Mayor Brandon Johnson’s mental health plan in Chicago starts small but carries big political implications – Chicago Tribune/MSN

At roughly 0.1% of the city’s recently passed $16.77 billion budget, the initial cost of Mayor Brandon Johnson’s effort to begin reopening Chicago’s city-run mental health clinics is minuscule. But the political ramifications are potentially huge. Johnson rode into office on a progressive wave powered by unions and activists who have long advocated that Chicago should return to having 19 city-run clinics, as it did in the 1980s, and grow those offices to also become bases for expanded nonpolice emergency response teams and a corps of new community care workers.

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Mark Glennon on AM560’s Morning Answer: Chicago pension buyout plan mostly shifts debt rather than eliminating it, property tax surge doubles inflation over three decades

Chicago’s political leadership is floating a pension buyout program as evidence it is seriously addressing the city’s thirty-six-billion-dollar unfunded pension liability, but Mark Glennon, founder of the Illinois policy research organization Wirepoints, said that the proposal moves debt from one column to another rather than reducing it, and that the broader fiscal picture facing the city continues to deteriorate across every measurable dimension. Audio here.

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