CN November 21, 2013

Posted on November 21, 2013 by Ken

 

Yes, there’s the usual litany of things to complain about in Chicago, but on this, our annual Thanksgiving show, we invited Lee Bey and Andrew Patner to talk about the things they’re thankful for.

For Andrew, WFMT and Sun-Times arts critic, yesterday’s passage of marriage equality was on his list. “I’ve had a very happy 24-year unmarried relationship,” he says, ” but the serious part is…had this happened 25 years ago, I would have had a family now. And that was the only thing that disturbed my parents, when I came out to them was – but you would be such a great dad.”

We offered the proposition that, aside from the Ventra fiasco, CTA has had a pretty good year. The Red Line project came in on time and has worked well. The 95th Street Red Line terminal is about to get rebuilt. The CTA is in the process of buying thousands of new el cars. And just yesterday, the feds began the process of funding the reconstruction of the north end of the Red Line and the Purple Line beyond it.

“The business community is saying to Rahm, we need these things to work,” urban planning expert and journalist Lee Bey asserts. “We need to get downtown. The population of a small city comes downtown to work and leaves at night. And it’s gotta work.” And, both guests agree, Mayor Emanuel has for years been a CTA user, so he has a solid understanding of how important the system is.

And as for Ventra: Both our guests say it’s fairly analogous to the health-care web-site rollout, in that it will eventually be fixed.

“This isn’t like the parking meter deal, which was an outright scam,” says Bey. “This is something that, if it does work, is a potentially good thing for the city. We complain about it, but the thing is, this comes out of laws the state legislature passed that demands a one-fare system for the region, which is a good thing. So this is a way to fix that.”

If you’ve been around Chicago a while, you may remember the creation of the RTA 40 years ago. Integrating the fares for City and suburban transit was supposed to be a high priority.

“Yea. I was seven then, and now I’m looking for my AARP card, and it still hasn’t happened yet,” claims Bey. “And the Mayor, and Forrest Claypool and CTA President Terry Peterson have said Cubic (the vendor) isn’t gonna get a dime until this thing gets fixed, which puts the onus on them to get it fixed.”

We talked architectural preservation, and the currently-occurring demolition of the Prentice Women’s Hospital building on the Northwetern medical campus downtown. “Y’know, It’s always been a funny thing, that, of Bertrand Goldberg’s buildings, this one was not my favorite,” says Bey. “But it’s tough to see it come down.”

In the past week, Northwestern has released renderings of the building it intends to construct on the Prentice site. It’s a sprawling building that essentially attaches to the existing research building at every floor. The University says it needs that feature to facilitate research and collaboration between the academics. That’s why they had to tear down the smaller, oddly-shaped Prentice. “I’m sorry,” Patner interjects.  “I think that’s nonsense from beginning to end. Northwestern doesn’t care where the building is. They want to control the entire area. And while the Prentice battle was going on, they tore down three more blocks of buildings.”

Research today is conducted globally and simultaneously with the Internet and video links. And, he says, there’s no real reason why these buildings needed a physical connection. “When you hear an organization say we’ve looked at everything, and there is no  alternative, that means there are so many alternatives, this is what we want.”

 

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CN November 14, 2013

Posted on November 15, 2013 by Ken

Has Mayor Emanuel quietly hit on the pension reform formula that might work for him? Although the headlines said that pension reform failed yet again in Springfield last week, two things  point toward some quick movement in early December. First, legislators were told there will probably be a special session in the first week of next month, which just coincidentally is after the deadline for filing election petitions. So an unpopular vote will be less likely to be met with a primary challenge. But the second factor is a bill that makes a lot of changes to the Chicago Park District pension plan, including a later starting year (from 50 to 58), larger employee contributions, etc.

Kristen McQueary says the Tribune Editorial Board, for which she works, liked it.

“They passed a pension bill that includes a lot of the components that we think make good pension reform,” she says. “Raising retirement age, asking workers to pay more, guaranteeing that the Park District will actually pay in. It did come out of nowhere. Mike Madigan was the sponsor in the House, John Cullerton was the sponsor in the Senate. So Cullerton was sponsoring a bill that had major planks that he has previously declared unconstitutional over and over. So it was very bizzaro world.”

And WBEZ’s Alex Keefe says it may have been a small bill, but it has big implications.

“The question I have is what this could mean – depending on what Governor Quinn does – for Chicago’s pension crisis,” he explains. “We saw Rahm Emanuel try to push a bill through with the police sergeants’ union – a smaller union – in February, that kind of rhymed with some of the ideas in this bill. And the police sergeants’ union overwhelmingly rejected it.  If this Park District bill survives a legal challenge, which it sounds like could be an issue, what does this mean? Could it be the template they want to put on Chicago’s other pension funds?”

If that’s the game plan, the consequences could be pretty dramatic. “I’ve heard people inside the pension world say – we know the Mayor is trying to start small – pick off a smaller pension plan,” says Keefe. “Don’t deal with police, fire, Municipal workers yet, and see how this one goes.”

Police Department staffing levels remain a hot topic. An effort was made at the City Coumcil this week to allocate $25 million for the hiring of 500 additional officers. It went nowhere, and it didn’t get the support of the Tribune, either.

“We’ve been talking about staffing of the Police Department for 25 years,” says McQueary. “Even when we have more officers, it doesn’t do something more substantial over the long haul to decrease crime in some of the hot-spot areas of the city. And the other thing is, we are broke. Yes, I realize we’re spending a lot on overtime, but once you hire officers, then you’re talking about benefits packages, and eventually a pension for these officers, I think over the long haul it is more expensive.  And if you believe Superintendent McCarthy, we have more police per capita than other areas of the country as it stands now.”

Another often-discussed strategy for reducing crime and violence is the raising of mandatory minimum sentences for the illegal possession of a firearm. It didn’t make it through Springfield, but McQueary says it’s  still a good idea.

“If we do not crack down on unlawful carrying of loaded weapons, we’re going to continue to see these sorts of crimes,” she asserts. “Gang members know that juveniles can carry the weapon and they don’t get in trouble. We just have too many cases where people are charged with this crime and then they are not cracked down upon, and then they go out and commit another crime.”

We also take on the perennial topic of TIFs. There has been discussion in the City Council (but no action) about allocating surplus Tax Increment Financing funds to the schools. Keefe and his colleague Becky Vevea did a detailed explanation of how the tens of millions of surplus dollars is being divvied up, leaving only a small amount for schools.

The City seems willing to have this discussion, and all sides agree that the Emanuel administration is more transparent about how TIF money is spent. But the biggest portion of TIF money – probably close to a billion and a half – is what’s called “encumbered”. And the City is more reluctant to get specific about that number.  “What you can’t see is exactly what that encumbered number is, and what is it encumbered for?” McQueary asks. “What is this money waiting for? I want to know what contract or what contractor is waiting for that money. Show us every number. And they have not done that.”

Keefe says despite the good work Tax Increment Financing has done, it remains controversial.

“I talked to Rachel Weber of UIC,” he tells us. “The way she put it is that it’s good for targeted (projects), but Chicago has created this monster  whereby anytime that anybody wants money for anything, they go looking for TIF money. And Chicago has a lot of what they call area-wide, multi-purpose TIFs. And  what that basically means is instead of a TIF created to fund a single project – so instead of a project in search of a TIF, you have these TIFs that are just kind of open, they just kind of exist, in search of different projects. So they’re not targeted enough. And these are the findings of Mayor Emanuel’s TIF Task Force a few years ago.”

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CN November 7, 2013

Posted on November 8, 2013 by Ken

Well, the Illinois Legislature gaveled to a close today without any tangible pension-reform legislation. But that wasn’t the only thing that got left behind as the doors closed.

Mayor Emanuel and Police Superintendent McCarthy had pushed mightily for increased mandatory minimum sentences for illegal gun possession  But it didn’t happen. At first, it seemed like a no-brainer. But…

“Almost immediately you had push-back from people who said, look, we’re warehousing so many people, do we need 20,000 more people in Illinois prisons?” says the Sun-Times’ Frank Main. “It’s going to cost an extra billion dollars to do that.”

Resistance began to build from minority groups and representatives, and political groups as diverse as the John Howard Association an the NRA.

“People are languishing in prison doing nothing,” the Chicago Reporter’s Angela Caputo tells us. “And so the question is – is there a way that we could spend this billion dollars that would be far more effective at fighting crime? I think a job is a great deterrent. Could a good job be a better deterrent than three years in the penitatiary?”

There’s another issue, too. Isn’t the role of judges being diminished as more and more laws are enacted that limit the role judges can play in, well, rendering their judgement? Are legislatures usurping the Constitutional role of judges?

“Judges believe – and I’ve talked to some of them – that possessory crimes are not violent crimes,” explains the Pulitzer-Prize winning Main.  “And you have the Chicago Police Department, the University of Chicago Crime Lab and Rahm Emanuel – who believe possessory gun crimes are violent crimes because you’re very likely to use that gun.”

But that’s where the little-understood process of pleading-down comes into play. “Judges still have discretion. If the prosecutor agrees to dismiss the most serious case, the person might go to prison on a lesser case, and that happens a lot with Class X felonies – armed robbery, say – …lots of times those cases get pleaded down to simple robbery, and I think that’s what would happen lots of times if this legislation were to pass.”

In the just-released issue of the Chicago Reporter, Caputo explains a shadowy process where police and prosecutors, in what’s called a wink-and-nod relationship, charge an offender with a minor infraction, such as possession of small quantities of marijuana. Because the offender doesn’t have resources to bond out, he will sit at Cook County Jail, often for weeks, awaiting trial. When that day finally arrives, the charges are dropped.

“In these misdemeanor courtrooms, eight out of ten cases are thrown out,” says Caputo. So very, very few people are convicted. So we have this whole judicial theater, and in the end, nothing comes of these cases.”

And finally, we kick around the recent revelation that overtime costs in the Police Department will top one hundred million dollars this year.  Sup’t. McCarthy says he supports the overtime because it’s “cheaper” than hiring replacement officers. But isn’t it burning out the officers who have to work all those hours?

“I talk to beat cops I’ve known for ten years,” Main explains. “And they say, for the first time they’re making more than $105,000 a year. These are guys who’ve been on the force for 20, 25 years and qualify for these overtime districts. But they love it. They’re working crazy hours to do it, but they’re banking tons of money.”

But don’t most Chicagoans prefer hiring more police officers instead of just going the overtime route? “You get a mixed reaction even from people in communities most affected by crime,” Caputo asserts. “Even the aldermen – they feel that police are overly aggressive and they feel that they aren’t solving crimes, but on the flip side, they’re, like, where are the Police? We need some backup.”

“People feel that they’re worn so thin,” she concludes.  “We have some of the highest childhood poverty rates in the country in these same neighborhoods. We have more young people (in Lawndale, West Englewood) 18-25 who’ve never had a job than any other part of the country. Those are the things that contribute to the perception, and – can we arrest our way out of this problem?”

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CN Oct. 31, 2013

Posted on November 2, 2013 by Ken

After Harold Washington died, the Daley family saw an opportunity to knock off Eugene Sawyer in a 1989 special election. But they needed lots of money, and fast. They turned to a not-yet thirty year-old up-n-comer named Rahm Emanuel, who managed to raise $13 million in seven weeks. 

That caught the eye of David Wilhelm, who was putting together a Presidential campaign for some former governor named Bill Clinton. They had raised a grand total of $600,000. Then Emanuel came on board. Through veiled threats and badgering, he raised $17 million and was seen as having saved the early phase of the campaign.

He co-founded a company called The Research Group, which specialized in Opposition Research.

As President, Clinton paired him with Bill Daley to get NAFTA passed. Business Week described it as a “bloody fight” that “pitted friend against friend and allied the administration with Republicans and big business.” A majority of Democrats in both the House and Senate voted against it.

Emanuel played a major role in the successful maneuvering to pass welfare reform, converting most welfare programs into what we now know as TANF. Ten years later, then in Congress, Emanuel said he was proud of the accomplishment that was “connecting a generation of children with a culture of work”

He used his “golden Rolodex” to make his way into the field of investment banking, where, despite not having an MBA, he earned more than $18 million in 2-1/2 years, placing him in the top 5% of earners in his profession.

Ron Susskind, in his 2011 book Confidence Men, said this about someone earning so much money so quickly, then heading right back into government: “paying someone who will be a future government official a lot of money for doing very little? On Wall Street we call that an investment.”

He went on to become Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff, and later to become Mayor of a midwest town called Chicago.

That’s just a tiny sampling of the stuff you can learn about our Mayor in Kari Lydersen’s new book, Mayor 1%. She says she and her publishers had intended the book to be more of an effort to tell the back-story of a man Chicago elected without knowing that much about him. But so much happened so quickly in that first couple of years that the book expanded to include the mental health clinic closures, the school strike, TIFs, the O’Hare janitors replacement and the public budgeting process.

Emanuel has taken a positive lead, she says, on key environmental issues like energy policy, battery research, closing coal plants and the like. But he still hasn’t found his footing when it comes to dealing with the public. For example, she says, he never once appeared at any public meetings to explain or discuss his budget priorities, as his predecessors had done.

And she pays special attention to the treatment of patients in the City-run mental health centers. “Saving two million dollars by closing the mental health clinics actually isn’t worth it in terms of the impact on the people,” she explains,” and there are larger costs when these people end up in emergency rooms or jail. So as smart as he is with money, I think that’s an example of  where he’s been penny wise and pound foolish.”

And she uses the current debate over how to combat the gun violence in our streets as an example. “The violence and policing issue is just so complicated”, she says. “I personally can’t say whether he’s done a good or a bad job on that – it’s such a mess – but it is a situation where listening to the people in the communities would be a good idea.”

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CN Oct. 24, 2013

Posted on October 26, 2013 by Ken

Take a look at this screen grab from Google Earth..

Screen Shot 2013-10-25 at 11.31.31 PM

See those two big black blotches (the one on the top and the one at the bottom) right beside the Calumet River? That’s petcoke, or petroleum coke. It’s a nasty by-product being produced in massive quantities at the BP Whiting refinery just across the state line. It’s filthy, dusty stuff that’s blowing everywhere in South Deering, depositing a grimy, black coating all over people’s houses and yards. And why is it happening in Chicago’s Southland? Because Indiana has more stringent environmental laws.

“If this waste was being stored at Whiting, under the terms of a big federal consent decree,…they have to enclose that waste there, and they have to take all kinds of other steps to keep the dust down,” explains the Tribune’s Michael Hawthorne. “Not the same if you take it five miles away in the City of Chicago right there along the Calumet River.”

But it’s not just sitting there blowing around. It’s waiting for the next leg of its journey.

“Most of it’s going overseas,” he explains.  “Most of it goes to China. The exports of petroleum coke to China have just skyrocketed in the last ten years. It corresponds to the increase in the refining of this tar-sands oil from Canada. And in China, a country that doesn’t have the same kind of environmental laws that we do, it’s just burned in power plants there, and it contributes to their air pollution problems and eventually problems here and the entire planet if you consider climate change emissions.”

So the vaunted new source of oil – Canada – is mining this heavy crude from the sands under the forests of Alberta, and sending huge quantities of this viscous, gooey “oil” to Whiting, Indiana, where BP converts it into gasoline and other products. But because it’s so dirty, there’s a lot of residue. And it has to go somewhere. Like the southeast side.

“This is another one of these unaddressed consequences of the steady shift to this oil from Canada,” says Hawthorne. “All kinds of environmental problems with it, not just in Canada, but here in the midwest and worldwide.”

And here’s the kicker. The company that hauls this stuff into Chicago, and sells it to power plants around the world to burn in their coal power plants, is owned by the Koch brothers of Republican fundraising fame.

++++++++++++++++++

So what happened last week when Mayor Emanuel quickly dispatched his CHA chief, Charles Woodyard, replacing him the next day with his Buildings Commissioner Michael Merchant? Why did he make the change?

Ethan Michaeli, publisher of We the People Media, and a journalist who’s covered public housing for decades, says Woodyard didn’t make much of a splash in his two years here. “He made very little effort to get to know anybody here in Chicago,” he says. “He didn’t make an effort to know residents, he didn’t get to know real-estate people, political folks or those even in the Rahm Emanuel administration.”

So what role did Woodyard play in advancing the “Plan for Transformation” at the CHA?

“Calling the plan for transformation a plan at this point is a questionable enterprise,” he says. “You’ve had something that was supposed to be a five-year plan that was frankly a ridiculous paper plan to build thousands and thousands of units of replacement public housing in a short period of time…that was extended to a ten-year plan, a fifteen-year plan, and now it’s gonna end up being a twenty-year plan. When you promise a family in public housing that you will be able to come back to a property, and that promise is fulfilled twenty years later, I’m sorry, that’s not a plan.”

There are currently 100,00 people using CHA Section 8 housing vouchers, and Michaeli worries that every former CHA tenant using one of those vouchers is taking up an apartment or residence that was once on the market as an affordable rental unit. So the CHA has to move forward. And a major issue is the quality of the management of the properties currently in the portfolio.

“There’s still a legitimate concern about the way the CHA manages its properties”, Michaeli asserts. “If you’e living across the street from a CHA property you’re gonna be concerned – is the housing authority doing the screening the way it’s supposed to be? Is it doing the maintenance, the policing, the regular landlord stuff? People are not sure that the housing authority yet is a good landlord.”

Tim Novak, investigative reporter for the Sun-Times, points out that there’s another dimension to Woodward’s departure.

Woodyard’s resignation “comes in the wake of an internal bid-rigging investigation,” he explains. “The CHA has hired a former U.S. Attorney. They escorted two people out of the building. It was the company that was hired to oversee what was left of the Plan for Transformation. So I think there’s something more there.”

And finally, Michaeli offers this observation.

“To be honest he was not running the housing authority. There were people that he didn’t appoint who were brought in by (Mayor Emanuel), and those people were really running the housing authority.”

So the CHA announced it would conduct a nationwide search, and the next day the Mayor appointed Merchant. It was apparently a short national search, because they quickly found the perfect CEO. “Just down the hall, as it turns out,” says Michaeli.

++++++++++++++++++++++

And now for the most delicious part of the week’s news. You simply have to watch the final ten minutes of this week’s show to see Tim Novak explain his latest story. 

“I’ve been waiting in the weeds for this deposition,” he says.

He’s referring the the appearance of Richard M. Daley at a deposition to determine just how that contract for the Park Grill in Millennium Park happened. The digging up of Michigan Avenue in the middle of the night to provide free gas to the place, the free garbage pickup, the 30-year tax-free concession deal. And let’s not forget the Park District negotiator who really went all the way to help her former boss get a good deal.

But the award for Best Performance goes to the former Mayor, who tries to convince the lawyers that he just doesn’t remember anything about designing or building Millennium Park. You can read the whole thing here. It’s a must-read.

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CN Oct. 17, 2013

Posted on October 17, 2013 by Ken

 

In our democracy, Bob McChesney says, “the range of debate goes from GE to GM.”

In Dollarocracy, a new book written with his colleague John Nichols, there’s a direct line from Citizens United to the just-ended government shutdown. People who contribute a few hundred bucks or perhaps a thousand to their candidate can still do so, but now billionaires can, and do, “invest” hundreds of millions in their favorite politicians. And the politicians the rich folks like best are the ones who vote to cede more and more power to corporations.

It’s not new. These battles between common folk and big business were waged in the nineteenth century. But much of the 20th century was different, McChesney says.

“From 1900 to 1970…there were pitched political battles in the progressive era, the New Deal, the Great Society of the 1960s. And democracy actually won a lot of these fights. We made this a better country. We made it possible for there to be Social Security and unemployment insurance. We had the right to have trade unions. We expanded public education so that working class people in many cities in this country could get decent, sometimes even first-class free education. We expanded higher education so that we had a larger percentage of our younger people going to four-year colleges than anywhere in the world. These were great victories. These were difficult fights. These came through the expansion of the vote, from people organizing, the civil rights movement, the voting rights act, and by 1970 America was a very different country than it is today, or than it had been fifty years earlier.”

But this didn’t go unnoticed, McChesney says. “There was one group of Americans who hated that. And that was corporate America.” The book covers in detail a memorandum written for the fifty top corporate leaders in 1971 by Lewis Powell, who would later become a Supreme Court Justice.

“His memo said basically to corporate CEOs, we have to take over the government again. The problem with American democracy is there’s too much democracy…and so after that memo we saw a ten-times increase in corporate lobbying in Washington within two decades.”

A major part of our discussion centers around how big money is changing, and limiting, the Internet.  Internet advocates insist that it will continue to change everything. That the change will not only be profound, but profoundly good for us all. It will transform us all into journalists and allow us to feed from an unprecedented cascade of wisdom and enlightenment. As McChesney sees it, some have benefited, but it’s the usual beneficiaries.

“If you look at the Internet, it’s produced a tremendous amount of wealth, but it’s concentrated in a small handful of companies. And what the Internet does, unlike other industries, is it’s winner-take-all economics. If you get the lead in a network, likeGoogle Search, or Apple or Amazon, you tend to have complete market domination. So of the thirty largest, most dominant companies in the country today, twelve of them are Internet monopolies.”

And the wealth they’ve amassed, he says, is staggering. Most of the companies we associate with Internet success – Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, eBay, AT&T, Verizon and Comcast – most of those companies have market share in their core area equal to or greater than John D. Rockefeller had with Standard Oil in the late nineteenth century.”

These companies, he says, “seem like such great guys because they don’t charge you a lot. The problem is that if you get something for free on the Internet, you’re not the customer. You’re the product.”

At Chicago Newsroom, we care deeply about journalism. The kind of journalism that changes laws, that gets wrongdoers indicted, and that shines light where light is decidedly unwelcome. And it’s that kind of reporting and editing that, because of the economic consolidation gripping the Internet, has become even more vulnerable today.

“The most important thing I think anybody who cares about journalism has got to understand is that the advertising foundation that was the basis of commercial journalism’s success for the last century is dying rapidly,” he explains. “Because advertisers have discovered they no longer need to buy advertising on a web site to reach the audience. They now go through these networks  that find you wherever you are on-line. They don’t care if you’re on the NYT website or the Best Buy website or a sports website. And because of that the revenues that go to support journalism on line have pretty much disappeared.”

In 2003, a newspaper website kept 100% of whatever advertising revenue it could attract to the site, he explains. But today, because of the middlemen, it probably gets about ten cents on the dollar.

“And that means that the commercial model of journalism is actually more alive in the old media – which still sells ads, which still generates resources – and a lot of the journalism we associate with the Internet today is being subsidized by old media. And when that old media declines and goes under there will be no media on-line.”

But doesn’t news want to be free? Won’t a new model of journalism simply replace the old? Here’s what McChesney and Nichols say in Dollarocracy: “We are sometimes told that a world with no paid journalists is a world where we are all journalists, as if this were some sort of great revolutionary accomplishment. Wrong. It’s a world where there are no journalists, or at least not one where that anyone in power has reason to fear.”

 

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CN Oct. 10, 2013

Posted on October 11, 2013 by Ken

George Schmidt has taught in seventeen of Chicago’s traditional neighborhood high schools. He founded and still writes for Substance News, which has needled CPS for over 30 years. He has a strong reaction to this week’s news (reported by Sarah Karp at Catalyst and Linda Lutton at WBEZ) that enrollment in neighborhood high schools has dropped dramatically as dozens of alternative high schools have opened.

“The problem is that the Board of Education has for at least the past fifty years been sabotaging the neighborhood high schools in different ways,” he claims. “This is not something new. The new piece is the charter schools are given so much preference in ripping off the kids and then sending back the kids they don’t want. After they get their money for the year. You know this is one of the tricks. You get your money in October and then in January you send the kids to Kelvyn Park or Amundsen…You have an almost propaganda campaign coupled with fiscal sabotage.”

The once-proud major high schools that dominated their neighborhoods started being challenged long ago, he says. “If you go all the way back to the sixties there’s been this push for magnet schools, preferential treatment schools, and as a result, the neighborhood high schools have faced these challenges.”

But why has there been this historic push for alternatives? Isn’t it because parents were often dissatisfied with these schools?

In some cases, yes, Schmid says. For the most part, though, he believes the issue was, and remains, under-resourcing. But there’s something else. “There was a kind of vicious, racist component to this,” he says.

“The southwest side is the phrase that Chicago uses to explain where the white people moved to as the black people expanded through the south side. At one point the southwest side ended around Halsted Street, then Racine, then Ashland…well now, at the last Board of Ed meeting, they were talking about the people from the southwest side don’t have a college prep high school. And they’re complaining. Well, at the same time the three college-prep academic magnet high schools on the South Side – Lindbloom, King and Brooks, are under-enrolled. Payton’s over-enrolled. And North-Side College Prep, and Jones. Those are the white part-of-town schools.” If the Board accommodates this separatist thinking, he says, this unsustainable disparity will continue.

The new high schools that have cropped up in recent years aren’t all what you might think of when you imagine a high school. Some, he says, are small, “high-schooly thingies” created for special interests.

“Communities that have a boutique sense of what they want…they get it because they have the clout, sometimes under the table – you don’t see and and then suddenly you have Disney II over there in Old Irving park where you can’t buy a home for less than three quarters of a million dollars.  They didn’t need it. Schurz High School is right there. If you’d put the same resources into Schurz you wouldn’t have had to invent Disney II.”

We ask if perhaps the whole idea of a big, general high school is outmoded, and that students are better served by smaller, specialty schools. Schmidt says no. “The general high schools in the suburbs, from Glenbard West to New Trier…are having no problem. It’s the peculiar history and the nature of Chicago politics and education politics that got us into this pickle,” he concludes.

We discuss CPS budgeting, a topic Schmidt has been passionate about for decades. He ridicules the “billion dollar deficit” that was mentioned so often as a reason for closing schools and firing thousands of staff. And he cites a power-point presentation at the July Board meeting. “The Chief Administrative Officer of CPS gets up..basically what he said, we didn’t really have a billion-dollar deficit because we found six hundred million dollars in our reserves.  A year earlier they said we didn’t have any reserves.”

Schmidt concedes that there is a giant pension hole in the Chicago teachers Pension fund, a hole he blames on the Daley Administration and former CEO Ron Huberman, as they requested and got “pension holidays” that starved the fund. But the hole is fixable, he says.

“We need progressive taxation, we need a serious review of the way in which property taxes are collected from corporations,  we need an end to tax benefits. Boom, suddenly we have more revenue,”  he explained. We had to agree to defer until another program the discussion about just how he’d get Congress, the Illinois Legislature and the City Council to go along with his plan.

And what about Labor’s traditional political allies, the Democrats? Mayor Emanuel and president Obama haven’t proven to be friendly to unions.

So what’s next for the CTU and for collective bargaining for public employees? “So now we’re going to be involved more intensely in political action,” he asserts.  “And I think there’s gonna be a lot of rewarding friends, because we have some good friends, from here to Springfield and Washington. And really looking at who our enemies are, starting with, of course, Rahm Emanuel.”

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CN Oct. 3, 2013

Posted on October 6, 2013 by Ken

The federal government (partial) shut-down continues, but it seems accurate to point out that there are relatively few obvious manifestations here in Chicago.  But as NPR’s David Schaper tells us, it’ll happen soon. “OK, there’s not a meat inspection this week,” he explains. “well,  when does it really start affecting the chain of food getting to the grocery store? It’ll probably take several weeks for a bigger, broader impact to be felt,” he says.

Schaper says it isn’t easy to figure out how this all gets resolved, but Speaker Boehner is in a position to break the deadlock. “All he has to do is call the bill that the Senate passed, for a vote, and see if the votes are there,” he says. “If his caucus is truly united, they will defeat it. His caucus clearly isn’t united, so he won’t call that bill. I think his position would be a lot stronger if they actually called that bill and shot it down because then I think both sides would have to say…we’re in a deadlock here. You killed our bill, we killed yours. We gotta find some middle ground.”

Mayor Emanuel made some news this week with his proposal to remove red-light cameras from 14 intersections where he said the cameras had done their job, since accidents and red-light violations had dropped. But planning goes ahead at full-tilt to install up to 300 speed cameras around schools and parks. BGA’s Alden Loury says it can still be difficult to justify the cameras. “If there’s an argument to make about safety and  excessive speed, and I think there certainly is in some parts of the city,” he says, “there are ways to do it other than installing speed cameras. The other thing is that there will always be a cloud over these kind of things in my mind, because the inspector general came out with a report regarding red light cameras saying that the city’s argument around safety with regard to those cameras – they hadn’t really backed it up with data. So the City’s cash-strapped. We hear annually about the troubles with the budget. So any time there’s an idea for a new revenue stream, people are going to be somewhat skeptical.”

The Mayor also announced this week that he’s bringing in a group of experts to evaluate and hopefully improve the effectiveness of 311. But if they make it really good, will it further reduce aldermanic prerogatives? “In the old system, aldermen did have control over a lot of city services,” says Schaper. “Ward Superintendents are often in the same office building, right next to the aldermen, and they work hand-in-hand.”

But gerrymandering of the City’s ward boundaries has become so exaggerated that picking up garbage and delivering other services became more and more difficult to justify on a ward-by-ward basis. So the introduction of the grid system and a 311 system that tracks results right to the constituent’s smart-phone are combining to make the alderman more of a middle-man.

“Mayor Daley introduced this concept of trying to take away some of that aldermanic control for some services, but sort of backed away from it,” Schaper explains. “But this is just one of those things, where, OK, it’s time, we can do this more efficiently, we can save some money, maybe it’s time to move forward.” And by the way, these reforms also add fuel to the argument for reducing the City Council to 25 aldermen.

There’s a series of investigations at the BGA Web site that reveal some interesting connections between between public figures and the former leader of the Gangster Disciples.  Loury co-authored the stories. “We were hunting Larry Huggins (formerly a Metra Board member) down for a story we’d done about him inviting a top Metra executive, one who’d been considered as a replacement for Alex Clifford, inviting him to a fundraiser. And in trying to get Mr. Huggins to comment on that we called his office a number of times and stopped by there. And we came across a woman named Wendy Jenkins working in his office. When we discovered who Ms. Jenkins was, we had another whole set of questions. Ms Jenkins is the common-law wife of Larry Hoover. As we learned in the federal case that sent Larry Hoover from state prison to federal prison in the mid-90s, Ms. Jenkins was actually a very integral part of the Gangster Disciples operation. I’m not saying that she sold drugs or did anything illegal, but she was a conduit, as the feds uncovered, between Hoover in prison and many of his Gangster Disciples leaders on the outside.”

There’s also a separate investigation that raises questions about whether CTA Chairman Terry Peterson once wrote a letter advocating for Hoover’s parole. Peterson denies that he wrote the letter.

It’s a complicated story and well worth a read.  It’s all a part of the BGA’s focus on on-line investigative journalism.

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CN Sept. 26, 2013

Posted on September 26, 2013 by Ken

In April, it will have been ten years since David Koschman was punched in the face outside a bar on Division Street. He fell to the curb, hitting his head, and he died eleven days later from that head injury.  In February there will finally be a trial. Richard Vanecko has been charged with throwing the punch that led to Koschman’s death. Vanecko is the nephew of former Mayor Daley.

Most of this probably seems familiar. That’s because a team of reporters and editors at the Sun-Times wouldn’t let the story die.  Their complete compendium of work is now available at a special site, and it’s worth a visit.

Tim Novak, Carol Marin and Chris Fusco wrote the initial story on February 28, 2011 that got the ball rolling. Chris tells us that it started with Novak’s memory of the vague, then-seven-year-old incident that had warranted a ten paragraph story in his newspaper in ’04.

“It really always gnawed at Tim that we were never really able to know what went on here after the dust settled”, he said.  “You fast forward..and in January 2011 Tim files a FOIA looking for all the reports on the Koschman case.”

The results of the FOIA were surprising. It seemed that the Police Department had changed its view of that night’s events. “The conclusion in 2004 is we don’t know who struck Koschman on the street that night,” he explains. “If somebody did strike Koschman, they did so in self-defense. And the sea-change between 2004 and 2011 is that the Police concluded that Vanecko did in fact throw a lone punch that struck Koschman, and that caused Koschman’s death eleven days later. But they stuck to the sense that Vanecko did so in self defense.”

The story continues. From that lone punch to a 162-page report prepared by Special Prosecutor Dan Webb that’s so “potentially explosive” that it can’t be opened until after the Vanecko trial. Will political interference have been uncovered? Did the Police and/or the States’ Attorney’s office bury the whole event in order to avoid embarrassment for the Mayor? That and more could be known in the next few months. And we have journalists to thank for it.

Andrew Patner, host of Critical Thinking and Critic’s Choice on WFMT (and arts critic at the Sun-Times for over 20 years) refers to Cardinal Francis George as “Francis the Corrector”.  The Cardinal seems to have taken upon himself the responsibility for explaining what the new pope means shortly after each of his news interviews in which he sets a new tone for the Church.

“But he’s up against a Jesuit here,” Patner says “And there’s a reason there’s never been a Jesuit pope before…he talks about movies, he talks about music. He talks about love, friendship, family. All without notes. And that’s going to be hard for somebody who’s definitely of that “Benedict/Ratzinger” mind.”

And Patner reminds us that Francis George, unlike almost all his predecessors, is a Chicago kid. He grew up here, and his roots are in a rougher, more traditional time. “There’s something in him that just wants to go back to the neighborhood, and  the boss is the boss.”

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CN Sep 19, 2013

Posted on September 20, 2013 by Ken

 

Governor Quinn got some great news this week – he pretty much has the Democratic primary to himself.  It isn’t clear that Bill Daley would have beaten Quinn, but the Tribune’s Hal Dardick says things have really fallen Quinn’s way.

“The advantage to Governor Quinn is that he doesn’t have to spend a lot of money on the primary, and say a  lot of of things that get him in trouble,” he says.

And Shamus Toomey of DNAInfochicago.com says Quinn’s new environment makes things tough for the Republicans.

“It clears the field for the Governor,” he tells us. “And the money alone that he’s gonna be able to stockpile and use against the Republicans…the Republicans are already starting to turn on each other now.”

So does financier Bruce Rauner, with his deep pockets, now inherit the edge as Quinn’s strongest opponent? Too early to say, says Dardick. “It’s interesting to watch these guys. you see a lot of wealthy people coming into politics and they don’t always succeed. More often than not, they don’t. They don’t know the game, they say the wrong things, and government is not a business.”

Dardick tells us that the most important ongoing story at City Hall right now is the backwash from the hiring of former comptroller Amer Ahmed. He  had been under federal investigation for more than five months before Mayor Rahm Emanuel hired him.

“The Mayor says he knew nothing about it,” Dardick explains, “but that’s kind of an odd thing. A guy who prides himself on what he knows, and being master of the political universe, and he didn’t know. So that’s an awkward position for the Mayor. ”

And there’s a big question about how this will affect another key member of the Mayor’s financial team, Lois Scott, who was instrumental in Ahmed’s hiring. Dardick, though, says she could survive the turbulence. “To be fair, she’s a very talented woman, she really knows the business well, and certainly nothing’s been found to indicate that she did anything wrong.”

Bus Rapid Transit has taken on a new dimension this week as the first public hearings have started.  The plan would run express buses down the middle lanes of Ashland Avenue, giving them a huge speed advantage. But they’d also eliminate just about every left-turn lane for about five miles.  It’s really ticking off some of the locals.

“They’re playing this out in their own mind and they’re thinking, OK, the way I’d do it is I’d take a right into the neighborhood after the big street, take another right and get to the arterial,” says Toomey.

“It’s a pretty good idea – hey, let’s get more people out of cars and into buses.  You potentially reduce congestion a little, but I think the people are starting to learn about it and say, whoa, wait a minute, let’s take a longer look,” he says.

“A lot of the business owners in this area aren’t really keen on  this idea,” Dardick adds.  I think you’re gonna see a lot of orchestrated opposition popping up.”

We talk at some length about the canceled Midway privatization effort. Dardick says there are all sorts of good reasons why Mayor Emanuel decided to walk away from the plan, especially the fact that only one bidder remained at the table. But the plan’s demise robs the City of some much-needed revenue.

“Part of privatizing it would have been paying off those 1.4 billion in debts,” Dardick explains. “That would have been the initial payment…and then what you could do, when you get those profits, is take them and spend them on infrastructure, and you could have taken up to fifty percent of those profits and used it to pump that into pension funds.”

And Chicago has been forced  to get into compliance with court-mandated concealed-carry legislation in Illinois. So for the first time in decades, Chicago doesn’t have a handgun registry. Dardick isn’t nostalgic. “I don’t know that the handgun regulations in the city were ever anything more than symbolic,” he says. “Or a tool for politicians to say they were trying to do something about violence. Because guns cross borders.”

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