Scott Pruitt, upon assuming command of the EPA, apparently didn’t consider asking Cameron Davis to stay on. Davis had served nearly eight years as President Obama’s point person on Great Lakes issues, including coordinating the compact between the eight Great Lakes bordering states and the Lakes provinces of Canada. It was an agreement to preserve, protect and restore the greatest fresh-water resource on Planet Earth. But the new president attempted to de-fund it.
“We hear code words for how things should be like cooperative federalism,” Davis explains. That might sound kind of nice. Well cooperation is good, but what it essentially means is let’s push the obligation back to municipalities like the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, like the City of Chicago, like Cook County and the States. But the environment doesn’t really respect those jurisdictions does it?”
Davis proudly proclaims that the reduction or removal of deadly chemicals from the Great Lakes is well under way.
“I think in some ways the reduction in our toxic burden to the Great Lakes is one of our emerging success stories,” he asserts. “Over time we have reduced some of the toughest toxics out there like PCBs, sometimes by banning them, sometimes by regulating them very stiffly, but either way, for the most part we’ve seen toxic levels go down. Where we have work to do is on emerging contaminants, things like PBDEs, which are flame-retardants. We are seeing this new generation of contaminants show up in the Great Lakes and flame-retardants are built into furniture, they can be built into clothing and things like that, and those escape and get out there.”
But the newest threat, Davis explains, is tiny plastic fibers, sometimes called mirofibers, which seem to be everywhere in our water, including our drinking water.
“Yeah, so what we wear, we are wearing – fleece these days and nylon-based clothing. Whenever you do the wash that stuff doesn’t dissolve, it just breaks down into smaller and smaller bits… Just like you may see plastic bottles along the lakefront or in a river or something like that on a very microscopic scale this is the same issue. The plastics that we use in life don’t really break down for a long long time, they just go somewhere else…what goes on out there in the lakes and in our rivers is often a function of what we do on the land and how we live our lives.”
No longer a federal official, Cameron Davis has set his sights on the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District. He ran for, and won, a nomination to a Board seat in the election last March. Caused by the unforeseen death of a board member, the hurried election had to be conducted a s a write-in. Using skillful social media and some clever commercials, Davis and his friends convinced 54,183 people to write in his name.
“So the vote that just happened was for the primary and I’ve been certified by the County Clerk’s office now as the Democratic nominee for November, so I’m running in November. That’s the mission and I’m heading straight for it,” he exclaims.
There is an interesting wrinkle, however, because after a months-long delay Governor Rauner exercised his right to appoint an ally to the seat at almost the same time. So it isn’t clear if there actually will be a vacancy in November for Davis to fill.
He says that doesn’t faze him, however, because he beleives the MWRD is a critical institution. “MWRD is one of the, as other people have said least known most important agencies we have in this region,” Davis claims. “I actually think it’s one of the most important municipal water agencies anywhere in the world. It’s got a budget of 1.3-billion, which is maybe a fifth of what the entire USEPA budget is on an annual basis just for the Chicago metro region.”
There’s a new biking option in town, and unlike Divvy it doesn’t use the familiar docks. After a lengthy process, the City decided on a pilot service area for the bikes (roughly everything south of 79th except the South Chicago community) and has green-lighted several companies to provide the bikes. Service began a few days ago.
Deloris Lucas, a transportation activist with We Keep You Rollin’ Chicago, tells us this is a big deal for Chicago’s south side, although “dockless” biking is still very new and there could be a number of kinks to be worked out in the coming months.
Dockless biking (DoBi) uses a smartphone app to locate the bike nearest you, and, linking to your credit card, it unlocks the bike for you and tracks your usage. When you’re finished you can lock the bike to an approved public fixture such as a bike rack, city lamppost or the like – and be on your way.
Transportation writer and advocate for transportation equity John Greenfield tells us that there’s room in Chicago for both docked and dockless bikes, and that at the same time Chicago is also making plans for a car-sharing program in a zone from Foster to Cermak, from the lake to about Central Park. The car-share program would be similar to dockless bikes in that the vehicles wouldn’t have a “home base.” Customers would find a car through an app, use the app to remotely unlock it and drive away. The car could be dropped off in any legal parking spot in the service area, making the cars incredibly easy to use.
A number of aldermen have voiced opposition to car share though, claiming that they’d rob citizens of valued parking spots. So the roll-out will be more limited than the City had originally hoped.
Also on today’s show we discuss the chronically-delayed construction of the Navy Pier Flyover, an elaborate bridge designed to lift cyclists and pedestrians above the traffic at Lower Michigan and Illinois streets, across the Chicago River and Ogden Slip, and to rejoin the bike path near Wacker Drive. Fuinding issues, construction delays and newly-acknowledged issues with the Lakeshore Drive bridge will cost months more in delays, so the most optimistic completion date is now 2020.
You can watch the show by clicking the image above.
If you live in Chicago, in a building that was built before 1986, it’s almost certain that you’re connected into the city water system with a lead “service pipe”. That’s the individual pipe, made entirely of lead, that snakes underground into your basement where it connects into your building’s plumbing system.
For years, the City has confidently told its residents that there’s no danger of lead migrating into the drinking water. How did they know? because they measured lead in fifty samples drawn once every three years. Does that sound unreasonable? What if you also knew that the samples were taken at the homes of water department employees and former employees? Does that make it should like a somewhat less than rigorous scientific study of an entire city?
Michael Hawthorne’s been writing about lead and city water for a long time at the Chicago Tribune, but his most recent revelation is perhaps the most disturbing of all.
He and co-author Cecilia Reyes were curious about an offer the City made a while back to provide free lead testing at any home where the owner requested it. Turns out, 2,797 households took up the offer. When the Tribune researched the results, they found that at least one home in every one of Chicago’s 77 community areas had a water supply that was bringing out-of-compliance lead levels in with the drinking water. Worse still, thirty percent of the homes tested had lead levels higher than is allowed for bottled drinking water.
Michael Hawthorne is our guest this week. We think you’ll find the descriptions of his research unsettling, especially the part about how so much of this elevated lead was apparently brought about by the city itself with questionable practices as it tries to rectify yet another infrastructure issue – the replacement of failing, leaky water mains.
You can watch the show by clicking the image above.
The Chicago Reader’s Maya Dukmasova joins us today. Maya covers housing and criminal justice. She recently produced a fascinating report about a lawsuit being brought by a developer that could, if it proceeds, challenge the age-old tradition in the city council of “aldermanic prerogative.” In short, this tradition holds that any alderman can support, or reject, any development in his or her ward, and all the other alderpeople will support the prerogative.
Thant kinda came apart in the 41st Ward when Alderman Anthony Napolitano had supported a large-scale, 300-unit apartment tower near Cumberland and Higgins. Until he didn’t. Why he changed his mind is a fascinating story, and it’s closely tied to a very different high density building proposed for Northwest Highway just south of Foster in John Arena’s 45th Ward. Arena supports it, but Napolitano didn’t like it and he helped lead the opposition to the building, ignoring Arena’s aldermanic prerogative.
“He kind of meddled in a neighboring ward,” Dukmasova explains. “A lot of people thought for political purposes, because Napolitano is Chicago’s only Republican Alderman…whereas John Arena is this self-styled progressive. He wasn’t bound to the pressure of the people were against the building.”
Months later, Napolitano, after it had been revealed that the 41st Ward building would include as many as 30 affordable-rate apartments, appeared before the zoning committee to withdraw his support. His objection was that the building had too much density. The board complied. The developer sued.
The developer is arguing that, since there’s no legal procedure for these kids of arrangements, and since the decision to withhold zoning was made in secret, it violated the Open Meetings Act.
So is it possible that the developer’s suit could end one of the strongest informal traditions in the City Council, forcing Aldermen to reach zoning and planning decisions in the light of day?
Dukmasova doesn’t think so. She tells us that the City will probably find a way to settle with GlenStar, the developer, and agree to give the company all the hearings and process it seeks, ending the dispute (and saving the Prerogative.)
“GlenStar’s argument in their complaint is that, either aldermanic prerogative is a thing, and we honor this custom, and this is how it works, you can’t flip flop. If your saying you’re for it, you’re for it” says Dukmasova, “Or, it has to be declared unlawful, because it’s just this arbitrary thing that doesn’t follow any kind of rules or guidelines.”
Dukmasova also tells us about story she recently wrote about Atrium Village at Wells and Division. Built in 1979 as a private affordable housing development, it is in the process of being redeveloped. The idea has been that several luxury towers would be built in the parcel, with the affordable housing units interspersed throughout the development. Recently, though, the developers announced that all of the affordable units would be concentrated in the old building, and that people living in the old building would have no access to amenities, such as pools, gyms, etc.
Dukmasova quotes one of the affordable-unit tenants as saying “the developer said that having people from the mid-rise use amenities in the luxury buildings would create a situation in which they wouldn’t be able to have enough eyes or enough people supervising these tenants.”
We also discuss the total rehabilitation that’s under way now at Lathrop Homes at Clybourn and Diversey, and how the promise that all of the public housing units lost during the redevelopment would be replaced, is yet to be fulfilled.
Finally, we talk about Mayor Emanuel’s decision to build a massive, $95 million training academy on Chicago’s far west side. Dukmosava has profiled the young activists who’ve been organizing against the project, arguing that placing hundreds of officers in the middle of an impoverished community could induce unnecessary friction, and that the academy could be built for far less money in a smaller footprint on property the city already owns.
Chris Fusco, Editor-in-Chief of the Chicago Sun-Times, is our guest this week. Fusco talks about the extraordinary challenges the Sun-Times and other media face in a market that’s only becoming more competitive.
As newspaper, magazine and broadcast companies find themselves going after a shrinking pool of advertising revenue, the race is on for innovative ways to expand audience and improve the effectiveness of their digital products.
But the new company controlling the Sun-Times is fighting back strongly with a fresh digital presence, new video and audio podcasts, a re-designed print product, expanded staffing and an aggressive marketing program, all released on March 28.
You can watch the video by clicking the image above.
Chicago Police Board chair Lori Lightfoot is our guest this week.
Lightfoot is especially good at explaining complicated processes, such as the quest for a consent decree, agreed upon by the Mayor’s office, an assembly of powerful community groups, the ACLU, the Police Department and the Illinois Attorney General. And they have to do it before September. But she’s confident it can be done, and that the consent decree will lead the way to significant, sustainable reforms to our police department.
She also explains, in great detail, the process of sorting out who’s accountable for the horrific shooting of Quintonio LeGrier and his neighbor Bettie Jones. They were killed by CPD officer Robert Rialmo, and the Civilian Office of Police Accountability found that Rialmo should be fired. The police superintendent reviewed the case and came to the opposite conclusion. That opens multiple new layers of process, including possible new hearings before Lightfoot’s Board. Lightfoot tells us that she’s very disturbed with the leaks of documents to the media, including Supt. Johnson’s confidential memo to COPA. The public scrutiny of the documents long before anything was final has corrupted and “delegitimized” the process, she tells us.
And the $95 million police training academy Rahm Emanuel has proposed for the far west side near Cicero and Roosevelt gets thumbs down from Lightfoot, despite her assertion that Chicago really needs a new training academy. “I just think putting this facility in one of the poorest neighborhoods of the City without having that community support and involvement and engagement, not having it be part of a larger economic development plan for that neighborhood, it’s just wrong-headed and frankly tone deaf,” she tells us.
If you care about police-community relations, and if, like Lightfoot, you have confidence that real reforms can be brought to the police department, you really should give this show a listen.
The massive shredders and processors that tear apart cars and refrigerators and scrap metal at Clybourn and Webster seem out of place in today’s rapidly gentrifying North Branch, but only a few years ago the entire region – known as an industrial corridor – was filled with factories, steel mills, tanneries and similar businesses.
There’s another part of Chicago that’s also left with massive ghosts of an industrial past, but there aren’t any fancy developers moving in with office towers and river-edge parks. It’s the area of South Chicago where so much of Chicago’s steel legacy was forged, and unfortunately for the people still living there a lot of the toxic residue still remains.
That’s where we begin today’s discussion with Michael Hawthorne, investigative reporter for the Chicago Tribune, who writes mostly about environmental issues.
Manganese has been in the news this week as the City passed new zoning regulations prohibiting the outdoor storage of the material in City limits. It all began more than year ago when the city got involved with the huge controversy about petroleum coke, a dusty by-product of petroleum refining that was being stored in the tenth ward along the Calumet River. It took a long time, but the residents nearby got the city involved and eventually outlawed the storage of petcoke in outdoor yards. But along the way activists discovered a different company, S.H. Bell, storing manganese, which is a known neuro-toxin, and they wanted monitors put up around the yards.
“And that led to a big back and forth in federal court,” Hawthorne begins, “where S. H. Bell said we don’t want to put our own air monitors up around the facility. The federal judge said if you have nothing to hide basically why don’t you just allow this, ordered the monitors. They’ve been in place now I think for a little more than a year and they found high levels of manganese coming from that facility. So S. H. Bell is in negotiations with the federal government to resolve those issues.”
“There’s been a lot of research done around that facility,” Hawthorne adds, “and they’ve found that exposure to manganese can cause problems like learning and memory that there are detectable problems with kids learning and doing well on standardized tests, and other ways that they measure cognitive abilities in children, the kids who are exposed to this manganese are more likely to have those problems. The question now is are we seeing the same thing in Chicago.”
“The City of Chicago piggy-backed on to what the federal government was doing,” he tells us, “and had their own clamp down on S. H. Bell. And the idea is at the beginning of this year S. H. Bell came back and said we’re going to stop storing manganese outside, so to kind of cut back on it blowing into the neighborhood.”
But the activists want another step. They want assurances that storage and shipping terminals like S.H. Bell can’t start up new facilities in there neighborhood in the future.
“The steel-making jobs are long gone from that neighborhood and what are they left with?” Hawthorne asks. “They are left with a lot of service industries and also kind of these like holdover legacy companies long the Calumet River, and the fear is is the rest of the City gentrifies, for example…that all of that dirty industry is eventually going to move and be concentrated back on the southeast side and that they will be disproportionately affected by pollution once again, which is what they were back in the day. But at least then they had a lot of jobs.”
Michael Hawthorne wrote recently about the Deep Tunnel. Specifically, he was addressing the McCook Reservoir, which only came on line in the last few months. Connected to the massive tunnels that run for miles under Chicago’s major rivers, the system is now capable of temporarily storing just over five billion gallons of sewage and rain water. It’s been the dream of water engineers for over 40 years.
But on February 20, the first big test – it filled to capacity in about 20 hours.
“It’s amazing and it says a lot about essentially what we’ve done to our natural environment,” he asserts.
So much rain fell on that day that when combined with the snow already on the ground, the system filled and went several million gallons beyond its capacity, requiring spills into rivers and the lake.
What’s remarkable about the past 50 years is that Chicago’s population, which hasn’t increased dramatically, has spread out. “And we’ve paved over a lot more of the metropolitan area since then,” Hawthorne explains, “and remember, we built this metropolitan area on a swamp. It’s flat. It doesn’t drain very well. What was the natural Chicago River was this sluggish prairie stream that really didn’t drain much. We live in wetlands, essentially.”
So, despite the construction of this gargantuan underground bucket that might have been adequate for the year it was conceived, by the time it has come into almost-full operation, it’s not adequate for today’s stormwater runoff. (There is, however, a final reservoir in the works, which will double the capacity to just over ten million gallons, but because it’s going to replace a currently-working quarry, it won’t be available for about ten tears.)
So, Hawthorne explains, the big question is – what happens now?
“One of the ways that climate change affects our part of the world is we are either going to have periods of dry weather or really intense wet weather, and that’s kind of what we’ve been getting since 2008,” he says. “In Chicago alone. We’ve had some of the worst storms in recorded history, and in each one of those storms the tunnels itself, the tunnels were quickly overwhelmed. And that means that all of that runoff ends up going out into our source of drinking water in Lake Michigan. And that’s what this entire project was built to prevent from happening.”
Hawthorne says there’s a huge conversation underway about getting the Water Reclamation District busy with lots of smaller projects to disconnect roof downspouts from the sewers, install permeable parking surfaces, roof gardens and rain gardens to soak up and “use” the rain where it falls rather than move it around and mechanically process it. That benefits everyone. But thousands of smaller, custom installations can be complicated to build, and we’re in a race against time if we want to prevent the hundreds of basements that flooded back in February from happening again and again.
On today’s show we also talk about the Foxconn plant soon to debut just north of Illinois in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, and about Cathy Stepp, who has been installed as the Region 5 EPA Director here in Chicago. The two stories are intricately tied together.
“Foxconn is this large Taiwanese-based company. They make flat screens and other electronics. They are a major supplier to Apple, and there was a huge sweepstakes to build a new factory, and Wisconsin won.”
And Cathy Stepp?
“Well, Hawthorne begins, “She was a state senator in Wisconsin on the farther right end of the spectrum. She and her husband owned a small home building company before that. She actually represented the area where the Foxconn plant is going to be located when she was in the state legislature. And Walker then named her, Scott Walker, the Governor of Wisconsin named her as the head of the Department of Natural Resources.”
She quickly distinguished herself in the office.
“She was known for a number of things. Number one, enforcement of environmental laws dropped significantly on her watch. She did other things for example, cut funding for scientific research at the department. And then some kind of small-scale things, but they are big too, especially the far right causes which are scrubbing any reference to climate change from official documents. So she was a polarizing figure. She later was a big advocate for Donald Trump in Wisconsin when he was running for President. She seems to be inline with kind of the same forces that are behind Scott Pruitt, who as Trump’s EPA administrator, was the former Attorney General of Oklahoma and was known for suing the agency that he now leads to try to undo clean air and clean water regulations.”
So how has she distinguished herself as the new EPA Administrator that oversees federal environmental actions across five states?
“Not much actually. She doesn’t come to the phone. To my knowledge she hasn’t made any public appearances outside of the EPA offices,” Hawthorne reports.
“We do know on the Foxconn issue related to air pollution in Wisconsin there’s a big decision coming up that Pruitt and the Trump administration has delayed on a tighter standard for smog, ground level ozone, which can cause all kinds of health problems, mostly lung problems and eventually heart disease. The feds have already missed a deadline to tighten the standard and say where the different areas of the country are and what in EPA speak is called non-attainment. Basically they don’t meet the standard, and that means that sources of pollution in those areas need to do more to reduce pollution.
“One of the areas, one of the dirtiest areas, at least according to monitoring data in Wisconsin is the county where Foxconn wants to locate, and if the standard is tightened to where it should be under the law Foxconn and other factories in that area are going to have to spend a lot more money on pollution control equipment, or they are going to have to find credits from other facilities, credits that are very difficult to find, or they are going to have to scale back production so they’re not polluting as much. So it’s a big issue for not just Foxconn, but for a lot of companies.
“Stepp is in a unique position to potentially affect that. She was on a lot of letters when she was at the State of Wisconsin urging the federal government to back off and stick with the standard that was adopted during the George W. Bush administration. Her immediate predecessor at the Chicago office wrote a letter to Stepp and to Governor Walker last year saying this is what the science says. This is what your own data says. You are going to need to do more. By the way, Chicago is going to have to do more too…Stepp has said that she’s recusing herself from any involvement in that issue, but it should be noted that Scott Pruitt, her boss, one of the cases he filed against the EPA when he was Oklahoma Attorney General was to try to block this smog standard from taking effect. So it’s led to some very interesting legal battles in Washington. Pruitt already backed down. He was going to try to delay the standards from taking effect for at least a year, was sued, and immediately backed down. Now they are talking about setting the final designation of areas that are in non-attainment or in violation with the standard in April. So it will be interesting to see what kind of wrangling goes on from now until then.”
Not that many people voted in Tuesday’s Illinois primary – about a couple of million statewide – but they made some very important decisions, including throwing out Joe Berrios, the powerful, connected Cook County Assessor, and unseating two of Toni Preckwinkle’s loudest critics on the soda tax issue, Richard Boykin and John Fritchey.
Three powerhouse political reporters on today’s panel. They are Tahman Bradley of WGN-TV, Chicago Magazine’s Carol Felsenthal and WBEZ’s Dave McKinney. Watch (or listen) while it’s still fresh. Chuy Garcia had a very special night, which not only launched him into Congress, but also made him something of a kingmaker in Chicago, where he could threaten the Burke dynasty, and possibly even Mike Madigan sometime in the future. Brandon Johnson’s narrow victory over Richard Boykin, Pat Quinn’s loss to Kwame Raoul for Attorney General despite winning all of Illinois, except Chicago and the Collars, and what’s next for Sharon Fairley, Marie Newman and Andrea Raila?
And, yes, the man who says, “we don’t have to live like this.” Ladies and Gentlemen, Garry McCarthy has entered the room.
Remember when Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley was quoted, exclaiming at a closed session of the Cook County Democratic Central Committee, “If a man can’t put his arms around his son, then what kind of world are we living in? I make no apologies. If I can’t help my son, (my critics) can kiss my ass.”
Do you remember what he was talking about? Well, it’s all in Dick Simpson’s new book The Good Fight.
“I introduced a Council resolution,” Simpson writes, ”ordering Daley to account as to ‘whether he has unlawfully used his influence as Mayor [for his sons] to receive undue preference.’ It was defeated 35-7″. It all had to do with Daley sending a no-bid contact for city insurance to the very company where one of his sons worked.
A year or so earlier, when he had just arrived on the Council, but had already been teaching at UIC for about 5 years, Simpson drew the battle lines quite starkly.
Complaining about 31st Ward Alderman Tom Keane attempting to put his son into a fairly obscure post as head of the Zoning Board of Appeals, he pointed out that Keane Jr was Vice President at Arthur Rubloff, at that time the most powerful real estate venture in the city. Keane was so connected he was often said to be second only to Daley in political influence. Daley didn’t like what this new kid was trying to do, and he exploded at the rostrum.
“The idea that I made this appointment because a man’s name was Keane and he was the son of a famous member of this council!” he exclaimed. “I made this appointment because I have known Tommy Keane, the boy I appointed since he’s been a baby… Should that boy be told… that he shouldn’t hold office because his name is Keane?”
Then turning to Simpson’s academic background, he went on. “Where are we going with these kind of educators? You are doing this to the young people of our country! And (Simpson) is not the only one. He’s typical of the large number (of professors) in universities polluting the minds of the young people… Frankly if you’re a teacher, God help the students that are in your class, if this is what is being taught.”
“Well,” Simpson tells us, “The biggest fun thing people don’t know is the Sears Tower is built over what used to be an alley that Tom Keane Sr managed to get as his law fee for condemning the street and allowing the Sears Tower to be built. That’s one of the reasons he went to jail for as long as he did. The Sears Tower wouldn’t exist if… I mean the Sears Tower is a good thing on the whole, but they could have done it legally. They wouldn’t have to bribe the head of the City Council.”
That’s how we began our conversation about Simpson’s sixty-plus years in public service, 51 of them at UIC as professor of political science. “Yes,” he says, “I’m still a teacher and I still do these weird things like try and engage students in more than just dull lectures.”
Key among them is instilling an interest in activism. And that starts with voting.
“We also have added by different registration techniques,” he explains, “an effort that has now yielded thousands of new student voters, more than ever before. We increased the voting at UIC – in 2012 42% of our students voted, in 2016 55% of our students vote. We had the largest increase of any university in the country of registrations and additional voting in 2016.”
Simpson’s political and personal life began in Texas, where he was active in the struggle for racial equality in the 1950s. He also spent time in Africa working on his doctoral dissertation. He arrived in Chicago in 1967 during the red-hot political events that would lead to the riots at the Democratic convention.
Then in 1971 he decided that he wanted to run for office, and he successfully won the 44th Ward aldermanic seat. “We were fighting over what should Chicago become,” he declares. “And so that’s why what would be a normal clash about somebody’s appointment was really a clash about patronage and nepotism and the rotten aspects of the Chicago machine.”
He told his supporters that, if elected, he’d institute a new way of thinking about aldermanic service. “We really thought citizens should be able to have a voice in the decisions that most affect lives,” he tells us. “If you think about Trump or you think Emanuel today or you think about Rauner as Governor, I mean none of them pay any attention to what the hell citizens want.”
Once in office, he announced that he’d vote the way Lakeview needed him to vote, not the way the mayor needed him to vote. That neighborhood-based government would direct his voting. “It sounded a lot like the SDS Port Huron Statement,” he laughs.
As alderman, and in the many years after he left office in 1979, Simpson was engaged in some of he most significant battles of our time. One of them was the legal fight to dismantle the Chicago Police Red Squad, which he says was founded in the 1930’s, “just to keep track of all the commies, that is labor union organizers and the like.”
The Red Squad, Simpson claims, was monitoring at least “20 different civic organizations and 20 or so major public officials.”
He had first-hand experience with the agency.
“The Red Squad would spy on us, and they would do more than just spy in the sense of sit and take notes, they did that, but they actually were agent provocateurs,” he claims. “They broke up an attempt we did to try and elect officials to county government as independents. We were meeting on the west side in a basement and one of the red squad agents got so provocative that the whole coalition fell apart, we couldn’t put together the ticket.”
“And so we sued them and we won the case,” he explains. “There were reparations paid to the organizations and the individuals.” In fact, more than $300,000 – a huge amount of money for the time. “The individuals, a group of us got together and set up a fund at the Crossroads Fund and then funded other civil liberties efforts for a decade to come.”
Simpson was also a significant player in the effort to defeat patronage. Michael Shakman, he explains, attempted to win a seat as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1970 that would re-write the Illinois Constitution. But he lost.
“He sued in federal court saying that the reason he didn’t get it was the patronage workers were working against him and that this took away both rights of candidates and citizens” he tells us. “But critical to this case it also took away the rights of the patronage worker. If you were a patronage worker you had to work for your sponsor or the party. And it took a long time for this to go. I mean we’re talking 1971 it all started. By the middle 70s it had worked its way through the first stage and the first Shakman Decree said you couldn’t, I have to get it right, you couldn’t fire workers for not working in a campaign. The second Shakman Decree said you couldn’t hire people because they had worked on a campaign”
And he was instrumental in another major political battle with huge consequences. “I was an expert witness in all of the gerrymandering cases which we’ve gotten very familiar with gerrymandering now, but all the wards were gerrymandered and they were gerrymandered to disadvantage the minority groups, to keep the number of black aldermen down. To keep the number of Latino aldermen almost nothing.”
A major consequence of this battle was that Simpson and his allies successfully won an order to re-district the City Council in the mid-80s, requiring a re-map that gave minorities a greater opportunity to hold Council seats. The effort was so successful that the new Council roster gave Harold Washington control of the Council for the first time, ending “Council Wars”.
The Good Fight is unusual for a political memoir in that it deals openly and frankly with Dick Simpson’s personal life. He describes his three marriages, his contemplation of suicide and his failure to balance his public life and his private life. He also takes us inside his time as an ordained minister.
“I don’t think a memoir can be written unless you write the truth,” he proclaims. “Sometimes you can shield some other people and maybe not tell the whole story that affects their life, but for your own life you have to, I think, be truthful. If it isn’t, people will instantly recognize it’s just all fluff. The second thing is I think the struggle between personal and outer life, interior and external, is a struggle that’s not just a politician’s struggle. I think a lot of people have it that whatever their job, whatever work they do.”
As we conclude, we ask Simpson, the lifelong activist, how he feels when he watches the student leaders of the gun resistance after the Florida massacre.
“It’s a great new movement,” he enthuses. “It’s allowing students to speak out. If they speak out now they will do that the rest of their lives. If they don’t win an early victory that may or may not be as important as the fact that they learn how to fight.”
So how was your commute today? Quick run downtown on the Red line? Gliding into the Loop from Arlington Heights or Bolingbrook on the Metra? A Pace bus from Skokie, a crosstown CTA bus, or maybe paratransit?
Oh, you drove in and parked – or you’re one of the cool kids who started work early on your iPad pro in the back seat of an Uber?
Well, here’s one thing we all have in common. In some way or another, the policies and practices of the Regional Transportation Authority had a direct impact on how you got to work or school today. The RTA’s been around for a while now – created in 1974 – and it has had some successes. But, hey, it’s in the public transit business, so very few politicians are willing to spend tax dollars to replace imploding trackbeds and decrepit stations – so progress is slow.
In fact, in the most recent RTA assessment, they need 1.6 billion a year for the next ten years just to keep up with normal replacement of vehicles, tracks and buildings, but they already have about a 20 billion dollar backlog in projects that never got funded. The state has pretty much run away from transit funding altogether in the past few years, and let’s not even get into what’s happening with the Trump administration, which seems like it’s pretty much wiped out federal support for transit in its ballyhooed infrastructure plan.
So today, we’ve invited the guy who runs the RTA to come sit with us and answer the question, why would anybody want this job anyway?
Kirk Dillard ran twice for Governor and missed winning the Republican Primary in 2010 by a little less than 200 votes. And in 2016 by about one voter per precinct. He still thinks he could’ve beat Pat Quinn in 2010, and who knows what would’ve happened if he beat Bruce Rauner in the ’14 primary?
Dillard went on to run the RTA later in 2014 and he’s been there ever since.
Dillard’s in an interesting position today. His state’s governor, and his president, are both Republicans. But he finds himself in disagreement with their transit policies. “Whether it’s Governor Rauner or President Trump, they need to understand that where transit goes the economy grows,” he declares. “It’s been proven time and time again, and governors of other states clearly understand it because they are putting substantial amounts of money (into public transit), especially as we have millennials and the generation of Uber and Lyft and the Divvy bicycles, it’s a different way that they travel.”
“The President has essentially flipflopped the traditional role of mass transit,” he continues. “It used to be an 80/20 split where we would have a 20% effort locally and the federal government will do 80. He’s flipped it upside down. If the President were sitting here where you are, Ken I would say, President Trump, how do you think for your properties in New York City or Trump Tower in Chicago, how do you think most of your employees get to work? Whether it’s the custodians or the concierge, or your bellmen, or your maid service, they take the CTA…”
Dillard’s RTA wants to be thinking about big-picture projects for the future. But expansion projects and additional services have to wait, because unfunded maintenance is the highest priority. “We have an overall capital backlog of probably $20-billion,” he tells us. “And you’re talking about the President’s plan. He’s talking…Just to give you something to gauge the size or lack of size of the President’s plan, the President wants to have a $200-billion of federal money program. Our state of good repair needs just in Chicago is $20-billion, so we could eat up one-tenth of the President’s infrastructure plan all by ourselves.” And New York’s backlog, he adds, is more than $100 billion, so that’s half.
“One-third of all of our assets in this area are essentially beyond their useful life,” he laments. “And our mechanics do a great job. Our system is safe. We don’t do anything that compromises safety. But the older our system gets the more expensive it is to maintain. I ride in in a car on the Burlington Northern Sante Fe Metra line that was delivered when Dwight Eisenhower was President.”
The RTA is getting squeezed from every direction. It’s not just that state and federal sources are drastically reducing their investment in equipment replacement and major renovations. The day-to-day operational funding is dropping, too.
“40% of the monies come from the riders themselves,” he explains. “Another 40% comes from the sales tax, which has been impacted by all of us buying products online. We don’t get quite the sales tax revenue that we probably think we should, and then another 20% is really supposed to come from the federal government and the state.”
“But for the first time in the history of the State, and it’s not only the RTA, it affects municipalities, the State is taking 2% of all the sales taxes that are raised in the metropolitan six-county area which the RTA is under,” he explains. “The State now takes 2% of all the sales taxes, ships it off to Springfield for the bureaucrats in Springfield to administer, so that’s a huge cut. Over a couple of year period that’s $40-million to the ridership of Metra, Pace in the CTA.”
“The state, though, has been really almost a deadbeat with respect to funding the Regional Transportation System in Illinois,” he asserts.
Gas taxes also play a part in RTA funding, but a very small part. “What we give from our gas tax to infrastructure is among the ten lowest in the United States of America,” Dillard claims. “Our gas tax has not been changed. I was Governor’s Edgar’s Chief of Staff, it hasn’t been changed since about 1990. It’s not adjusted for inflation. It is just a gallonage tax, so the buying power of the State of Illinois gas tax today is about half the 55% of what it was when it was last touched back in 1990.”
“(Indiana) and Iowa just increased its gas tax,” he tells us. “Conservative Nebraska just increased its gas tax. And one of my biggest fears, I lie in bed at night worried that even though it may be paltry, when it’s time for our State to match what we need to match from Washington for important projects like the Red Line modernization, we’re not going to be ready to go. I was on a panel in Washington recently with someone from the Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce and my counterpart from Phoenix who said, – ‘We have our federal match all ready to go. You guys haven’t even in Illinois done an infrastructure bill in a decade. We can’t wait to take your Illinois taxpayers’ money to use for projects in Indianapolis or in Phoenix.’ It’s political malfeasance to leave monies laying on the table, and these are yours and my monies, Illinoisans’ monies that go to Washington and get redistributed. We at least ought to get our own federal tax dollars back to the State, but you’ve got to have the match out of Springfield to match it.”
“We have, our grandparents, my parents’ generation have built what I believe is the best mass transit system in America, and we shouldn’t be the first generation that just lets it slide,” Kirk Dillard concludes. “I guarantee you 20 years from now CTA, Metra and Pace will continue to be the primary mode of the safest and fastest transportation in a population like we have. We move 2-million people a day. One-sixth of Illinois takes the RTA system every day. That’s an amazing number.”
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