I had the pleasure yesterday, in between e-mail and a client meeting, to take in the 7th Annual lunchtime media briefing by Chicago Metropolis 2020. CM2020 is a non-profit organization originally established by the Commercial Club of Chicago "to promote long-term planning, better regional cooperation, and smart investments in the Chicago region and its people." The briefing, attended by a number of notables on the Chicago journalism scene, promised presentations on criminal justice reform; campaign finance limits; housing policy, early childhood education, and the Burnham Plan Centennial.
Adele Simmons, VP of the Burnham Plan Centennial, combined a general welcome with an overview of the mission of the Centennial, which is to carry on the legacy of legendary planner Daniel Burnham by focusing on innovative regional solutions for the Chicago metro area, saying, "The choices we make today will shape the future." While that statement might seem tautological at first, the emphasis was on bringing to the forefront of our decisionmaking the long-range, rather than short-term drivers.
The following is a repost from Mike Fourcher's blog, Vouchification.
The increasingly desperate straits of Chicago's news outlets is already having an impact on what - and how much - news gets covered. More cuts are coming. In the next year we should expect a significant decrease in community and political news coverage in the Chicago area. Small start-up are trying to fill the gaps, but they lack resources and readership to make up the difference.
Last week I reviewed the financial states of Creative Loafing, Inc. and the Sun Times Media Group. Although CLI is suffering, friends from the Chicago Reader assure me their paper remains profitable - despite CLI's debt. But STMG regulatory and bankruptcy filings seem to show that the Chicago Sun Times is the major money loser among STMG properties. It seems possible - even likely - that the Sun Times may not exist in 2010.
Earlier this year the Chicago Tribune's parent company, the Tribune Company, went into bankruptcy, burdened by $12 billion in debt created by Sam Zell's leveraged buyout of the company. Although recent news suggests Zell will be muscled out and the company will become the property of creditors - especially Deutche Bank - it seems likely that the new owners will be looking for ways to increase cash, reduce expenses, prepare the company for sale, or dismember it into parts for individual sales.
Ahh, mid-summer. It's a good time to think about finally scheduling that relaxing day at the beach along Lake Michigan. But take a closer look at the water you're about to take a swim in -- the Natural Resources Defense Council has some unpleasant news about what's lurking underneath.
According to the Council's annual survey of water quality, "pollution caused the number of beach closings and advisories to hit their fourth-highest level in the 19-year history of the report." The report notes that old and "poorly designed" sewage and stormwater systems are two main factors causing beachwater pollution. How did Illinois fare?
An Illinois state law could prevent a Skokie man from calling himself an engineer despite an engineering background of 50 years, 123 patents, and work on cameras that accompanied astronauts to the moon.
On July 8th, Judge Mary K. Rochford of Cook County Circuit Court heard oral arguments brought by attorneys for Burton Siegal in an emergency hearing that could make or break legal precedent on free speech rights reaching far beyond the engineering field.
At stake: Government regulation of the use of words.
Most people would shudder at the very idea of laws governing speech, but in reality, it happens all the time...and we're fine with it. Consider the fines levied against CBS when Janet Jackson experienced her infamous wardrobe malfunction during the 2005 Superbowl, or those pesky bleeps you hear every time Cartman on South Park utters words you know anyway.
The accepted basis for this approved form of censorship is for the protection of people, whether pure of heart (children), or weak of heart (the elderly). But politicians also claim they should regulate words for the general welfare. We wouldn't want just anyone calling himself a doctor, teacher or engineer, right?
Tune in to Ray Hanania's morning talk show--WJJG 1530 AM, Radio Chicagoland--to hear me and Progress Illinois' Josh Kalven talk about local and state politics of the preceding week tomorrow at 8 a.m. We'll be on until 8:30 or 8:45, as part of a weekly feature. Josh has a pretty soothing voice and Ray is a comic, so there will be plenty to counter act my very limited wit and nasally, accent-y voice (also I have a nasty cold, so there's that).
Any issues you'd like us to talk about? Email me (email is below on the side bar) or comment here.
Five local transit and planning advocates held a media briefing via conference call on June 25 to elevate the attention level of House Transportation Committee chairman James Oberstar (D.-MN)'s $500 billion surface transportation stimulus/funding bill, as well as to call for improvements in the bill. The consensus of the panel was that the bill provides much needed funding but still lacks some key elements, most prominently performance measures and a heavier mass transit emphasis, to effect meaningful change in national transportation policy.
Oberstar and Rep. John Mica (R.-FL) released the full draft text of the 775-page Surface Transportation Authorization Act of 2009 ("STAA") on Monday, June 22. A shorter 17-page summary was made available the week before. Fuller account below.
TV typically only carries a few seconds of action from an event. One or two pictures in print media are all that we can usually expect. This is not a rap on those media, just acknowledgment of their limits, especially in an economy this stressed.
Since I was downtown at the Responsible Budget rally last week, I thought I'd post this short (3-min.) clip, which gives more of the real size and flavor. It was the biggest rally I've ever seen for a tax increase. No doubt there are still places to cut the budget, but that doesn't negate the reality of needing to do something responsible to prevent the hurt that will occur if the draconian cuts threatened take place.
The video includes the remarks by Bill McNary of Citizen Action as well as those of working mother Gloria Gonzalez. You may have better luck viewing without interruption if you go directly to YouTube.
I'm
sure many of us have experience some type of frustration now that
Chicago has employed the use of red-light cameras to catch people in
the act!
This was the story of a woman who was nowhere near the location
a camera caught her at. She got a ticket in the mail and she decided to
contest this. She had to cough up some money to even protest this red
light ticket and had to appear at the Daley Center three times before a
license plate was produced.
That license plate was key to getting her case dismissed. Why?
After all the dust had cleared and the expenses were paid by this
tenacious senior citizen, including time, parking fees, tolls as well
as anguish and distress, the case was dismissed.
It was dismissed
simply because, after investigation by this lady, it was discovered
that two vehicles registered in the state of Illinois can have the same
identical plate number. The only difference is that one is a vanity
plate.
A case of mistaken identity! Especially since this woman drives a
Buick and the car that was caught on camera was a Chrysler van.
Some major transportation and planning projects that affect your daily commute may be in jeopardy if the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning cannot secure more state dollars.
The planning organization -- which studies land use and transportation planning for the seven counties of northeastern Illinois -- is asking on its Web site that concerned residents write to state legislators, expressing their concern that Governor Quinn's proposed Fiscal Year 2010 budget does not include the Comprehensive Regional Planning Fund (CRPF).
In past years, CMAP received about $3.5 million, or 70 percent, of the $5 million statewide CRPF fund annually, according to Tom Garritano, CMAP's communications director. Garritano says this money is crucial to current and future CMAP projects.
"The money is really important, even though it doesn't make up the majority of our annual budget," he says. "It is needed to match the federal transportation dollars that come to the region, and it pays for a lot of the non-transportation planning that CMAP does."
So how is it that this relatively small portion of money affects CMAP so significantly?
Given typical political schedules, I doubt many opinion leaders have spent as much time as you and I have standing on windy, freezing, sometimes-scary platforms, held hostage in tunnels or "slow zones," or stranded in the Twilight Zone of a bus stop for 40 minutes on a route that's supposed to provide service every 15. I wonder how many legislators have picked up a copy of Metra's February newsletter, On the Bi-Level, which spells out how their lack of capital funding for the last 5 years now imperils the very rails on which we ride.
State senator Martin Sandoval, acknowledging what has become clear, that last year's so-called save of mass transit was only a band-aid that avoided yet one more "doomsday" scenario, and after first criticizing the recent "mini-capital" bill as allotting insufficient monies for transit, has called for a three-part solution to address transit funding on a permanent, not stopgap, basis:
The Chicago Community Trust has released some disturbing numbers today, indicating homelessness continues to rise in the city. And across the board, all of the indicators of economic collapse are on the rise over 2007 -- homes dependent on food stamps, the explosion in foreclosures, unemployment, everything.
gulp.
The work of the Trust in distributing these "vital signs" of our city's economic health are critical to understanding what "hard times" means in real terms. In 2008, nearly 40,000 more households -- somewhere over 100,000 people -- came to be dependent on food assistance to make sure they had enough to eat. The type of social and political instability that kind of economic insecurity causes is hard to comprehend unless you've lived in the middle of it. To have tens or hundreds of thousands of people plunged into economic insecurity creates the atmosphere of desperation that, often, only radical change can address.
Jump the jump for the January reports from the Chicago Community Trust.
While the Roland Burris docudrama was playing out, Metropolitan Water Reclamation District Commissioner Patricia Young quietly announced her resignation. Young will be stepping aside to take a full-time public affairs job with the MWRD that pays nearly twice as much. The kicker: under the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District Act, the vacancy is filled by...appointment of the governor "until the next regular election."
No accusations have been made that Blagojevich tried to sell this seat, a $50K job that most treat as part-time, but no doubt there are many who would oppose his filling the vacancy. Will he? Should he, now that he's been formally impeached? Unlike the U.S. Senate, where a political argument could be made that Barack Obama may well need that Illinois vote, no compelling urgency to fill the vacancy jumps out. But unlike the U.S. Senate scenario, there doesn't seem to be any requirement that Jesse White put his thumbprint on an appointment -- so it would seem to be at his complete discretion.
The District's storied history as a place rife with murky dealings that the public rarely even hears of would seem to set this up as perhaps one last big opportunity for some pay-to-play type chicanery. Hard to imagine that any of the more nefarious influences on county politics want Pat Quinn having the choice.
The MWRD is an agency desperately in need of some new blood. Out of the sunshine, it doles out enormous sums on contracts and bond issues incomprehensible to the average voter, all the while pouring tax dollars into a Deep Tunnel project destined to go on seemingly forever but with no apparent progress in stemming city and suburban flooding, or releases of sewage into Lake Michigan.
Regardless of who makes the pick, some supporters of Mariyana Spyropoulos are urging she get the nod. This last March, she just missed nomination for the MWRD, coming in fourth in a field that gives the Democratic advantage to three. Spyropoulos had the endorsement of both the Trib and the Sun-Times, as well as environmental groups such as the Sierra Club.
I doubt we'll see any clamor for a special election for this spot, so we could do worse than slotting in someone who already demonstrated some voter support as well as the approval of third-party reviewers.
