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Friday, April 19
It's now been a week since a small group of Chicagoans descended on the Federal Reserve (by way of a brief stint at the Willis — neé Sears — Tower) to stand in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement.
— Megan E. Doherty
On October 4, the Chicago History Museum will host a discussion on our current political climate entitled, "Politics Today: Red, Purple, and Blue." The discussion is part of the museum's In the K/Now series of discussions, which occur monthly. Moderating the discussions is Laura Washington, columnist for the Sun-Times.
"We will cover both [Cook County and Chicago], particularly the debate in the City Council and on the Cook County Board over budget cutting measures like furloughs, police, cuts to vital service like police, fire and health care, and tax increases," Washington said.
According to Ilana Bruton, Public Programs Coordinator for the Chicago History Museum, the different discussions for In the K/Now have various sized crowds depending on the topic.
"We try to choose hot, contemporary topics that effect Chicagoans today and include a diverse group of panelists," Bruton said.
Panelists for the October 4 discussion will be 43rd Ward Alderman Michele Smith, Michael Mezey, political science professor at DePaul University; and Christine Dudley, a political and public affairs consultant.
"Being 'in the know' is all about making today's history relevant," Bruton said. "Everything in the museum was at one time contemporary and it is important to continue to stay relevant and remind ourselves that history is ongoing."
For this discussion, a historical perspective for the political strife will be examined.
"We will ask the panelists to look at moments in history when the parties and political operatives were at odds," Bruton said. "We will talk about some of the frustrations with politics today and talk about solutions to stop the bickering and opportunities to forge towards bipartisanship."
The event is free and open to the public, although attendees can reserve seats on the Chicago History Museum's website. The discussion is scheduled to run from 6:30-8 pm.
— Monica Reida
Gapers Block politics editor Ramsin Canon appeared on WBEZ's "Eight Forty-Eight" on Tuesday to talk about the Cook County commissioners who refuse to take a furlough day, aldermanic travel and other current political news. If you missed it, you can listen to the segment online
— Andrew Huff
The Chicago Inspector General, Joseph Ferguson, released a report this morning with recommendations to the city government as to how it could close its considerable budget deficit.
There is constant harping in this space (e.g., from me) about the need for democratic control of institutions and meaningful public input into public processes. Any more than a little complaining about constant deference to more or less unaccountable technocrats. Make no mistake, though--technocrats and experts--and insular bodies--do have an important role to play. One of the best things about "third party" bodies that are insulated from politics yet still part of government is that they can make findings and issue recommendations free of the type of political considerations that the elected incorporate into everything. (Which is just one of many reasons why the IG's office should be well-funded and protected from meddling).
At the same time, being part of government means the recommendations these bodies make carry more weight, generate more instant attention, and carry some imprimatur of officialdom. So I read the IG's report with some interest late last night and early this morning.
One of the things that will strike you right from the executive summary is that a number of these recommendations could save enormous sums annually with fairly straightforward actions. It takes only another moment before you realize that they would be unpopular either with powerful special interests or with casual voters. Creating a 1% city income tax, for example, would cause a stir, and Mayor Emanuel has not shown the particular style of political courage necessary to try something like that. Similarly, this administration is unlikely to take the common sense step of eliminating some of the legions of appointed supervisors who supervise ever fewer employees but enjoy high salaries and benefits.
By Ferguson's estimation, that latter change could save the city as much as $100mn a year.
The option that generated buzz this morning was transforming Lake Shore Drive into a toll road, which is unfortunate because there are a lot of other common sense suggestions that, in the short term at least, could balance the city's budget without necessarily wreaking havoc among working families, including (from a release):
· Eliminating all Tax Increment Financing Districts to increase tax revenues to the City's general fund by an estimated $100 million annually
· Increasing the work week of all City employees to 40 hours to save approximately $40 million annually
· Create a Commuter Tax estimated to generate $300 million in annual revenues
· Implement Congestion Pricing for vehicular traffic that is estimated to generate an additional annual revenues of $235 million
· Broadening the City's Amusement Tax which would produce an additional $105 million in annual revenues
A lot of this is necessarily unlikely. They would be major, if simple, changes, and Emanuel's entire political career is one of risk-aversion, and the City Council is not really equipped to take any initiative. Still, having a body in government that can put forward options and recommendations like this, to at the very least make the public aware of what is conceivable and possible--and what politicians are unwilling, for their own person political reasons, to do--is essential to good government.
To read the full report, follow the jump. Also, check out IG Ferguson on WBEZ's 848 this morning. (I was on after him).
— Ramsin Canon
This is Part Two of a series examining health care in Cook County.
The Fantus Health Center provides a stark contrast to its neighbor, Stroger Hospital, making the latter seem almost a paragon of quality public healthcare with its modern design and efficient organization. The clinic, named after Dr. Bernard Fantus, who started the world's first blood bank at Cook County Hospital, is about 50 years old and shows signs of age from grime on the floors of the entryway. Immediately upon entering, you're greeted by a cacophony of conversations between people waiting to pick up their prescriptions and the numbers of people being served constantly being called out like a Department of Motor Vehicles station. Because of the size of the waiting area and possibly the dark walls and lighting, the waiting area for the pharmacy seemed to be more crowded than the ER waiting area at Stroger Hospital.
"Fantus is probably what most people think our health system is like," Sonja Vogel, Communications and Marketing Director for Stroger Hospital and the Ambulatory and Community Health Network (ACHN), said while walking to the building.
The outpatient clinic is noisy, dim, grim, busy and pharmacy area has a smell reminiscent of processed cheese in boxed macaroni and cheese. On the first floor, the pharmacy is the first thing that patients and visitors are greeted by, before turning down a hallway where The Lifestyles Center and Ambulatory Screening Clinic (ASC) are located.
— Monica Reida / Comments (2)
Last week, Illinois officially declared Sept. 14 to be Lilly Ledbetter Day, a day to recognize the equal pay activist and remember the fight for gender equality. Although this newest of official days pales in comparison to other auspicious days, such International Talk Like a Pirate Day (which you just missed), Lilly Ledbetter Day gives voice to an issue many of us assume is passé but is unfortunately very much current.
Way back in the archaic, Neanderthal days of 1998, Lilly Ledbetter sued Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company for wage discrimination. When Ledbetter neared retirement, she inquired about the salaries of her colleagues and discovered she was making on average $1,000 less per month than her male (and often junior) colleagues. She called BS, sued, won, then lost on appeal, and ended up in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court ruled narrowly against her on the basis that gender discrimination could not be proven within the 180-day time statute of limitation required by the Equal Pay Act. Ruth Badger Ginsberg gave a famous dissent noting that wage discrimination is neither as time-sensitive nor as obvious as firing a woman outright for not having a Y chromosome.
Fast forward more than a decade after the initial suit to 2009, when President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Day Fair Pay Act as his first act of office. The Act said discrimination starts again with each new paycheck issued. It was a big deal.
Women still earn 77 cents to every dollar men earn. For women of color, this gap is even wider. For many young women working the espresso machine or slave-wage entry-level positions next to their similarly impoverished male co-workers, this argument doesn't seem applicable. Yet on average, a woman will lose one million dollars over the course of her lifetime from not getting raises on par with her male colleagues. Lesson of life: You may be equal to your paycheck-to-paycheck boyfriend now, but in four decades, you will be a million dollars or about 200,000 Starbucks pumpkin-lattes behind him.
Lilly Ledbetter Day and Act are a start to getting women their fair share of deliciously sugary Starbucks drinks, but not enough. For example, did you know that the famous Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), has never actually been ratified? What!? You don't remember that from 8th grade U.S. history? Did you go to public school? Don't worry, many don't realize this iconic amendment was never actually ratified.
To learn more about the ERA and why it should or should not ratified, consider attending "Searching for Equality in the US Constitution - Debating the ERA," an event hosted by the Northwestern Law School. The event is on Friday October 28th at noon at the downtown campus. Sign up on Facebook or just show up with a sugary caffeinated beverage of your choice. If you are female, may I suggest bringing a budget cola such as Super Chill; never to early to start accepting your wage disparity and embracing it.
— Niki Fritz
Phil Rosenthal had a great piece in the Trib about the core policy questions that arise in the debate about TIF: Who needs subsidies? Working families? Or big companies?
On the one hand, you have unceasing waves of foreclosures hitting Chicago neighborhoods, contributing to blight, affecting property values, and, most importantly, putting families out of their homes. Without question, these harm a local economy.
On the other, communities need jobs. The flight of manufacturing from Chicago degraded the city's middle class significantly, and only an infusion of professionals to gentrifying neighborhoods has kept the median income steady. If employers are only willing to relocate with lavish subsidy, whatever our ideological or moral objections, it may be necessary.
Add to this a third layer: to what degree are we actually solving a problem, and to what degree are we shuffling deck chairs? From Rosenthal's piece:
"It depends on how you view the geography of our economy," said Rachel Weber, an associate professor in urban planning and policy at UIC. "If you think of the upper Midwest as one interlinked economy that competes with Europe and China, then moving these pieces around is not necessarily a benefit. If you look at it from the perspective of the city of Chicago, this is a winner. It depends on the scale of the economy you think matters most."
Beyond the process concerns, one of the challenges that TIF-style economic development presents is stability. TIFs are a weapon in the battle between communities and states to lure business away from one another, which changes the net but does nothing to the gross: the pie doesn't grow, in other words, between regions and states. How many subsidies are enough? What's to keep a company willing and able to chase the best benefits from staying put long enough to truly plan around?
Mayor Emanuel, like his predecessor (whose name is not "Mayor My Predecessor" as Emanuel would have you believe), has an intense policy focus on keeping Chicago a "global city." As the global economy has become more and more integrated and capital freed from parochial bonds since the 1970s, the "global city" idea has majorly informed of metropolitan areas has formed the basis of urban planning.
In her influential book Cities in a World Economy, Sasskia Sassen teased out what this often amorphous concept of a "global city" means:
[T]he forty or so cities that currently qualify as 'global cities' fulfil three major functions. They are command and control centres for the organisation of the world economy, key locations and marketplaces for finance and specialised services, and also major sites of production, including the production of innovation. [Sassen] stresses that global cities cannot be treated as single entities and that their social and cultural determinants must be taken into account to understand their economic trajectories.
The intense specialization and capital requirements of these functions requires significant infrastructure and social capital investment. Like the human brain, they consume a lot of resources. The professionals and the social networks in which they move require certain modes of urban living, access to major research institutions, access to power, and generally little interference from the state. Requirements like these often come to the detriment of the type of "neighborhoods first" governance that was the center piece of Harold Washington's reforms in the 1980s. Thus the constant friction between funding for "downtown" and Millennium Park versus investment into "the neighborhoods" and relief for cash-strapped families.
Competition for international capital and the industries, social networks, and professionals that accompany it is only sharpening. What's more, the policies needed to compete can seem to the public to be a series of desperation measures to stay relevant, with investment in working class communities forever put off into some future where there is some stability. And if the fictional wealth bonanza of the 1990s taught us anything, even seemingly dynamic changes to the fundamentals of the economy can be illusory. The example in Chicago is stark: the collapse of the housing market led directly to the tanking of Chicago's revenue base which was kept afloat by huge surges in Real Estate Transfer taxes.
The race to the bottom indicates there is a bottom, but the analogy can't be stretched too far. In reality, what is considered an acceptable level of social spending is constantly revised downward, the public common is consistently narrowed, and neighborhood participation in planning low-rated into oblivion.
Still, the abuse of TIFs by Mayor My Predecessor has given them a bad name, but they are not by any means inherently bad. To the contrary; one can easily imagine how TIF districts could be used as a tool for community control over and input into local planning and development decisions. A first step to resolving the type of tension Rosenthal reported on is to work towards some kind of consensus on the question of what makes a city prosperous, and to what degree our "global city" position needs to be balanced with true local ownership over policy and planning.
— Ramsin Canon
This is Part One of a series examining health care in Cook County.
The lobby for John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital of Cook County, is a clean, bright, modern space. On the left side of the lobby are a gift shop and coffee counter run by the auxiliary board, which uses the money to help buy furniture for the hospital and gifts for mothers that give birth in the hospital. In the center of the lobby is an information desk where a sign telling visitors to get in line sits at the front of a roped off area to contain the line. The windows near the elevators are large, allowing those waiting to see greenery around the Stroger campus as well as the older Fantus Health Center building while sun streams through the windows.
What is the oddest thing about Stroger Hospital is that it does not seem to fit any conception of a public hospital most people hold.
— Monica Reida / Comments (2)
The state has released its annual report on "gaming" (gambling) in Illinois, and there are some surprising statistics in there. The most shocking to me is that Chicagoland is the third largest gambling market in the country, behind Las Vegas and Atlantic City, and really not all that far behind Atlantic City, considering it is the (filthy) East Coast Vegas between Philly and New York.
Most troubling to me personally is the lottery. Granted at least the cash all goes into education (supposedly) but it is still troubling to me that the state will generate $1.2bn just on the instant lottery games.
Check out the full report for more.
— Ramsin Canon
The state of Illinois has been increasing pressure on not-for-profit hospitals to justify the consider tax breaks they enjoy. Specifically, in order to qualify for the property tax exemptions enjoyed by not-for-profits under the state tax code, hospitals have to provide a certain amount of so-called "charity care," or care provided to low-income patients. If hospitals cannot show that they have provided sufficient charity care, the state can move to revoke their tax exemptions. For small community hospitals, losing such exemptions could be devastating, leading to closure or absorption by larger, for-profit chains (which could limit or eliminate certain services).
Bruce Japsen of the Chicago News Cooperative reports on the results of this policy, and looks at increasing efforts by the Illinois Hospital Association to change the charity care standards:
The Illinois Department of Revenue moved last month to strip property tax exemptions from Prentice Women's Hospital, a sparkling new medical center in Chicago's tony Streeterville neighborhood; Edward Hospital, a rapidly expanding medical center in the western suburb of Naperville, and Decatur Memorial Hospital in central Illinois.
....In anticipation of new tax challenges, hospitals in Illinois are preparing a lobbying push that would seek to redefine the qualifications for tax exemptions. The new definition would go beyond just charity care and expand to include patients' unpaid debts, costs of medical care not covered by Medicare health insurance for the elderly, Medicaid coverage for the poor, as well as direct costs that teaching hospitals pay to train doctors and conduct research.
It is a difficult policy area. Surely, since for-profit hospitals pay property taxes, not-for-profits should do something that differentiates them--they should, in a sense, compensate the public for their exclusion from property tax requirements. But these hospitals don't exist in a vacuum--they have built their business model and services around the assumption that they would be able to operate without paying the significant tax, and a sudden revocation could result in closure of these hospitals or elimination of non-profitable services (such as primary care, which is notoriously underfunded in health care, but critical to controlling long-term costs).
If these hospitals are forced to close or are absorbed into larger systems which then cut non-profitable services, the community not only doesn't get any charity care, it doesn't get care of any kind. Hampering not-for-profits from hampering and watching for-profit chains move into those markets could be disastrous for those communities.
Notably, the hospitals Japsen cites as being the most recent targets of the Department of Revenue are not in seriously under-resourced areas.
— Ramsin Canon
The Chicago Teachers Union has filed suit before the Illinois Education Labor Relations Board requesting injunctive relief to stop the Board of Education from conducting school-by-school "elections" to lengthen school days.
Specifically, the suit alleges that the Board, which is teachers' employer, is committing unfair labor practices in egregiously violating their contract with the districts 30,000 teachers.
Specifically, working conditions and wages and pay are supposed to be negotiated by the teachers' collectively and their employer. Since both sides are subject to the contract, it would be inappropriate for either side to try to negotiate such a condition on an individual basis.
— Ramsin Canon
by Tim Mata
Feeding the poor wasn't enough for one faith-based non-profit on the North Side. A Just Harvest, a community kitchen turned community organizer, is planning a tilapia farm in the North of Howard area. The main feature of the project would be an aquaponics farm that would produce both locally grown food and, ideally, jobs.
The scope of the project isn't your garden-variety urban greenspace. The goal is to construct an aquaponics system that would produce two yields of tilapia in the first year alone. Like a home aquarium, an aquaponics system pumps wastewater out of the fish tank to keep the fish healthy, but that's where the similarities end. Instead of using a mechanical or disposable filter, the wastewater from the fish would in turn be pumped to a separate area with a bed of produce. The water is then filtered by the plants and simultaneously used as fertilizer before being pumped back in to the fish tank as clean water. Depending on the size of the tank used, the amount of fish can be anywhere from a few hundred fish to tens of thousands.
— Mechanics
Today begins a week-long strike for employees of the Hyatt hotel chain, in Chicago as well as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Honolulu.
These workers, who have been without a union contract for two years, allege that Hyatt is particular among hotel chains for its unfair treatment of laborers. Union president Henry Tamarin was quoted as saying that "Hyatt is one of the most abusive hotels in their treatment of housekeepers and has the worst record on subcontracting."
In addition to decrying the outsourcing of jobs to agencies that will provide laborers who will work for even less pay, the housekeepers cite the American Journal of Industrial Medicine to support their claim that Hyatt mistreats its workers.
While this may be the initial strike scheduled to last a week, it wasn't the first altogether. A brief picket in July turned ugly when the hotel switched on 10 heating lamps. Located under the awning to warm guests in the winter, on July 21st they instead heated up already hot picketers on a sweltering day (heat index 109 F).
Although Hyatt spokesman Farley Kern claimed that "Unite Here regularly engages in extreme rhetoric and gamesmanship during contract negotiations. This dishonest attempt to misrepresent the work environment in our properties is well over the line," the action of whoever turned on the heat lamps — and of those who chose to leave them on only until they realized the media was picking up on it — speaks to the contrary.
— Megan E. Doherty / Comments (1)
by Matt Farmer
Like some ne'er-do-well nephews whose rich aunt just died, the bosses at CPS headquarters are suddenly flush with cash. And from the looks of things, that newfound dough is rapidly burning holes in the pockets of the folks who occupy the corner offices down on Clark Street.
Talk about a sudden reversal of fortune. On June 15, Mayor Emanuel's hand-picked Board of Education voted (unanimously, of course) against paying CPS teachers the 4% contractual raises they were scheduled to receive this year. At that time, the board claimed it did not have "a reasonable expectation" of finding the money -- roughly $80 million -- to cover those raises.
What a difference a couple of months make. On Tuesday, CPS CEO J.C. Brizard became a one-man stimulus package, offering to pay each of the city's 482 elementary schools $150,000, if the teachers at those schools quickly agree to extend the length of the school day by 90 minutes. If all the schools sign on, Brizard's so-called "incentive" payments will add up to about $72 million.
But just in case $72 million isn't enough to seal the deal, Brizard is also offering each of the roughly 13,600 teachers at those elementary schools a lump-sum payment of $1250 -- you know, just to show he cares. That's another $17 million in newly discovered greenbacks.
— Mechanics / Comments (5)
South Side Chicago and the southern suburbs could be the battle ground for a Democratic heavyweight battle come next March. Former Congressional Representative Debbie Halvorson filed paperwork to explore a potential matchup in the second congressional district with Jesse Jackson Jr.
— Aaron Krager
Last Monday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel made good on his campaign pledge to reform the Chicago's sprawling Tax Increment Financing (TIF) program. So it would seem from scanning the headlines. Or maybe it's time to double-down on cynicism, because nothing has changed.
Hard to say, really, since there's been precious little analysis of what Emanuel's TIF reform panel actually proposed.
(For a quick refresh of how TIFs work, click here and here.)
So let's take a look. At bottom, their report urges the city to adopt four simple, technocractic habits:
— Mechanics
On August 25, Saint Francis Hospital in Evanston was fined $23,800 by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for employees being exposed to patient blood.
According to Robert Malgieri, spokesman for HEART/AFSCME, the employees at St. Francis Hospital contacted OSHA due to their own concern for employee safety.
The 13-page complaint issued by OSHA states that St. Francis has failed to inform housekeeping staff of tasks that would result in exposure to bloodborne pathogens, have materials for bloodborne pathogen training in an appropriate language for the employees, explain what would be the plan for St. Francis Hospital if an employee was exposed to bloodborne pathogens, failed to explain what tasks would result in possible exposure to bloodborne pathogens, did not tell staff of methods that could prevent exposure, and that employees were not given a session to ask questions during the bloodborne pathogens training session.
Bloodborne pathogens include the Hepatitis B virus, Hepatitis C virus, and HIV as well as viral hemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola and Lassa fever.
— Monica Reida
I did not know where I wanted to go with the story on the Congress Hotel strike when I first started doing some research. I knew it had been eight years, strikers are typically still on the picket line and little of the negotiations are known. I wanted to treat it more as a piece of objective journalism instead of throwing my opinion around as I tend to do. So if you could follow me below I will divert and offer it here.
— Aaron Krager
I imposed on Alison Cuddy's hospitality and yapped on 848's "Month in Review" yesterday, beside Financial Times reporter Hal Weitzman and Manya Brachear, who reports on religion for the Chicago Tribune.
— Ramsin Canon
By Phil Huckelberry / 2 Comments
It's now been 11 days since the carbon monoxide leak which sent over 80 Prussing Elementary School students and staff to the hospital. While officials from Chicago Public Schools have partially answered some questions, and CPS CEO Forrest Claypool has informed that he will be visiting the school to field more questions on Nov. 16, many parents remain irate at the CPS response to date. More...
By Ramsin Canon / 2 Comments
It's not surprising that some of Mayor Emanuel's sympathizers and supporters are confusing people's substantive disputes with the mayor as the effect of poor marketing on his part. It's exactly this insular worldview that has gotten the mayor in hot... More...
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