Taxes Thu Dec 29 2011
Part of the recently passed "Tax Break Bill," or SB 397, includes the Live Theater Production Tax Credit Act. This act will give any for-profit production that does a long run or a pre-Broadway run in Illinois up to $2 million in tax credits for one fiscal year.
The only other state that has a similar tax credit for theatrical productions is Louisiana, although New York City also has a tax exemptions for theatrical productions.
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— Monica Reida
Event Sun Dec 25 2011
Join the Society of Midland Authors for a discussion of Twenty-First Century Chicago, an anthology of speeches, editorials, memoirs, biographies and articles investigating Chicago's "social, economic, political and governmental conditions."
Leading the talk will be the book's editors, Dick Simpson (former alderman and head of the political science department at University of Illinois at Chicago) and Constance A. Mixon (an associate professor of political science and director of the urban studies program at Elmhurst College), as well as contributor Don Rose (independent political consultant).
Details:
Tuesday, January 10, social hour with complimentary snacks and cash bar (6pm) and event (7pm)
Cliff Dwellers Club (200 S. Michigan Ave.), 22nd floor
— Megan E. Doherty
One of the competitors in the Apps For Metro Chicago Grand Challenge promises to help Chicago become greener while users save money. Taxi Share Chicago has that goal in mind.
The idea for the app came from Chicago attorney Dan Fedor after meeting his wife while sharing a cab. Fedor thought that an app allowing people to share a taxi would not only help save money but also reduce carbon emissions and congestion.
Cyberwalkabout.com CEO Uki Lucas designed the app.
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— Monica Reida
Taxes Wed Dec 21 2011
This week Governor Quinn signed into law special tax incentives for the insanely profitable Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the poorly run Sears. The Associated Press offers a sort-of warning: that scores of companies have tax "packages" that are to expire over the next few years. If you are a shareholder in any of those companies, would you expect anything less than threats to relocate from your CEO? And if you're a government affairs person representing a business in Springfield, what would your attitude be towards a legislator who voted for this tax package but won't put forward one for you?
I never bought for a minute that CME and Sears were actually going to leave. Nor do I suspect that Mayor Emanuel, who helped engineer the cuts for CME, or most of the legislators who voted for the cuts, actually bought the threats either. But the threat to leave is a formality that gives cover to politicians who want to hand their political supporters a nice plum but want to obscure the quid pro quo. Seeing now that the tactic works, we should fully expect a tidal wave of employers demanding incentives to stay in the state.
You know, if we cut our tax rates to 0%, we'll get all the businesses. All the businesses!
The good news, as far as it goes, is that CME at least is in a pretty unique sectors and dominates its market in the state, so there is a superficially rational argument for why they should receive breaks but nobody else should. But as the Daily Herald reports, Community Unit School District 300 is going to be feeling some hurt for a generation thanks to the cut for Sears. If legislators are willing to make trades like that, it isn't clear where or why they'll draw a line.
— Ramsin Canon /
This week, Chicago Parking Meters, LLC, the shell consortium that owns our once-public parking meters, has sent the city two bills: one to compensate it for parking by the disabled, and one to compensate it for street closures. Despite some lap yapping from the Mayor, the city has little choice but to pay these bills, either in full or mostly-in-full.
The parking meters are bemoaned as an anomalous poor choice by Mayor My Predecessor, and Mayor Emanuel has regularly shifted between jokey anger and sighing resignation as to it. The truth is though that Mayor Emanuel will have his own Parking Meters deal--probably several--before his Mayoralty ends, and that his power to govern the city--to actually govern city, not just move numbers around between departments to create superficial savings and issue press releases--is not a function of his ability to "lead" but a function of his ability to creatively supplicate.
How does Chicago's government operate? The way it actually operates is fundamentally different from the way it apparently operates. The "apparent" part: it writes laws and enforces them evenly. The way it actually operates: it makes up for a deficiency to act on its own by seeking out powerful investment institutions to partner with, offering up its coercive authority in exchange for badly needed capital. Those agreements are the regime we actually live under, not the laws on the books.
The fundamental shift towards neoliberalization of the economy and government at federal and state levels has changed how Mayors and Councils "govern" cities if they really govern them, in the classical civics-class sense, at all. Of course Emanuel, as one of the political architects of one of neoliberalization's most important structural supports, NAFTA, is not a victim of neoliberalization but an important figure in its rise. That fact is one of the reasons national elites rushed to fund his campaigns for Congress and the Fifth Floor.
In the Neoliberal City, laws, regulations, and rules are less important than relationships between political leaders and wealth, or capital. Mayor Emanuel explicitly ran for office touting his ability to "leverage" his relationships with wealthy elites. He even comically justified his immense fundraising from out-of-state and global financial elites by pointing out that because the rich like him, he'll be able to beg goodies out of them for the public.
The regime that runs the city is not about legislation and enforcement, it is about bilateral agreements, where government promises to use its power for the benefit of investment, or capital, to the greatest extent possible. Carving exceptions to law is as important, if not more important, than legislating itself.
The most stark example of this is the "Memorandum of Understanding" between the City and the University of Chicago, an agreement that could usher in major changes to the Hyde Park/Kenwood area, that was agreed upon in bilateral negotiations between the Mayor and the President of the University. The Mayor told the press he was moved to go into these high-level negotiations with the University after the President told him that in China, such building projects only took six months, whereas the bureaucracy here would lengthen it to years.
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— Ramsin Canon
By John Greenfield
As part of an ongoing project to interview all 50 of Chicago's aldermen about sustainable transportation issues in their districts (previously: 27th Ward Ald. Walter Burnett Jr.), I recently caught up with Scott Waguespack at the 32nd Ward service office, 2657 N. Clybourn. His ward includes parts of Ukrainian Village, Wicker Park, Bucktown, Goose Island, Lincoln Park, Lakeview and Roscoe Village.
In 2007 Waguespack defeated Richard M. Daley-backed incumbent Ted Matlak and soon gained a reputation as an independent voice in City Council. Most famously, he was the leading critic of Daley's push to privatize the city's parking meters, a move that the former mayor would eventually admit, "we totally screwed up."
Waguespack is also known as one of the city's most bike- and transit-friendly aldermen. We talked about his commuting habits; his efforts to promote biking and transit use in the ward; plans for developing the Bloomingdale Trail; and his far-fetched idea of connecting his district to the Loop via water taxi.
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— Mechanics
On Monday Chicago Public School (CPS) officials announced that 12 new charter schools are proposed for the next two years. This would add more schools to the already established Noble Street, United Neighborhood Organization (UNO) and LEARN Charter Networks while establishing Catalyst and Christopher House charter schools.
In a press release, CPS CEO Jean-Claude Brizard is quoted as saying that expanding the charter school options would increase "higher quality school options" for students.
This would be a nice proposition if 25 of the 83 charter schools in Chicago didn't have less than 50 percent of students meeting or exceeding state standards. It's curious why something touted as being a way to provide outstanding education to students doesn't have more performing at outstanding levels.
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— Monica Reida
When Mayor Daley took full control of the schools in 1995, transforming the once semi-independent Board of Education into something more like a Department of Education under his direction, it "streamlined" the process for closing or altering schools. When he accelerated his privatization program with the Renaissance 2010 program, this meant that traumatic school closures, phaseouts, and "co-locations" were introduced into neighborhoods with little meaningful input from the community, and often with almost no notice.
The situation became intolerable enough to parents that members of the city's delegation to Springfield were actually motivated to act in opposition to the Mayor's wishes, which I don't need to tell you is not a particularly frequent occurrence. Like seeing a black swan, or an ice age.
In any case, the result was Senate Bill 620, sponsored by Iris Martinez in the Senate and Cynthia Soto in the House. The bill started out as a strong framework for ensuring community input on the Board of Education's school closure policy, went through the usual waterings-down, and ended up as something between strong and perfunctory. Better writers would think of a synonym for "moderate," but frankly I trust you guys to come up with your own synonyms. I'm empowering that way.
Speaking of empowering, the statute as finally enacted requires CPS to involve communities by mandating the schools CEO issue a notice of all impending "school actions," including closures, turnarounds, phase-outs and co-locations, and hold community meetings for public input. The statute provides in relevant portion,
Sec. 34-230. School action public meetings and hearings.
(a) By November 1 of each year, the chief executive officer shall prepare and publish guidelines for school actions. The guidelines shall outline the academic and non-academic criteria for a school action. These guidelines, and each subsequent revision, shall be subject to a public comment period of at least 21 days before their approval.
(b) The chief executive officer shall announce all proposed school actions to be taken at the close of the current academic year consistent with the guidelines, by December 1 of each year.
The bill goes on to require that the Board can make no decision on a school closure in less than sixty days from publication of notice that a school is being targeted, with a public hearing on the matter to be held no less than thirty days after the initial announcement. The initial notices also by law have to include the reasons the school is being "school action-d". Thus, this list from CPS, with attendant fact sheets. The Board has also hired consulting firms with expertise in "conflict resolution" to handle the public hearing process. CPS must hold at least three public meeting regarding the school action for each school, two of which must take place "in the community" where the school is situated.
This means a lot of opportunity for opponents of school actions to make themselves heard, but per the bill no official power to stop or alter the character of the actions. And as the Board is wholly appointed and unelected, there is little other recourse for residents opposed to the CEO's plan of action or the Board's decisions. This makes a little more clear why complete Mayoral control of school systems is often considered a first step to privatization overhauls, despite little evidence of its utility: it severs accountability at a critical point and concentrates decision-making at a higher and more remote tier of power.
— Ramsin Canon
Feature Tue Dec 13 2011
By Michael Moreci
Earlier this year, Tio Hardiman saved the life of a young man who was about to be murdered by an elder member of his own gang. There was a miscommunication when the young man abruptly disappeared to care for his ailing mother; at the same time, his gang was raided by the police, leaving the gang to suspect they'd been sold out. Hardiman got word of the execution that was about to take place and literally talked the elder gang member down — but not after having his own life threatened.
"He told me he was going to put me to sleep," Hardiman said.
For some, this intervention would be heroic act of courage; for Hardiman, it's another day at the office.
Hardiman is an "interrupter" for — and director of — CeaseFire, a non-violence organization based out of the University of Illinois at Chicago campus. The role of an interrupter is exactly what it sounds like — Hardiman, and others like him, work to prevent retaliatory violence.
"People can change, that's what we believe," Hardiman said. "We're in the business of changing behavior and mindsets associated with violence."
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— Mechanics /
The United Neighborhood Organization wants to build a new charter elementary school in the 36th Ward's Galewood neighborhood. Alderman Nicholas Sposato might have something to say about that.
Tomorrow morning, concerned parents and students plan to attend a Zoning Committee meeting to object to Sposato's, well, objections. The school, which would occupy a now vacant lot at 2102 N. Natchez Avenue, would enroll 576 students — and, touts the UNO, create hundreds of much-needed jobs as well as improve education opportunities for students.
The UNO has a friend in the Chicago Tribune, which published an editorial in favor of the new charter, which Sposato may be opposing due to pressure from the Chicago Teachers Union.
WHERE: Zoning Committee Meeting at Chicago City Hall, City Council Chambers (121 N. LaSalle Street)
WHEN: Tuesday, December 13, 10am
CONTACT: Ray Quintanilla, UNO Communications Director. 312-505-7862
— Megan E. Doherty /
A familiar trope in the wake of a high-profile institutional failure, whether private or public, is the suggestion or outright assertion that the disaster was the fault of a lone gunman, a "bad apple" whose actions shouldn't be allowed to spoil how we view the rest of the bunch. Messrs. Cheney and Wolfwitz rolled out this cliché when the horrors of Abu Ghraib surfaced. We were told that Enron was, similarly, an outlier of financial fraud, rather than emblematic of how regulatory schemes (or the lack thereof) are too often purchased in what Greg Palast has called "the best democracy money can buy." In the wake of a major environmental disaster the prompts for the "bad apple" defense are sometimes audible. And, of course, when an official misbehaves, others in the arena are always ready with the singular-fruit metaphor.
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— Jeff Smith
Today former Gov. Rod Blagojevich was sentenced to 14 years in prison for corruption that was first discovered three years ago when Blagojevich conspired to sell the senate seat of President Obama. The sentencing was livetweeted and here's some of the coverage and observations made during the process.
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— Monica Reida
Event Mon Dec 05 2011
On Wednesday, Dec. 7 a public policy forum will be held to discuss how to deal with dropouts. The forum is entitled "Re-Enrolling Out of School Youth: A State, County and City Blueprint," and will be held at the Union League Club from 9am until 12:30pm.
The forum will feature Cook County Board of Commissioners President Toni Preckwinkle, Chicago Public Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard and Illinois State Board of Education Chairman Gery Chico.
At the forum a new study entitled "High School Dropouts in Chicago and Illinois: The Growing Labor Market, Income, Civic, Social and Fiscal Costs of Dropping Out of High School," authored by Dr. Andrew Sum of Northeastern University, will be released. Sum will also be one of the participants at the forum.
There is currently no more space for people to attend the forum.
— Monica Reida
Jeanne Gang is most commonly associated with the landmark 82-story Aqua building on Chicago's "New East Side." The undulating tower mirrors the river it shadows over and reflects the lake into which its views spill. Water has become a preoccupation for the MacArthur Genius; her designs not only reflect water as a form, but speak to water systems on the whole as meshing with the built environment. Nowhere is there more on display than in Gang's new book Reverse Effect, an innovative design plan that seeks to restore the natural Mississippi River and Great Lakes' watersheds, implement permeable green infrastructure, and reclaim vast swaths of underutilized land along the Chicago River for redevelopment.
Gang's plans for the Chicago River's remediation were revealed in a late November talk at the Harold Washington Library with Steve Edwards of WBEZ and Henry Henderson of the Natural Resources Defense Council. As illustrated in the book's title, Reverse Effect proposes the incorporation of green infrastructure as a way to mitigate the concern of invasive species threatening the entire water system from the Great Lakes down through the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico by restoring the natural watersheds of the Great Lakes Basin and the Mississippi River. Specifically, Gang proposes erecting a barrier near Bubbly Creek, the still-simmering toxic repository of the Chicago River on the border of the Pilsen and Bridgeport neighborhoods. With the barrier in place that separates the watersheds back to their natural state, and the introduction of adjacent green space to act as wetlands around Bubbly Creek, Gang's designs would work to recharge the lake, and provide an opportunity to reclaim the surrounding fallow, industrial land for redevelopment. As Gang stated, "this water problem is an urban problem. Our solution is to make the urban solution a water solution."
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— Ben Schulman
Chicago Sun Dec 04 2011
At 7p.m. tonight, Occupy Chicago will hold its first overnight occupation on the South Side following a general assembly on property owned by New Beginnings Church. The church is hosting the event in conjunction with its own occupation of the derelict Super Motel at 6625 S. Martin Luther King Blvd, which is across the street from its main sanctuary. Its pastor, Corey B. Brooks, has been camping on the roof of the motel for a dozen days and fasting on water alone. He plans on camping on the site until the church raises $450,000 to raze the former motel and build a community center with mixed-use, mixed-income development on site.
Pastor Brooks said that he was "excited" when contacted by Occupy Chicago. "I think that anybody who -- especially when they're not from this area -- wants to come lend support, we've got to be open to that." Ultimately, the pastor hopes that he can play a role mediating between the group and Mayor Emanuel. "I want to have good relations with everybody. We are the church. We're not supposed to be at war with anybody ... We bring about peace."
Follow developments in the motel case on the Project H.O.O.D. website and through Pastor Brooks' Twitter account, CoreyBBrooks. Occupy Chicago is online at http://occupychi.org.
Additional photographs follow.
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— David Schalliol /
By Rev. C.J. Hawking
I am one of 300 Chicagoans going to Washington for a three-day convergence of thousands of people from across the country called "Take Back the Capitol." We will bring the power of the people to bear on Capitol Hill to say that the time has come for Congress to start representing the 99 percent of Americans -- We the People -- not just the richest 1 percent in the country.
The U.S. House of Representatives, after all, is supposed to be The People's House. But millions of people are out of work, wages are in steep decline, and income inequality is at its worst since the 1920s. And what is Congress doing in the face of this suffering? Failing to pass a jobs bill that would put people back to work. Meanwhile, Wall Street and K Street exert more influence over our elected representatives than ever.
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— Mechanics
At a time of great unrest and pissed-off parents with proposed CPS closures, phase-outs and turnarounds (or, as CPS phrases it, giving students "access to higher quality school options"), there's a bit of positive news: The Oppenheimer Family Foundation recently awarded more than $140,000 in grants to 256 primary and secondary Chicago Public Schools teachers. These grants are awarded to fund "innovative, experienced-based learning projects" and are estimated to impact 20,000 CPS students.
On December 1, at the 36th annual Teacher Incentive Grant awards program, the following schools, representing 116 interdisciplinary programs, were awarded grants of up to $2,000 each: 2012 awards list.
— Megan E. Doherty /
Since we're past the deadline for the City Council to agree on a new ward map, this is as good a time as any to start talking about it here.
For the record, I live in one area that will be affected by the remap process. I've been to meetings regarding the ward remap. This includes neighborhood meetings as well as public hearings about the remap.
If you've followed the stories about this we already know what the deal is. Basically the blacks of Chicago who have lost 180,000+ and the Latinos have gained 25,000+ people. Of course the Asians don't have enough numbers to justify giving that ethnic group their own ward. Also I read that even the city's Polish community want their own ward.
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— Levois /
What do people want when they demand transparency in government?
The Sunlight Foundation, a transparency watchdog group, provides this background:
Public oversight, civic participation and electoral engagement--the stuff of democratic accountability--all depend on a transparent, open government.
Indeed, transparency and openness are the very foundations for public trust; without the former the latter cannot survive. The Internet is making increased transparency cheaper, more effective, and in more demand every day as Americans come to expect instantaneous and constant access to all kinds of information.
But what kinds of information? The Sunlight Foundation focuses on "influence data," information on money flowing into politics, lobbyist information, and oversight and corruption data. They also advocate for "public means on-line," meaning that to be truly public, data and information needs to be put on-line in easily searchable and manipulable formats.
Consider Mayor Emanuel's transparency initiative. While I've poked fun at the flood of spreadsheets we've gotten, there's no doubt that the administration has done a phenomenal job of putting information--including "influence data"--on-line in extraordinarily user-friendly ways. The City's data portal allows you to look through lobbyist disclosures, spending, and registration information, with an impressive depth and breadth of information. Everything from food inspections to 311 requests are eminently searchable, allowing citizens, journalists, and researchers to track what the government knows, when it knows it, and how it is reacting to it.
But this week, the Chicago Tribune expressed some ire with the administration for refusing to release e-mails and memoranda that could shed light on the decision making that went into crafting the Mayor's water fee hikes and speeding cameras policies:
After Emanuel this fall proposed a series of fee increases to help balance his budget, the Tribune filed requests for any internal City Hall documents to show how Emanuel came up with his plans to charge homeowners and drivers more, including emails, memos and any relevant contacts with outside companies or interests.
This on the heels of an earlier report that the Mayor was "shrouding his office in secrecy":
[E]fforts to peer into the daily operations of the mayor himself -- a man with enormous say over hundreds of millions of dollars in city contracts, hiring and regulations -- are met by a stone wall.
The mayor refused Tribune requests for his emails, government cellphone bills and his interoffice communications with top aides, arguing it would be too much work to cross out information the government is allowed to keep private. After lengthy negotiations to narrow its request for two months of these records, the newspaper was told that almost all of the emails had been deleted.
Illinois' freedom of information (FOI) law explicitly exempts "deliberative materials" from its requirements as to what must be made public upon request:
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— Ramsin Canon
A little friction met the Emanuel administration's to-date smoothly-rolling program of partially privatizing the school system this week. First, a report in the Tribune indicated that charter schools, which are privately run schools operated on tax money, do not perform any better than public schools on average and in many cases are considerably worse. Particularly troubling for privatization advocates--who are found in both political parties and in a wide swath of the political spectrum--was the suggestion that it is in fact poverty that drags down those charters performing worse. This fact is often brought up by privatization opponents and downplayed by its champions as mere excuse making. From the Tribune report:
More than two dozen schools in some of the city's most prominent and largest charter networks, including the United Neighborhood Organization (UNO), Chicago International Charter Schools, University of Chicago and LEARN, scored well short of district averages on key standardized tests.
In two of the city's oldest charter networks, Perspectives and Aspira, only one school -- Perspectives' IIT Math & Science Academy -- surpassed CPS' average on the Illinois Standards Achievement Test, taken by elementary schoolers, or the Prairie State Achievement Examination, used in high schools.
Next, Emanuel's choice to spearhead his school-turnaround effort brought the word "cronyism" into coverage of his administration, always a quick way to convince Chicagoans the new boss is the same as the old boss. This week the Emanuel administration announced a turbocharged CompStat program for the public schools and the expansion of the privately run Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL) program, handing them six more schools to turn around. AUSL has a mixed to poor record with school turnarounds, and is connected to the Mayor through a number of campaign and policy staffers and his choice to head the Board of Education, David Vitale, raising questions of the propriety of the choice. Interestingly given the mantra of privatization advocates that public school supporters use poverty as an excuse, AUSL head Martin Koldyke defended their record by blaming kids for being slow to catch on.
Emanuel was reportedly testy when asked if there was a conflict of interest in his choice of AUSL given his political connections to them. Asked directly if there was a conflict of interest, the Mayor answered a wholly different question:
It is not a conflict to give kids a good education. It's the responsibility I have as mayor.
Whether there was a conflict or not, this controversy, if it is that, lays bare one of the problems inherent to privatization of public trusts, namely, the ease with which, at worst, actual conflicts arise, and at best, the appearance of conflicts arise. Mayor Emanuel's political connections to AUSL leadership are undeniable; whether they motivated in whole or in part his decision to hand them more business isn't as germane as the ease with which he is able to hand them business, the lack of meaningful checks to that ability, and the absence of transparency in the decision. It is worth nothing that another major charter operator, United Neighborhoods Organization-Charter School Network (UNO-CSN), is headed by a co-chair of Emanuel's Mayoral election campaign, Juan Rangel. From the outside looking in, the lesson is obvious: if you want to build a successful school operator, at the very least it helps to have strong political connections.
Now that the privatization train has started rolling, it will be more and more difficult to stop, and the Mayor's ideological dedication to the principles underlying certainly grease those tracks. It is unfortunate that the years-old warnings that charters were unproven went unheeded. We now are looking at a class of powerful and connected rent-seekers with intense financial and professional incentives to preserve the system. If it bears out that charter schools offer not meaningful advantage over public schools, we have solved no problems while likely creating a whole new class of them.
— Ramsin Canon /
