In an interview w/ Channel 7 this week, Mayor Daley casually mentions that he has re-thought the longer school day. Without a plan for increased instruction, he says he’s not so sure the longer hours are worth it. It seemed a bit like a swipe at Rahm Emanuel — maybe Daley’s first in such a public way. We suggest that it could be a rebuke, but it also could be Daley’s way of sending Rahm a message, that he believes public sentiment is moving away from the “full school day”, and he’s offering Emanuel cover.
The guests were polite, but seemed extremely under-whelmed with the concept. In fact, Sam Hudzik (Political Reporter/WBEZ-FM) and Mark Brown (Columnist/Chicago Sun-Times) don’t think Daley’s statement will amount to much of a setback for Emanuel at all. At this point, they say, it doesn’t seem to matter all that much what Daley says.
Also up for discussion: some of the more arcane aspects of lucrative pension deals … the appointment of U.S. Attorney Dan K. Webb to lead an independent review of the David Koschman case…. and the cautionary tale of state representative Derrick Smith.
Mayor Emanuel’s Infrastructure Trust passed the City Council on Tuesday with only 7 dissenting votes. And if you’re 25 today, you’ll be 126 when this complicated deal expires. As proposed by the mayor, and enthusiastically endorsed by alderpersons as philosophically different as Mell and Moore, this deal might rebuild crumbling infrastructure and transform physical Chicago. It might. But it might not. Details are so sparse, and oversight of the process is so sketchy, that nobody – including those enthusiastic aldermen – really knows what the Trust actually is. What it isn’t, Mayor Emanuel assures us, is another parking meter selloff.
Hal Dardick, City Hall reporter for the Tribune, and Dan Mihalopoulos, who recently joined the Sun-Times, offer their deep understanding of this story.
And Dan tells us about his recent story about the consortium of private interests that leased the Millennium Park and Grant Park garages for about half a billion dollars during the Daley years. Turns out one of the provisions of that deal forbade any private operator from opening a public garage pretty much anywhere east of State Street, so there wouldn’t be competition. But the Aqua Tower opened its new spaces a block away and a buck cheaper, so the consortium has sued the City for $200 million. As Hal points out, this is the downside of profit-oriented corporations taking over public assets. They want to make money, as you might guess.
Also on the show, a tip of the hat to Elizabeth Brackett for her informative Chicago Tonight interview with Jim Kirk, the just-installed Executive Editor of the Sun Times. It’s an optimistic, positive conversation that gives one confidence in the company’s future. It’s worth watching.
Well, were you driving at 36 mph any time today in Chicago? It’s official – Rahm Emanuel’s gonna be watching you, and he’s about ready to ding you $35 bucks for the privilege. In the name of protecting children, the City of Chicago is about to blanket much of the City with cameras that will mail you a ticket ($100 if you’re 11mph over), and most of the aldermen at yesterday’s Council meeting spoke emotionally about how much better our city will be when the cameras protect us.
Then there’s the Infrastructure Trust, which got deferred for a few days.
Charlie Meyerson, Chicago Bureau Chief at FM News 101.1, has some reasons for skepticism. “It’s this question the mayor just refuses to answer,” he says. “We’re gonna get the money, we’re gonna use it to retrofit Chicago buildings…but the mayor has portrayed this as a big idea…but then you ask him, what else? I asked him again yesterday… and he says ‘we’ll see how it goes’ “.
Maybe next week we’ll know more about this concept that would shift a large amount of infrastructure spending from the City Council to a new non-profit panel.
Cheryl Corley (NPR) talks about her recent experiences covering the Trayvon Martin and Tulsa serial killer cases. She says Chicago’s recent spike in violence and murder travels with her. “I talked to people there, and people asked me – where are you from, and I’d say Chicago – and they’re like -‘well, what are you doing down here?’ ”
The largest municipal election in the country is coming down to its final week, and voting begins next Thursday – right here in Chicago. You didn’t know? Well, it’s the 11th Local School Council election, in which thousands of seats are up for grabs on the councils that govern more than 400 Chicago Public schools. The problem is that this election, the first under our new Mayor and schools CEO, just doesn’t seem to be a priority for them. In fact, panelist Don Moore, who, along with his organization Designs for Change was one of the activists who fought for the LSCs back in 1989, tells us that “there have been a whole series of obstructions” by CPS of the effort to recruit LSC candidates.
Lorraine Forte, (Catalyst-Chicago) Editor and Thom Clark (Community Media Workshop Prez) add that a combination of a slow financial retreat by the philanthropic community and a complete blackout of coverage from the media (with the exception of a Sun-Times editorial and some gallant coverage by Center Square Journal), along with a lack of interest from the central office, has cast a pall of “benign neglect” over the whole process. And, adds Forte, “It’s always easier from the District’s perspective to go in and say OK, we’re gonna get a new principal and fire all the teachers, because that’s more easily controlled as opposed to’ OK, we’re gonna support this grassroots effort”
The Center Square Journal saga, by the way, is especially interesting. CSJ’s efforts to get from CPS a list of candidates running for LSCs in its area elicited a response that they’d have to FOIA the info from CPS. A FOIA to find out who the candidates are?
There’s plenty of discussion about the recent “compromise” on the length of the school day, and the uncanny similarity to Mayor Emanuel’s “compromise” on the fine for getting caught in one of his SpeedCams. Now it’ll only cost you $35.
Mayor Daley will be deposed in the Burge trial. We talk briefly about what the delay has cost in taxpayer dollars.
And a hand-wringing discussion about the recent changes at the Sun-Times. Everyone at the table proclaims admiration for the paper, and for the excellent record its reporting staff has earned over the years. But the attempts give the paper a more down-market appeal is baffling. (Shortly after we finished taping, we learned that editor Don Hayner has retired.)
And Thom was given almost fifteen seconds to plug chicagostories.org ,a very worthwhile CMW project. It’ll help the thousands of reporters coming to Chicago for the NATO summit to “discover the real Chicago”.
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In Chicago, culture can be a very political thing. Mayor Emanuel is deeply involved with the city’s culture, showing up regularly at plays, concerts and recitals. But there are fears that, in this period of deep budget cutting, a lot of the cherished city-sponsored cultural events and venues may be suffering. The merging of the Department of Cultural Affairs with the Department of Special Events and the apparent reduction of programming at the Cultural Center are two of the topics we kick around on today’s show.
Nick Rabkin is currently working with the City on a massive survey to ascertain the public’s perception of culture in Chicago – what we have, what we need, and what the City’s involvement should be.
Alison Cuddy is WBEZ’s culture expert. As a host, reporter and editor, she’s covered all manner of arts and culture for the station, and has been actively following the politics of culture.
It’s a big-picture discussion this week about Chicago’s economy and environment .
Mayor Emanuel’s announcement today of a seven-billion dollar infrastructure program for the city has long-term implications for transportation, water quality and sewage. But as David Roeder of the Sun-Times points out, there are concerns that this massive pot of money might “go off the books” and not be subject to the oversight of the City Council and such legal provisions as the Open Meetings Act and the Purchasing Act. It could be managed in a way not too different from the TIF program, but with hugely larger numbers.
But Henry Henderson, Midwest Director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, points out that Rahm Emanuel has always had a strong interest in finding ways to finance big projects over the long term. That protects large, beneficial projects from waves of political whim that undercut multi-year developments.
We’ve been gripped, Henderson says, with “a sickness, that somehow government is the enemy of the people”. “The fact is”, he says, “we would have no transportation, we would have no water system…(none) of these things that are critical to our health, safety, welfare and economy” without government involvement and funding.
We also discuss the announced closings of the Fisk, Crawford and State Line coal power plants, which Henderson says were “subsidized by peoples’ lungs”, and have come to the end of their lives partly because “the alleged cheap coal is not cheap”.
Roeder gives us a summary of Chicago’s current economic picture, and it’s surprisingly positive. Office space rental downtown is picking up, especially in the up-market sector, housing sales are moving upward, especially in neighborhoods that are well-served by public transportation, and there’s a booming business building new apartment buildings, because “developers have found that now that people can’t qualify for mortgages and the ‘liar loans’ are out the window, they can still afford the rent”. And, as always, Chicago has the biggest intermodal transportation hub in the western hemisphere, a strong airport and, despite funding problems, a vibrant transit system.
But here’s the cautionary tale. Henderson, who fought for years to close the coal plants, holds them in high esteem, because they were, at the turn of the 20th century, revolutionary technology. Chicago and the midwest were the silicon valley of their day.
These legacies, Henderson says, “should spur us forward, as opposed to slumping down in a protectionist swoon and sucking our thumbs.”
In case you weren’t sure where Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle stands on the issue of decriminalizing the possession of small quantities of marijuana – here’s what she says on today’s show.
“So I’m 65 years old. I’m gonna run for re-election in this job, I don’t have any other ambitions. So I can say what I believe is right. And what I believe is right is that our drug policies are crazy. And that what we’re doing is destroying the lives of our kids, our very young people in the African American community, and spending an incredible amount of money on a stupid policy”.
Further, she says, “The War on Drugs is a failure”, adding that ” I’m in public life. You take incremental steps in the direction you want to go. And decriminalization is where we’re going. At least that’s where I’m going. ”
Preckwinkle also points out that the United States, with its 300-plus million pople, is one-fifth of the world’s population. But 25% of all the people in the world locked up in jail or prison – are Americans. And as we’ve seen, large numbers of these imprisoned populations got there for drug offenses.
Ben Joravsky’s also on the show, and he reasserts some of the stunning numbers he and Mick Dumke have been publishing in the Reader as part of their series on marijuana laws. It’s highly-recommended reading.
For example, marijuana is believed to be used at similar rates across racial groups, yet African-Americans account for 78 percent of those arrested, 89 percent of those convicted, and 92 percent of those jailed for low-level possession in Chicago. Incredibly, the ratio among those who plead or are found guilty is (black-to-white) 40 to 1.
In other news, was it awkward for the President to pick up the phone, as she did yesterday, to congratulate Dorothy Brown on her decisive re-election as Clerk of the Circuit Court, despite Preckwinkle’s enthusiastic support for Brown’s opponent? “well, yea,” she admits.
But to Carol Marin, who said of the President in yesterday’s column: “You don’t endorse if you don’t also intend to win. And there is a danger in spreading yourself too thin.” – Toni Preckwinkle responds this way: “If the only criticism she has of me is that I’m loyal to people who I think would be good and talented elected officials I’ll take that shot.”
George Schmidt is a delegate to the Chicago Teachers’ Union, a paid union consultant, and he writes for Substance, a “pro-union” newspaper. Joe Macare writes for truthout.com and for Occupied Chicago Tribune, which favors the Occupy Chicago movement.
We talk about efforts by the New York and Boston police departments to subpoena Twitter records from recent Occupy events, such as Occupy Wall Street. On the education front, does CPS really support Local School Councils, or have they been quietly withdrawing from promoting the upcoming LSC elections? And Merit Pay for teachers – can it ever be an effective tool for improving schools? For that matter, is differential pay for people in an essentially equivalent job description ever effective at all? Schmidt says no, never. It’s never worked for teachers, he says, but he’s confident that Mayor Emanuel and CEO Brizard are about to try once again to institute it.
Mayor Emanuel, along with Bill Clinton, has announced a vague but ambitious plan to build “roads, rail and runways” in Chicago using a huge infusion of private money. Critics almost immediately pointed out that the not-for-profit entity proposed to manage all this investment would stand apart from the City Council, be unelected, and presumably immune from such niceties as the Open Meetings Act, the Purchasing Act, and Freedom of Information laws. Is this just another attempt to privatize the most important aspects of government, or a sincere effort to bring sorely-needed funding to the table to fix our infrastructure?
Did Rahm Emanuel really get only one hour’s notice from his friend Barack Obama that the G-8 was being whisked from Chicago? Both our guests – Hal Dardick (Tribune) and Carol Felsenthal (Chicago Magazine) think it’s plausible. But, they say, our mayor is probably relieved that the G-8 was moved. If the change was made to thwart some of the planned protests, though, Dardick and Felsenthal say they believe all the protesters will be in Chicago anyway.
We take on the election for Circuit Court Clerk this week. One of the big issues in the campaign is how, and when, to digitize the office. Millions of filings every year are still handled in avery analog way – putting papers into filing envelopes. Dardick says that fewer than 3,000 cases have ever been filed electronically in Cook County, but neighboring DuPage files 78,000 every year.
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