murder is worth an occasional mention.

The Chicago Tribune reports that work will begin this fall on the largest modernization project in CTA history, a $2.1 billion reconstruction project that goes by the name of Red-Purple Modernization (RPM). The overall project, which will take a total of four years to complete, will modernize the signaling and train controls and rebuild four stations on the North Side elevated, on which Red, Purple and Brown line trains operate.

Presented without comment.

Runaway overtime at the Chicago Police Department isn’t the only item in Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s cost-cutting crosshairs.

She also hopes to hammer out a new firefighters’ contract that eliminates treasured union perks and outdated staffing requirements that cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.

Reason’s response to a recent similar article in The Atlantic.

A coalition of progressive groups and a handful of aldermen are getting specific about increases to a bevy of taxes to fill Chicago’s budget hole, including restoring and increasing Chicago’s corporate head tax to $16 per month for large companies, instituting a 3.5% tax on office leases, a hike in the hotel tax from 4.5% to 7.5% and a local income tax on those earning above $100,000 a year.

That’s just the start. See their whole “Re-imagine Chicago Platform linked here.

Lightfoot said she has ordered a review of Finney’s “significant portfolio” of public housing after the Chicago Sun-Times shined a light on a federal judge’s stunning allegations of fraud, self-dealing and mis-management against Finney’s former nonprofit.

Michael A. Pagano, dean of the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs and director of the Government Finance Research Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Meter all water users and charge a price to replace the system’s infrastructure. Charge a market price for parking as well as road use, starting with congestion pricing. Ask the legislators in Springfield for access to an earnings tax at the place of employment, like Ohio’s cities, or a payroll tax on employers, and reduce the property and sales tax rates. Broaden the sales tax base by imposing the sales tax on

Workers are moving from New York City to Charlotte. N.C., and Orlando, Fla., and from Chicago to Nashville, Tenn., and Indianapolis, according to an analysis for The Wall Street Journal by LinkedIn.

If the Mayor expects the Council to go along with an unpopular tax hike, she may have to drop her plans to cut their ward responsibilities.

For decades, the South Side powerhouse’s nonprofits got millions in public housing money. Now, he’s facing allegations of fraud and self-dealing.

Greg Hinz: “Hard data backs up my anecdotal impressions. As first reported by my colleagues Alby Gallun and Danny Ecker, retail vacancies in the metropolitan area are hovering around 11 percent, within a percentage point of the highest level in nearly two decades. And average asking rent per square foot is lower than it was in 2001, based on data from CBRE.”

“The whole idea of a countywide elected official being able to file suit against the county strikes me as being an inherent conflict of interest,” Morrison told Chicago City Wire. of . “When you are a politician and have legal activity with that same government you represent, to me that is an inherent conflict.”

Lightfoot called the 3 percent COLAs built into public employee pensions “unsustainable” and implied Illinois needs a constitutional amendment to fix a broken system. She was right. Too bad she had to take it back.

“It is not entirely clear, though, how Chicago will cover its increasing pensions bill as well as its current spending, given its credibility problem in the capital markets.”

The unanimous vote taken at the CTU’s house of delegates meeting Wednesday evening sets the table for a Sept. 26 vote which will decide whether members authorize the union to strike.

The earliest the union would go on strike is Oct. 7.

More than 16,450 Chicago Public Schools students were homeless last year, half of them concentrated in ten South and West Side wards, underscoring the need for a “dedicated revenue stream” to combat the problem.

He also says, “There are 115,000 self-admitted adult street gang members in the city of Chicago,” he said. “That doesn’t include the juveniles. That is major challenge for law enforcement and society, and we’re not going to police our way out of it.”

S&P said it expects that the city “will continue a trend of using surplus tax-increment financing district revenues to plug the budget gap,” but the agency sees that revenue source as “unpredictable and therefore one-time in nature.”

“It doesn’t have to be this way.”

The free program through Chicago Public Schools could come at a major cost to community-based early childhood centers, many of which offer far more than preschool for four-year-olds, including infant and toddler care as well as after school and summer programming. The preschool expansion, coupled with new requirements for centers that receive public funding, is hurting centers across the city, including Concordia Place in the Avondale neighborhood on the North Side.

“We would view any measure that would lower annual contributions into Chicago’s pension systems negatively. That’s a reference to talk that Lightfoot might seek to lower and move farther into the future the pension-payment ramp adopted at Emanuel’s request.

On the other hand, the New York firm said, “We would view measures that either trim liabilities through benefit reductions or a dedicated revenue stream toward pensions positively.” S&P didn’t get specific, but officials have talked at reviving what now appear to be moribund plans for a Chicago casino that could help pay pension debt or moving to reduce the

A pension actuary’s perspective.

A lesson for Chicago as it considers a hike in transfer taxes on high end properties, to which Mayor Lightfoot is committed: New York hiked its transfer tax on sales over $2 million on July 1. July sales of Manhattan homes and apartments for $2 million or more shrank to the lowest level for any month in more than six years. It was the slowest pace for such sales in the month of July since 2009.

Jacobin is a leading socialist publication.

Includes a link to Wirepoints research.

Cook County’s public health system expects to provide a staggering $590 million in health care next year that it won’t get paid for.

On Friday, Cook County Health CEO Dr. Jay Shannon warned that the amount could climb even higher if new federal rules begin in October. Those rules would deny permanent residency or visa renewals to immigrants who use or might use government programs like Medicaid. “The chilling effect that this may have on people accessing services that they have a right to, is right now a large X factor,” Shannon said

Union leadership seems to have looked at teacher uprisings in certain red states and in Oakland, Calif., and drawn the conclusion that the same tactics will work here, igniting a grassroots brushfire of support for their cause. But teachers in those districts truly are miserably paid and their schools woefully underfunded. Chicago teachers, however, have been well paid for years, and Chicago isn’t Oklahoma or West Virginia. Chicagoans understand the connection between good schools and a city’s economic viability. They’re also smarting from the tax burden being placed on them. And they’ve just elected a mayor who ran not on

A spokeswoman for the city’s Finance Department said the agency is examining whether to make commercial property a part of the tax increase. If it’s included, it would be the second time the administration has expanded the proposal’s reach since Lightfoot began publicly discussing the idea in recent weeks.

Initial discussions involved applying a higher tax rate to sales of homes valued at $1 million or more, similar to a proposal offered by progressive aldermen who want the money earmarked to help the homeless. But in her address about city finances Thursday night, Lightfoot said the tax should

Such job growth is “essential to helping close Chicago’s racial health and wealth gap,” said some promoter.

Comment: Read the text of the speech linked here if you want, but she said nothing concrete. Her cash budget numbers, as usual, mean little because the real problem is growing pension debt. She said nothing specific about what revenue or reform measures she will pursue. The only exception is a progressive real estate transfer tax, which she said she is committed to. We called that an Exit Tax on the wealthy when we wrote about it. Mayor Emanuel rejected it as “treating homeowners like ATM machines.”

https://www.nbcchicago.com/blogs/ward-room/chicago-mayor-lori-lightfoot-faces-challenges-after-100-days-in-office-558627691.html

How the Windy City takes its citizens’ vehicles.

“Working class Chicagoans need a budget that taxes the rich and powerful corporations to pay their fair share,” Ramirez-Rosa said. “ … The time has come to tax the rich instead of continue to rely on fines, fees, and regressive taxes that have pushed out Chicago’s black and brown families out of our city.” No specifics are offered, however.

Lightfoot on Wednesday sought to downplay any expectations of specific budget solutions in Thursday’s address.

Lightfoot took office on a mission to take down the machine. When it comes to the city’s finances, the biggest blockade to investments that will improve upward mobility for residents is the pension problem. She can best lead a new Chicago if she helps stop this problem from grinding through city revenues.

Comment: Mr. Hertz, formerly with the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, last year authored an op-ed in the Chicago Sun-Times calling for a progressive increase in the real estate transfer tax, which we wrote about here.

The Civic Federation supports the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) proposed budget for FY2020 because it demonstrates continued financial stability in the third year of Evidence-Based Funding from the State of Illinois. However, the Civic Federation continues to be concerned about the District’s long-term financial sustainability

Code for America is doing the work for Cook County at no cost to taxpayers, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx said Tuesday, adding that the automation provided by the group’s digital system will do the work in a fraction of the time that it would take bureaucrats to do the task.

Churchill Downs blames prohibitive tax rates that would penalize it relative to competing Chicago-area casinos.

The Chicago Teachers Union wants the school board to delay Wednesday’s vote on a $7.7 billion budget, claiming it doesn’t address critical staffing needs or fulfill Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s campaign promise of equity in education.

Chicago Teachers Union boss Jesse Sharkey talks like a socialist tough guy, lives in a posh Rogers Park estate and drives a Tesla.

The outcry from county leaders has been consistent for years: This tab is unsustainable.

“Where does it end?” asked John Daley, a veteran Cook County Board commissioner. “We’re at a point now, when you look at these numbers, you can’t continue this.”

Comment: Taxpayers helped fund it. According to Curbed Chicago, incentives included $6.4 million in Tax Increment Financing (TIF) and $1.5 million in Low Income Housing Tax Credits expected to generate $15.2 million in equity. The City of Chicago also sold two city-owned lots for $1 each to support the development.

On Aug. 26, the Illinois Civil Justice League, an organization which advocates for reform of the state’s civil court system, released a report indicating the state’s tort system hits those in the Chicago metropolitan region with $3.8 billion in annual direct tort costs annually.

Despite not having a vote, Cook County residents have a big stake in the outcome. The county’s chief judge has a $272 million budget and an army of 2,400 employees, which doesn’t even include the 400 judges the office oversees.

“I know that people have gotten new assessments that are 50% higher. Property taxes are the last thing in the world that I want to use as a lever but at this point in good conscience I can’t take anything off the table,” Lightfoot said in a new interview.

1.5% annual appreciation rate, the lowest rate in 44 months. This places the Chicago area 5th from the bottom of the rankings of the top 20 metro areas that they track. Several former high flyers have fallen from grace and are now below Chicago: New York, San Francisco, San Diego, and Seattle. Seattle, surprisingly, is actually seeing falling home prices.

The nascent lottery sports pilot is limited to parlay wagers, meaning bettors pick the outcomes of multiple games as part of the same bet. Such parlay cards were long illegal in most states outside Nevada — though ubiquitous in office pools, local taverns and with neighborhood bookies

The pain from lawsuits in Illinois isn’t limited to the purses of the companies that get sued, but is spread to the pocketbooks of every state resident, a new report said, estimating the state’s high level of litigious activity costs the average Chicago area resident $811 each, every year.

On Aug. 26, the Illinois Civil Justice League, an organization which advocates for reform of the state’s civil court system, released a report indicating the state’s tort system hits those in the Chicago metropolitan region with $3.8 billion in annual direct tort costs annually.

Lori Lightfoot’s “State of the City” speech could be something new: a speech by a Chicago mayor that means something.

“It seems that Mr. Obama may have messed with the wrong bunch of environmentally sensitive stakeholders. On Thursday a federal agency called the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation said in a letter to the Federal Highway Administration that the plan needs more study and that it’s ‘concerned that not enough detail is provided to properly characterize the nature and intensity of the adverse effects to the cultural landscapes’ of Jackson Park and Midway Plaisance, another park nearby.”

Comment: This is a sad but significant low point for legal reasons we will write about shortly.

The Chicago Teachers Union is taking fire after a trip to Venezuela by a four-member delegation made the headlines. The CTU delegation knew exactly what political and economic system it regards as a model. As awful as they are, Chicago’s public schools have not reached the level of desperation the collapsing system in Venezuela has. But if the CTU is allowed to keep putting its socialist ideals into practice, Chicago may get there.

Comment: “Mayor Lightfoot should endorse a community-led process to reach 100% clean energy by 2040,” says the executive director of the Illinois Environmental Council. No mention of cost, for a city that’s beyond broke.

Both CTU and AFT, along with the largest teachers union in the country, the National Education Association (NEA) have been major supporters of the #RedforEd movement, which launched in Arizona in March 2108 with the organizational assistance of a former CTU member and has subsequently spread throughout most states in the country.

Nah.

The utility amassed $30 million in bad debt just in the first half of 2019, about double last year’s pace, as heating bills continue to rise and collection efforts remain muted. The cost gets passed on to paying customers.

A judge is about to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Foxx, while the Democratic bosses of Cook County don’t need to hear what that probe might uncover.

On Tuesday, leaders of a campaign to use a Chicago real estate transfer tax increase to fund an aggressive effort to reduce homelessness slammed the new mayor for abandoning their cause now that she’s eyeing the same revenue source to help balance her first budget.

But CoreLogic’s Deputy Chief Economist Ralph McLaughlin said he expected the slowdown to turn around in the coming months.