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Chicago Wed Jan 07 2009
Spielman on Streets and Monies
If I didn't know for a fact she existed, I would suspect that the Sun-Times' Fran Spielman was a reporting robot. Seriously how does she file so many stories?
Two great pieces, one on the city reversing its much-detested plowing and salting policy:
On Tuesday, the mayor's snow commanders did an about-face on a controversial cost-cutting policy that saw City Hall use less salt, plow side-streets during normal working hours to reduce overtime and skip side-streets altogether after minor snowstorms.
During the "dead of winter," Chicago side-streets will be plowed and salted after every snowfall whether or not it requires overtime.
No more waiting until normal working hours, only to have the temperatures drop and side streets -- along with major intersections around schools -- turn into sheets of ice.
...and another on Mayor Daley making a pretty good argument about the need for direct municipal access to federal funds. In 1984, Jesse Jackson said that Nixon took the power from the cities and gave it to the suburbs, and that Reagan took it from the suburbs and gave it to the states. Not entirely sure what he meant about Nixon, but Reagan's ending of revenue-sharing was probably what he meant by the states. In any case, I don't know why exactly direct management of federal funds by the city is such a wild-eyed idea (and yes, of course we know that the city administration may not have the best record on spending waste, but we are comparing it to Springfield in this instance):
"Mayors are going directly to the federal government. They have to. We can't wait. You can't allow Springfield to take your money, hold the interest, then eventually give it to you in the middle of winter. You'll never get the job done in the middle of winter," Daley told reporters.