CN June 2, 2016

Posted on June 3, 2016 by Ken

Forrest Claypool laid it out in stark terms yesterday. Unless there’s a state budget, with funding for Chicago Public Schools, no Chicago school will open in September. They just don’t have the money.

“I don’t think he’s posturing,” says Tribune City Hall correspondent Hal Dardick.. “If you look at the finances of the Chicago Public Schools they have about $20-million in their bank account and with the kind of payroll they have that’s pennies. That’s a few days, you know, and they don’t have the ability like some other districts to borrow money. They have a junk bond rating. They had to pay a really high 7½% interest rate the last time they borrowed money, and the markets probably next time would just say no, we’re not even going to loan to you, or we’re going to do it at such exorbitant prices that it’s untenable. So he can’t do any of the things that you would do in a crisis. There’s no reserves to spend. They won’t open, I think he’s right.”

We talk Springfield on this week’s show, specifically the epic collapse of any effort to create a budget before the end of the Spring session on Tuesday night. Reuters correspondent Dave McKinney tells us the plan Mike Madigan’s House passed was seven billion dollars out of balance, and was never serious.

“A total wish list, so it wound up getting out of the House comfortably, but then it just sat and sat and sat in the Senate, he explains. “And even though the Senate is the upper legislative chamber in Illinois they have a bit of an inferiority complex there because they are just years and years and years of being spoon-fed by Mike Madigan, and a lot of members who have been around a long time are resentful of that.

“And so when they see this gigantic budget bill coming to them in an election year that doesn’t have any way to pay for it they know immediately hey, this is a problem, we could wind up suffering in the fall.”

In terms of the raw politics, McKinney tells us there are plenty of House Democrats who are getting worried after seeing the cash resources Governor Rauner was able to marshall against a couple of members in the primaries. “It took $5 or $6-million in spending,” he tells us, “And most of these legislators have no means to get that kind of money. They’re completely dependent on Madigan and the Unions to come up with it, and everybody is like, if we can avoid that fight we would love to avoid that fight.  So, yeah, Rauner does have a little bit of leverage that way, but what we’re seeing right now is just this deadlock we’ve had since really the beginning of ’15 when Rauner came into office, it’s just a continuation of that and I don’t see any immediate end to it in Springfield.”

Mayor Emanuel scored a major victory on Memorial day when both the House and Senate voted to override the Governor’s veto of a bill that allows Chicago to extend payments into its police and fire pensions.

“It gives the City 15 more years to bring financial health back to the police and fire funds which are woefully underfunded,” Dardick explains. “They are about more than $10-billion short in money, and they would go broke in 7 or 8 years without more money. But the Mayor agreed, he passed a property tax increase last year, a record high property tax increase to put money into it. But at the same time it wasn’t enough to pay them down under the current schedule which would have been 25 years. He wanted to extend it to 40 years so he doesn’t have to raise those property taxes any further.”

Dardick said Emanuel didn’t go to Springfield, but he worked the phones and Facebook diligently beforehand pushing for the override.

“I can tell you he is working the phones,’ he says. “I think one thing you never do as a politician is you don’t go down there and actually be seen in person pushing for something if you’re not 100% sure it’s going to happen because then you look weak.”

So where do we go from here?

McKinney says expect only incremental progress between now and the November elections.

“Well, I do think that things will gravitate slowly back to this scheme that Rauner has floated to do a little bit of spending for fiscal 16 and then a K through 12 budget for fiscal 17,” he tells us. “I think that’s where they gravitate back toward, but it’s like a chessboard where there are two kings and that’s all that’s left on the board you know. They’re just chasing each other across the Board.

It’s not clear how much longer Rauner and Madigan can continue this stalemate. There’s increasing resistance in the Legislature itself, McKinney reports.

“Rank and file Republicans hate it; rank and file Democrats hate it. The Democrats hate it because the social service programs that they rely upon in their areas are going bankrupt and the universities and the MAP students. Most of the universities downstate are all in Republican districts. Those guys are acutely feeling the strain of the budget impasse.

“The failure to have a budget belies (Rauner’s) theme of fiscal responsibility, because every day that we don’t have a budget the debts grow, the interest on the debt grows. The problem for the State of Illinois becomes worse. There’s more risk of the debt ratings going down,” McKinney asserts.

You can read a full transcript of this show as a Word document here:   CN transcript June 2 2016

 

 

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CN May 26 2016

Posted on May 21, 2016 by Ken

 

Karen Lewis takes us inside the bargaining sessions this week, and rejoices over the election of troy LaRaviere. She also explains why the CTU isn’t wildly enthusiastic about joining CPS in a united front against Bruce Rauner. It’s a wide-ranging conversation that covers many topics.

A few samples:

On support for Sen. Manar’s education funding revamp (SB 231)

(7:00) Ken: It’s controversial in so many ways but at least it’s something that’s on the table. Where are you on it?

KL: We support Senate Bill 231 as a first step. It’s not a solution to the problem.And while it does look like it’s taking from the rich and giving to the poor, what it does is it starts us on a road to equity. Not equality, but equity. And I think that people don’t understand the difference between the two concepts. Especially when you use property taxes as the majority of funding for public schools, there’s always going to be this huge gap – an inequality – from the very beginning. So if we’re going to evaluate people equally, then we have to have some sort of funding formula that works. I mean, it’s easy. Go to the wealthier school districts. Look at their  buildings. Look at their curriculum. Look at what they have to offer. It’s quite different from what you see in many of our schools.

What the CTU is fighting for in a contract:

(32:00) what my people would like to see and what they constantly complain about is the constant drumbeat of inane work. That’s just compliance. We want to see a change to the evaluation, where we’re not doing all this extra work just to justify that we’re doing good work. The new evaluation system as far as I’m concerned is a complete bust because they haven’t found all these terrible teachers that they claim exist…This notion that the system is full of incompetent teachers is just a joke. And trying to tie teaching to test scores is ridiculous.

What it’s like in the bargaining room:

(33:00) the actual bargaining meetings themselves are quite amicable. It always starts with (James) Franczek giving a big speech, and we all roll our eyes, going, OK, Franczek speech, you know, and then we tease him about whatever the heck he said –

Ken: And then you give a big speech?

KL: And then I give a big speech and they roll their eyes. It’s not ugly. Normally they’ll say, we can’t make a decision on that. And they take a caucus, and I guess they call the mayor, or they’ll come to us and we take a caucus and discuss it…

On the dismissal of Troy LaRaviere:

(41:00)I thought it was the stupidest move ever…when I first heard this I even brought it up at bargaining. I said, OK, what did Troy do now? And they were like, -what hasn’t he done? And I said, you all need to leave him alone. He’s a good principal, he does a good job, the parents and teachers seem to like him.

I’ve got a meeting with him today, this afternoon. (May 19)

Ken: Did you call him to congratulate him?

KL: Of course I did. I wrote him a little text, Mazel tov.

Ken: Ben Joravsky said the Mayor has now created a second Karen Lewis?

KL: He really has…and I hope Troy and I can work together, because I think the principals and the teachers union working together, we can fix this crazy system…I think it’s huge. Because I think that Troy has a vision. And because he has a vision that he wants principals’ voice to be heard, that it will be.

On Forrest Claypool

(44:35) I think the problem with CPS and the problem with Forrest as CEO, which is very different from previous CEOs is that they don’t, I mean the fact that we even have a CEO is a problem. Why can’t we have a Superintendent? Why can’t we have somebody that really gets education? Forrest is a numbers guy. He’s a technocrat. I kind of feel like what works for buses and trains doesn’t work for human beings. we need to figure out how we’re gonna work together to get stuff done. But we can’t get stuff done with – here’s some stuff (pushes paper across table). You go out and sell your members that. Nobody’s going for that. 

On the possibility of building a united front for reformed State funding

(51:30)Ken: Isn’t this one of those cases where there’s more that unites you than divides you?

KL: Let me just parse this out for you. I’m not gonna go for anything that ultimately doesn’t fix the problem. I’m not interested in any short-term band-aid approach. We have to look at a long-term set of things. We need to figure out how to work together to get progressive income tax in Illinois. How to at least restore the flat tax back to where it was. How to do a financial transaction tax. There’s a whole bunch of things we could do. look at Colorado. They legalized marijuana. All that money’s gone to education. They don’t have the problems we have. I got excoriated for talking about legalizing pot. Yet Rauner even says let’s decriminalize it. That’s a step. Let’s figure out where the money is instead of playing these little games around it, and coming up with slogans – we’re 20% f the population so we need to have 20%…

The problem is, they want us on their bus. I’m not getting on the crazy train with these people. I want to have real solutions that figure out how to deal structurally with these issues.

Ken: So you expect Rahm Emanuel and Forrest Claypool to get on your bus?

KL: Yes. ‘Cause our bus is also the humane bus. It’s not the crazy bus.

Ken: Of course, calling the other guy’s bus the crazy bus…

KL: (laughs)You didn’t think I was gonna go through this whole thing without saying one provocative thing about them?

Ken: I just was wondering, things are so bad that maybe we’d be better off if everybody could find a neutral bus to sit on, but…

KL If we could find that bus, I would be on it. There are certain things that I completely think we need to look at. And they keep saying that’s not on the table.

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CN May 19 2016

Posted on May 19, 2016 by Ken

 

“It’s not a bailout. We just want our fair share. There’s a separate and unequal formula that is given to Chicago Public Schools.”

That’s how our conversation got started with Alderman Howard Brookins, Jr (21), who’s now the Chairman 0f the City Council’s Education Committee.

He’s been engaging in a written battle with Beth Purvis, Governor Rauner’s Secretary of Education. She wrote a Trib Op-Ed last week stating, in part:

“The stunning fact is that while the state provided major assistance to CPS, Chicago shirked its own duty to pay its pensions. From 1995 to 2015, the state sent CPS payments totaling approximately $1.1 billion for pension contributions. During that same time frame, CPS skipped pension payments for 10 straight years and received General Assembly approval for three additional years of contribution reductions.”

Brookins isn’t buying it. “Every other district, the state picks up their pension,” he explains. “We are in a hole because this year CPS will have to pay some $700-million towards pension payments. They want to say that there’s an issue that, well, we took pension holidays. Well CPS is in a better situation than the rest of the state with respect to pensions and pension solubility. We are funded at 52%, the rest of the state is funded at 42%. They allowed CPS to make these pension holidays in part because they did not want to come up with additional monies to help the school system at the time. So they said, “Oh well, just don’t make the pension payment this time and everything will be all right,” knowing that at some point this day was going to come.”

And when it comes, as it now has, Brookins says the state isn’t creative about how to allocate the cuts.

“And they say, ‘Okay, well we’re just going to cut education to 90% so that we can stay equal.’ Well in Barrington you’re relying on say 6% of the State money and in Chicago or somewhere else you may be relying on 20% or more. East St. Louis if you’re relying on say 50%, well the State cutting you that 10% pro rata is a bigger number than them cutting Barrington 6%.”

“We need a comprehensive revamp of how we fund education in the State of Illinois,” Brookins concludes.

In the meantime, with no state agreement on the horizon, CPS is preparing its schools to gird for a nearly 30% budget cut at every school in September.

 

There have been indications in the past week or so that CPS is about to launch a new round of contracts to privatize cleaning and maintenance services in many more schools. Brookins sees lots of disadvantages with privatization.

“In principle I think it can be a mistake,” he tells us. “And people always say, ‘Oh we should treat government like a business,’ and I say, well okay then, we are the CEOs. We would pay ourselves as much money as we could get. And then we would charge you or raise the taxes as high as you could stand.’ And so no, you don’t treat government like a business.”

One of Brookins’ concerns is accountability of the workers brought into replace City laborers.”Quality can suffer and who do they report to?” he asks. “Who influences them? So when we privatize say crews to do cement, if it’s a City crew out there I can get a supervisor on the phone as your elected official when you say, ‘Hey, they busted my sprinkler system. They disrespected me,’ etc., because they work for us, but when they work for some other company we can’t do that as elected officials.”

He gives us an example. “With Sodexho I know an exterminator who had been doing a good job, got great accolades. They didn’t have problems with respect to his work, but when you get a major company come in they want to say ‘well you’ve got to do it cheaper. You don’t need to do this, you don’t need to do that,’ and it’s like well that’s why we don’t have bugs – and it’s a problem. Cheaper is not always best.”

We talk about the on-going negotiations between the CTU and CPS.

“I want to sit down and talk to Karen (Lewis)”, he says. “I think that we are on the same page with respect to fixing the situation for money. She realizes that CPS doesn’t have the money, and it is within the best interest of the teachers and CPS that we get the money and then come up with a contract. I want to sit down and pick her brain and talk about permanent formula, funding solutions for the State of Illinois, what are the best practices going forward.”

“There’s no money and there’s no political will,” he continues.” I can’t go back to my constituents and ask them to swallow another property tax increase that still won’t resolve the problem that we have. She can’t go back to her constituents, her teachers who are relying on her, and tell them to take more concessions, raises, wages, work hours, etc., and knowing that you still may have to do this another time and another time. So we’re in uncharted waters, but the only way out is that we work together and swim in the same direction.”

And how does the Alderman feel about newly-appointed police superintendent Eddie Johnson?  He was neutral on the Mayor’s choices, he says, but he’s happy with Johnson. “I always like Chicago people being in the job because I don’t have to start out and for our first ten meetings I’m explaining historical information as to why does it make sense for you to put resources here because that’s been tried over and over, and he gets it.”

Brookins worked with Johnson for years when Johnson was the commander for part of his Ward. “So anything north of 87th Street, he was the Commander there. He was very community-oriented. He solved problems that we had and he would come out and articulate that to the community, so I thought he was a great person,” he says.

High on Johnson’s agenda, the Alderman says, is building  faith with a community that feels estranged from the police.

“We’ve got to restore that trust and some of it starts with the way you just treat people. I tell them all the time you can be firm with people, you can arrest them, but you’ve got to treat them with dignity with respect…But it is the perception of the Chicago police it starts out with the epithet, it continues with more expletives and you feel bad about the whole situation and they still give you a ticket.”

And there’s at least one area where Chairman Brookins differs sharply with Mayor Emanuel. “But I still think, and many of us in the City Council believe, that we actually just need more police officers to resolve some of the problem,” he asserts.

You can read the entire transcript as a Word document here:

CN transcript May 19 2016

 

 

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CN May 12 2016

Posted on May 12, 2016 by Ken

IMG_6651

We don’t have an actual  Chicago Newsroom this week, due to some construction issues with our new studio that will eventually give us much greater flexibility for future shows.

Instead, we’re offering an unedited recording of Troy LaRaviere’s statement this morning about his recent dismissal as principal of Blaine Elementary. The press availability, which was heavily attended by the media, was at the North Side Wishbone Restaurant.

We thought you might like to hear the entire statement, along with the unedited Q&A with the media afterward.

Here’s the statement:

And here’s the question and answer session with reporters.

Back with a new show next week….

 

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CN May 5 2016

Posted on May 6, 2016 by Ken

 

A CHA voucher recipient lives in a high-rise with a lake view. The rent is about $3,000 a month. Another lives in Aqua Tower.  It’s great fodder for investigative news teams. To make matters worse, the CHA admits that fiscal efficiency isn’t the most important issue when selecting these tenants.

But there’s a story behind this story.

It was a brief, perhaps poorly-handled but well-intended effort to see if Chicago’s housing authority could pay a small part in helping impoverished, but highly qualified households to break through the color and poverty lines that so brutally define Chicago. In other words, it was a quiet experiment in integration.

Maya Dukmasova and Meribah Knight, working with Northwestern’s Social Justice News Network, authored this investigation for the Reader.

As of 2013, “more than 36,000 people in the city  have Section 8 vouchers,” explains Reader news Editor Robin Amer, also on this weeks show. “Those are all of the people who have any kind of voucher from CHA, and the vast majority of those voucher holders are living in highly segregated impoverished Southside and Westside neighborhoods.

“So, you have a voucher system that is reinforcing the patterns of segregation that have existed in Chicago for decades, and this “super voucher” program that we looked into in great detail was this tiny, tiny effort to get some small percentage of these voucher holders out of the poor segregated neighborhoods and into nicer integrated neighborhoods in the city. That was the program’s reason for being, and I think as we worked on the story that’s what we found so tragic about the program’s demise was that its intention was pro-integration, which is something I think if you kind of look at that goal on its face most people would say, ‘Oh yeah, integrated housing, that’s a worthy goal,’ a worthy aspiration.”

As most Chicagoans know, the CHA knocked down almost all of its high-rise buildings in the last decade or so, resulting in the loss of at least 25,000 dwelling units. Despite promises to rebuild them, only a fraction ever were. Instead, most former CHA tenants have been moved to the voucher program.

As Dukmasova and Amer point out, voucher payments are based on a median which takes into account the very highest and lowest rents in Chicago.

“So you have this difficult almost Catch 22 situation if you’re a voucher holder,” Amer continues, “where you don’t quite have enough money to get into a nice place in a nice neighborhood, but you are being taken advantage of potentially by landlords who own substandard housing in poor neighborhoods who are getting more from voucher holders than they would from the average tenant.”

In other words, the program has created a market for landlords who can get more from their sub-standard apartments in undesirable neighborhoods than they’d get outside of the voucher program.

Dukmasova says the CHA knew that, among its 36,000 clients, there were those who, despite their poverty, had clean arrest records, had never been evicted, and even had good credit.

“So this program was born out of this reality. Louis Jordan and his colleagues at the CHA at the time thought that it would be a good idea to give some flexibility to voucher families and essentially give, if a family was going to move to a high opportunity area where there were lots of jobs and good schools and lower crimes such as Near North, such as Lincoln Park that they would get more money for their voucher. That the voucher would be flexible to allow a family to move into a more expensive neighborhood.”

In the four years that the program operated, Dukmasova says 744 of the 36,000 voucher holders got the so-called super-vouchers. In most cases, the bump was a few percentage points – perhaps to 120 or 130% of their normal payment. Some were more than 150%, and a few – probably 22 -reached 300%. The total cost of the program was slightly more than $4 million in a more than $1 billion budget.

And this is where things get sticky. The voucher program is, above all else, supposed to be fiscally efficient. But the CHA’s small social experiment wasn’t. It wasn’t ever  intended to be. But  the constant churn in top management left the program orphaned, and difficult to explain.

“So at one point I think Crain’s had this expose that said, “HUD says the program isn’t cost-effective,” and everybody lost their minds a little bit as if that were proof that this program had somehow been corrupt or mismanaged or ill thought-out, and our reporting found that it was a much more complicated situation than that,” Amer tells us.

Then, as Amer explains, it got political.

“And then very soon after that Congressman Aaron Schock stood before congress and essentially pilloried the program and then shortly after that, that same summer of 2014 he requested that HUD do an audit of this program to determine whether it was in accordance with the CHA’s operational agreement with HUD.”

So the tiny experiment, dubbed “super-vouchers” by the press, was phased out. It was plagued by poor planning and execution, but along the way it helped a few families move into “opportunity areas” that were previously inaccessible to them. It got played in the press as wasted taxpayer money and became a political football.

But, as Dukmasova  points out, “There are landlords that get money from the CHA through the vouchers for units that fail inspections countless times during the year, sometimes up to like 18 times we saw in the records. And the (seven) landlords who had properties in the city that had the highest number of inspection violations throughout the year they collected over $4-million.” That’s about the same as the whole “super-voucher” program cost.

And since landlords in poor neighborhoods are often being paid more per unit than that apartment would fetch in the open market, there’s a premium that CHA pays every month for every one of those apartments. No one has ever crunched that number for Chicago, but with 30,000 apartments in the system, almost all of them in impoverished, segregated neighborhoods, the number is clearly substantial.

“And where,” asks Amer, “is the comparable outrage over that, right?”

You can read a full transcript of the discussion as a Word document HERE: CN transcript May 5 2016

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CN April 28 2016

Posted on April 29, 2016 by Ken

 

It looks like the Tribune Publishing company may be in play once again.

Chairman Michael Ferro has said that Gannett is trying to “steal” the Tribune, But Aldertrack’s Mike Fourcher has a different take.

“Now let’s keep in mind,” he explains, “Michael Ferro only owns a little under 17% of the company. There are two large companies, Oak Tree Capital Management and Prime Capital that own 36% of the company.  They’re really the ones in the driver’s seat and they have made no mention, they have made no public statement whatsoever about what it is that they intend to do. What I would imagine, I don’t know, is that the leaders of these hedge funds are turning to Ferro and  CEO Justin Dearborn and saying, “Okay, we want to see your plan. You guys show us your plan about how you are going to increase the value of the company that’s going to be better than what it is that we have right now from Gannett, or we’re going to vote to sell.”

Oak Tree and Prime, he tells us, are really the big payers here. They invested a lot of money in Tribune, and probably see this as a remarkable opportunity to make back their investments and make some profit.

“Gannett has really hit them where it hurts,” Fourcher continues. “Which is in the wallet, and they are offering to pay good money and to relieve these companies not only of the debts, but give them a chance to make some [money].”

What remains to be seen is what Gannett would do with the big papers it purchases. What would happen to the Chicago Tribune? Would it become a kind of midwest USA Today?

“If you go look at the Indianapolis Star, the Indianapolis Star has pretty much the same design website as USA Today, same design as the Sheboygan Press, and they’ve cut a huge amount of their staff and a lot of their content comes from national publications,” says Fourcher.

But would they be able to do something like that with a paper as grand and as historic as the Tribune, we ask.

“You can do anything you want,” he concludes.

We talk briefly about the Sun-Times and the Reader. Both are being operated under a trust, the terms of which are undisclosed. But if Micharl Ferro loses the Tribune,will he come back to Wrapports and run both these papers again?

And we ask Fourcher about the petition drive some staffers at the Reader recent launched asking Wrapports head Bruce Sagan to invest more money into their paper. Fourcher says there’s a bigger question on the table: whether the Reader is even needed any more.

“You know the problem the Reader has is not really so much that the Sun Times or Bruce Sagan isn’t investing in it,” he asserts. “The problem the Reader has is that the place that it once had – independent alternative newspapers had in the media world – has been displaced, and it’s not necessarily needed anymore. It used to be that that was where you went in order to get the listings for the day. Well, it turns out there’s two other places that have listings that are pretty good. You can get them at Metro Mix and you can also get them in Time Out Chicago. Those are pretty good listing services and it used to be that it was the place where you could get the radical bomb-throwing, angry or good investigative journalism or whatever it is. There’s a bazillion places in order to find that now.”

…

Denny Hastert was a pretty powerful guy in Washington, but  Fourcher reminds us that he was very powerful in Kane County, too.

“Denny Hastert was really the hometown hero of Yorkville, Illinois for a very long time. And if you were to try and do business or try and do politics in Kane County or the surrounding area for dozens of years, you at some point or other have to have a reckoning with Denny Hastert. …this guy was the center of political and business activity in that part of Illinois for a very long time. And so former Illinois House minority leader Tom Cross was one of his… Tom Cross looked to Denny Hastert as a mentor, and it turns out that Tom Cross’s brother, Scott, was molested by Denny Hastert.”

A lot of people were confused yesterday when  he received only 18 months in prison after admitting to numerous sex crimes. But the sentence was for his financial crimes, the statute of limitations on the molestation having run out years ago.

…

Time is running out for the City to figure out whether it’s really going to rebate property taxes to people it feels were unfairly hit by the increases in this year’s budget driven by pension plans for police and fire personnel.

It wouldn’t be an exemption from taxes,as with the Homeowners Exemption. Instead, the City would write checks to people who qualified. But working with the County’s turned out to be a bureaucratic and info-tech nightmare.

“Literally what happens is that the accessor runs a number of things and they put it on a tape,” Fourcher tells us. “Yeah, remember those old-timey tapes? So then they carry them over and then they put it on to the other mainframe for the treasurer and the treasurer runs that and then when she’s done with their stuff they then take it over to the clerk who has another system, another tape. So this is some real old timey stuff and it hasn’t been upgraded in a long time and it’s a huge mess and they are all using Fortran and COBOL programming languages from the 70s, which is scary. This is something a lot of people in city government didn’t understand. They didn’t know. Oh my gosh, this is actually how it’s being done.”

Mayor Emanuel claims he has lots of support for his revised plan to build the Lucas Museum over the foundation of McCormick Place’s Lakeside Center. He even has George Lucas’ support. The support he doesn’t have, though, is Bruce Rauner’s, and state legislation would be needed to move things along. Turns out McPier, which operates McCormick Place, still needs Lakeside Center for its big shows.

“McPier counts on the money from those shows in order to be able to cover the debt,” explains Fourcher. “And the land that the Lakeside Center is on is owned by the Park District and McPier pays the Park District rent for that land. If the Lucas Museum goes on that land they won’t likely get any more rent. So there’s a bunch of people that lose out on long-term cash flows on this.”

So the deal’s far from done, and if it succeeds, taxes on hotel stays, and, ultimately all of us taxpayers, will be extended for decades into the future.

“And there’s a really good argument that’s made by the Chicago Teacher’s Union,” Fourcher says, “which is how come you can find hundreds of millions of dollars in order to build this museum and you can’t use it in order to pay for the schools.”

…

Troy La Raviere, principal of Blaine Elementary, is in the news again, having been “reassigned” from his school. Mayor Emanuel says he had nothing to do with deposing one of his harshest critics. Fourcher says the argument is plausible.

“I do believe the Mayor had no fingerprints on it. I think that everyone in CPS understands that Troy LaRaviere is not in the Mayor’s good graces and that’s the way that Chicago City government has operated for a long time. There’s a message that’s sent – I’m not crazy about this person or this project – and then people kind of line up to make sure that that project gets either the good treatment or the bad treatment.

…

Aldertrack found itself in the middle of a tussle with the Police Department last week when it learned that a new dash-cam tape, involving the arrest and shooting of Tiffany Jacobs on May 25, 2011, had surfaced.

The admitted armed robber, who’s now serving time for holding up a McDonald’s earlier that day, pulled into a gas station where she was confronted with many police officers.  She began to drive toward an officer, who shot her through her windshield because he thought she was trying to hit him. She briefly gets away, is pursued, and is apprehended. That’s where the dash-cam video (without sound) kicks in, according to Fourcher.

“She’s already shot and she steps out of the car and doesn’t have her hands up, but clearly has her hands down at rest. A police officer runs up to her, grabs her and it’s hard to tell if he grabs her by the jacket or by her hair and then pulls her backwards and slams her to the ground, and another police officer comes up and they taze her while she’s on the ground and then they handcuff her. This is pretty violent. But it’s also pretty clear that she was no innocent and there was something going on and the police officers were charged up. They were concerned about their safety.”

Aldertrack requested the tape, and the CPD and City stalled on the request for days, finally releasing in early that Friday evening in what can only be interpreted as an effort to bury it in  the news cycle.

“Why couldn’t they be upfront?” Fourcher asks. “And even more questionable is – this wasn’t a horrible video and it really didn’t necessarily put the police in a bad light. Yes, they arrested her in a bad way, but it wasn’t really outrageous, totally outrageous. Why weren’t they more upfront about this?”

Equally befuddling is the indication that the video resurfaced because new superintendent Eddie Johnson is said to have initiated the review himself, and has stripped two of the officers of their police powers because their actions in the idea were “concerning”.

“They could have pulled us aside and said, “Look, off the record, Aldertrack, what we want you to know is yes the video exists and we’re going to release it later, but we want to go through a process where we’ve talked to people in the community.”

You can read a full transcript of the show as a Word document here:  CN Transcript April 24 2016

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CN April 21, 2016

Posted on April 21, 2016 by Ken

 

Mayor Emanuel announced today that he’s immediately implementing some of the recommendations from the Police Accountability Task Force he created in December.

That comes as good news to two of the report’s authors, though they say the more than 100 recommendations they made to the mayor weren’t intended to be implemented in piecemeal fashion. It’s all a big, integrated whole, and no one piece will work well if everything isn’t begun at the same time, they tell us.

“I think you have to look at all the recommendations in the ecosystem,” asserts the MacArthur Foundation’s Maurice Classen, a Task force panelist. “This is maybe a first step, but there’s more steps to come and our expectation is that that will take place over the coming days and weeks, not months and years.”

Nevertheless, Classen and co-author Victor Dickson (Safer Foundation) tell us they feel very optimistic that the people of Chicago and the Police Department could embrace this report and use it as a roadmap for genuine reform. It’s an opportunity for everyone involved, including Mayor Emanuel, to acknowledge that there are deep, historic maladies, and that everyone has a stake in making profound changes, they say.

“The #1 reason that people obey the law is because they believe it to be legitimate. And so what we tried to do with our entire task force was  make recommendations to rebuild that sense of legitimacy as a basis to rebuilding trust in the community,’ Classen says.

We discuss many aspects of the report during this hour-long conversation, but we begin with issues the Task Force raised about  the City’s contract with the FOP, the police officers’ union.

“An officer can make a statement and then once they are provided the video evidence they can amend the statement without being charged with making a false statement because they now have a piece of evidence they’ve seen, Classen explains. “Well, I was a criminal prosecutor for almost a decade. The idea that you should be able to change your statement is just crazy. You should be held accountable for what you said, so we believe that rule should actually be changed.”

“So if you’re trying to investigate police misconduct you want to do that investigation onsite, want to get the statements, but they in their contract have the ability to wait I think it’s 24 hours,” adds Dickson, referring to cases involving police shootings.

“There’s a provision in the contract that allows an officer to make a statement and then they find out that there’s a video of that event, look at that video and then change the statement so it is more consistent with the video,” Classen continues. “So in other words you could lie about what happened in an official report that you file and then turn around and change that report after seeing the video. And then there’s no consequence to you making a false statement in the beginning, because the contract allows you do that. You think about any other workplace where  you be able to do that.”

There are also concerns about police officers’ ability to avoid revealing to the City any outside employment, some of which might conflict with their policing responsibilities.

“Most other employees across the City of Chicago have to get permission for their secondary jobs and they consider what actually those jobs are” Classen explains. “CPD officers, there isn’t this policy that requires them to report exactly what the job is and getting permission for it. And we think there are certain times where some of those jobs may be more challenging and taking more energy away from certain officers and getting to this point about burnout. There may be certain situations where it’s just not appropriate to have a certain type of secondary job or secondary employment because it could lead to increased burnout.”

Although there may be a public perception that the report, which contains strong language about race and power, may be anti-police, these Task Force members insist that their report argues in favor of re-investment in policing and police personnel.

“I mean, officers themselves are being failed by the system,” Classen says. “They are not being provided the tools that they need to succeed. I would actually argue that the majority of our report are recommendations that are meant to help officers do their job better.”

“We’re spending, you know, $640-million on settling cases,” Dickson explains. “And all of that kind of money, if we would start investing some of that money in the things that the police need to do their job more effectively, to learn how to de-escalate situations, you know, to have the right kind of tools that they use, less lethal force kind of tools that they can use, all those things would eliminate the need for a lot of that settlement.”

The panel called specifically for the elimination of the Independent Police Review Authority. This despite the panelists’ respect for IPRA’s leader. “Sharon Fairley, the new head, has made an incredible effort to reform the department, but at a certain point a brand becomes too damaged. And sort of the name IPRA, at least what we found in the community, is seen as illegitimate and had no accountability and was broken.”

The report calls for rapid deployment of body cameras for all officers.

“Anecdotal evidence in Oakland, which has had body cams for the last five years because the Department of Justice’s consent decree there, they’ve seen astronomical drops both in complaint and use of force,” Classen claims. “Complaints are down 50% over five years and use of force is down 60%, maybe flipping those statistics, but both it’s incredible. And I think part of it what it does is it provides transparency both for officers and for citizens.

In a late development, Mayor Emanuel and the City Council signaled on Friday that they would wait to implement many of the more difficult reforms, such as replacing IPRA and asking to renegotiate aspects of the FOP contract until after the release of the Justice Department probe, which could be a year or more away.  In our discussion, though , both panelists  encouraged the mayor to act more quickly.

“So I think this is an opportunity for him to take hold of the narrative and drive home a successful model and reform the department before DOJ implements a potential consent decree, Classen argued. “We not only would be saving our community, we would be building a stronger police force and we would be saving ourselves a heck of a lot of money.”

You can read the entire transcript of this show as a Word document here:CN transcript April 21 2016

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CN April 14 2016

Posted on April 15, 2016 by Ken

 

Chicago Public Schools runs 87 high schools, most of them of the “neighborhood” variety. But 50 of them are under-enrolled, and 35 are less than 50% full. Some have only a tiny fraction of the 2,000 or so students for whom their school was built.

What to do with the neighborhood high school?

It’s a topic thoughtfully researched by Kate Grossman in her latest piece for the Atlantic, titled “Reviving the Hollowed Out High School“. Grossman surveys the heroic effort to bring Austin High back to life over nearly 20 years, but finds a school that’s fighting demography, economics and, perhaps most of all, the perception that it’s a dangerous place in a dangerous neighborhood.

Within Austin’s attendance boundaries, almost no eighth-graders who would normally attend the school elected to do so. “They only had 14% of the 8th graders in the attendance boundary going to either the Austin building or Douglas High school, which was the other neighborhood high school, and the rest are just scattering.” Grossman explains. “I mean they went to 90 different high schools.”

These students opted for selective enrollment schools, magnets, other neighborhood schools and charters. Their families decided that the inconvenience of long bus or car rides every day was balanced out by what they considered a better education elsewhere.

Every under-enrolled school has its own story, of course, but there’s one thing they all have in common. Chicago’s aggressive choice system, which has increased the number of high schools from 86 in 2000 to 140 today, has pushed the old general high schools to the back of the pack.

But, Grossman reports, there is a movement in some communities to rally around the old schools, and re-shape them for today’s needs.

“So schools like Lake View and Amundsen and Washington High School and there’s some others, there’s this movement to try to embrace them again,” she tells us. “And so there you’re going to have more of the normal cross-section of high achieving kids, middle kids and lower kids.”

This new energy is being sparked in some more affluent neighborhoods and in some Latino communities, she says, because parents want a solid, safe alternative to the elite schools. “And they’ve had some nice success because there’s a need for it, because not everyone can get into a selective enrollment school and would prosper there even if they got in,” she says.

Chicago now has more high schools than ever, and more choices. But it is rapidly losing the community-based, easily-accessed general high school. Whether that’s good or bad from a city-wide perspective is still unclear, but, in at least  some communities, parents are fighting to revive them.

There’s one thing, though, on which  Grossman says almost everyone is beginning to agree.

“Just from a number standpoint it makes no sense to be opening any new schools when you can’t fill the schools you already have.”

You can read a transcript of this show as a Word document here:CN transcript April 14 2016

 

 

 

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CN April 7 2016

Posted on April 8, 2016 by Ken

 

A few years ago, Tom Tresser was co-leader of No Games Chicago, an organization devoted to killing Mayor Daley’s push for the 2016 Olympics. It wasn’t easy battling back against the massive, well-funded public-relations push for the games, but he and others helped ignite a tide of opposition. Chicago was eliminated in the first round, but few Chicagoans today seem disappointed that we’re only a couple of months away from what would have been the opening ceremony in Washington Park.

“The Olympics is one of the greatest brands on the planet,” says Tresser. “But it’s a giant corporation, and they make boo-koo bucks. And the cities that sign the Olympic paper, it’s a blank check and there’s no stopping… It essentially privatizes your city for seven years.”

And, as we all know, cites commit to building things that they’ll never use again.

“Yeah,” he says. “Well there’s a whole library of books published on artifacts of Olympic venues where there’s very sad images of weeds growing out of ski lifts and what-not. That’s what our legacy would be, plus debt, plus the corrosive erosion of civil rights because that accompanies the games. So there was this echo chamber at the time, and now years later the Tribune and the Sun Times all are editorializing – if you’ve noticed Phil Rosenthal and a bunch of other columnists have said, “Whew!”

Tresser has also led a years-long resistance to Tax-Increment Financing. Though the battle still rages on, there is significant community opposition to the practice, and the Mayor’s Office insists that it runs the program today in a much fairer and more rational way than in past years.

Today, Tresser’s main focus is City financing in the broadest sense. He’s attempting to crowd-fund the publication of a book on the topic, and he’s currently half-way to his goal. His “Chicago Is Not Broke” campaign argues that corruption, malfeasance and bad policy wastes a huge swath of the City’s assets, and lawmakers are simply ignoring opportunities to raise significant amounts of funding from, for example, a Financial Transaction Tax.

“Basically it’s done in, I’m going to say about 18 different countries,” Tressser explains. “And it’s simply a charge levied on a trade. So you buy a can of soda pop and the state has put a tax on that and the vendor must collect that tax and pass it to the state, it’s the same thing. In this case it would be the Board of Trade that would tack on that surcharge.”

Tresser says studies have ranged from a penny to a dollar per trade, and the more conservative estimates show that, after sharing the revenue with the state and Cook County, the City of Chicago could receive a billion dollars a year or more from the practice. But the financial markets really oppose the idea, despite the fact that the customer, not the exchange, would pay the tax.

“The consumer is paying,” he says. “And so the idea of just this knee-jerk reaction that the Board of Trade will pack up and move to Iowa or some such place. Well would they? Why are they here in the first place? Well there’s a reason why Chicago is a financial center because of the concentration of education, the workplace, the cultural amenities where the workers want to be. The infrastructure. So I mean you can threaten to move to a faraway place that doesn’t have the lake front, the opera, the blues, the food, you know, the architecture or the history, but would your workers move there? It’s an open question. But even before we get there I would make this sort of moral economic argument to the financial elite to say, “You should be part of this. We should be in this together. Don’t fight us.”

You can read a transcript of the show as a Word document here: CN transcript April 7 2016

Or you can read the full transcript below this page break. Continue reading →

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CN March 31 2016

Posted on March 31, 2016 by Ken

 

Greg Hinz is our guest this week. The writer, columnist and blogger for Crain’s said he understands the demands that CTU is striking for on April 1, but he’s not sure the CTU will convince anybody, or will itself accept the tragic fiscal circumstances the schools face.

“I’m a believer in shared sacrifice,” he tells us, “But I’m not sure that message has quite sunk in to the membership level. Ergo, you have this big day of action which is designed to kind of have everybody march around and feel good and we’re tough and rally the troops and send a message, but I’m not sure the message is going to fall on any ears that are listening. I mean everybody from Chicago who is in the Springfield delegation is already for more money for Chicago public schools. Forrest Claypool, I think, has made a reasonable argument that hey, Chicago pays for statewide pensions but the State doesn’t pay for our pensions, that’s not right. But you know, downstate and suburban lawmakers, particularly other democrats, people are talking about how democrats have the super majority in Springfield and can do what they want, much of that super majority is out of the City of Chicago. A lot of those districts are in trouble too.”

Hinz says there’s no way out of this mess without finding more revenue.

“Ultimately,” he says, “The solution to this is going to have to be more tax money from somewhere, and it’s not all going to come from rich people and it’s not all going to come from TIF districts and trading fees on the commodity exchanges. It’s going to probably come from an income tax and sales tax or both on all of us because that’s where most of the money is, and that’s a tough sell right now.”

We also talk about the selection of, and the selection process for, Chicago’s new police Supe, and about the strange way in which Governor Rauner prefers to make Illinois’ unemployment numbers look worse than they actually are.

You can read the full transcript as a Word doc HERE: CN transcript March 31 2016

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