Public money, public accountability — and in this city, a whole lot of people fighting over both. This is The Chicago Daily Fix. Today: City Council cutting deals for the United Center district, Pritzker and Johnson throwing elbows over local funding, and the Midway Blitz special prosecutor still in limbo. And somewhere in there, the CTA is actually adding rush-hour service — which, I know, sounds fake, but we’ll get into it. It keeps coming back to the same question: who has the money, and who has to answer when it goes sideways. From Mariah Woelfel at Chicago Sun-Times:
Chicago taxpayers should help bankroll development of a“cultural and entertainment district” around the West Side’s United Center, a key city panel said Monday. The City Council’s Committee on Economic, Capital and Technology Development voted unanimously to provide $54.7 million in tax breaks for the first phase of the massive development planned by the owners of the Bulls and the Blackhawks.
Sun-Times and WBEZ’s Mariah Woelfel has this one — a City Council committee just approved nearly fifty-five million in tax rebates for the first phase of the 1901 Project, that seven-billion-dollar entertainment district the Bulls and Blackhawks owners want around the United Center. Seven billion-dollar project, surface parking lots becoming an actual neighborhood — I want to be excited, I do. But "transformative for the West Side" is what every alderman says right before the West Side sees none of the jobs. Unanimous out of committee, which in Chicago usually means either this is genuinely good policy or everybody got something they wanted. Still has to go to the full Council, so let’s see if that unanimity survives the cameras. Andrew Field, writing in RiverBender.com:
The Illinois Housing Development Authority (IHDA) is now accepting applications from units of local government for grant funding dedicated to supporting local affordable housing needs and community revitalization efforts across Illinois. Offered through IHDA’s Strong Communities Program (SCP), this initiative provides financial assistance to allow local governments to address vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated residential properties within their communities.
IHDA’s Strong Communities Program is open for applications — state grant money meant to get vacant and abandoned residential properties back into use. Local governments apply, then they go to work on the blight. Finally, some money pointed at the actual problem. If you want to fix a block on the South or West Side, you start with the abandoned house that’s been sitting there for a decade drawing crime and dragging down property values. Pritzker put his name on it, sure — but the work lands with the aldermen and county officials who actually file the applications. The state is handing out a tool. Whether Chicago wards use it hard or let it sit is the real question. Here's City Life Org:
Service improvements on the 2, 3, 4 and 5 lines during weekday morning and evening rush hours will go into effect on May 18. These schedule adjustments, presented to the MTA Board in January, add more trips during high ridership hours that previously had less service.
Heads up — this one is actually a New York MTA story. The 2, 3, 4, and 5 lines are not Chicago lines, so file this under "interesting if you live in Brooklyn." Honestly, kind of painful to read about New York adding rush-hour trips and improving reliability for 1.2 million riders while we’re still waiting on CTA to just run trains on schedule. Credit where it’s due, though — using actual ridership data to adjust schedules is the move. CTA has that data too. The question is whether they use it or just announce a task force about using it. From Sean Reed at Advantage News:
As mayor of the largest city in the state, Johnson said the decrease in funding proposed by Pritzker for the coming year would slash an additional $12 million in funding to the city of Chicago, and a combined $60 million statewide. “These cuts inhibit our ability to increase accessibility on our public transit systems, make the investments we need to build safe communities, and build the affordable housing that we need,” Johnson said.
Brandon Johnson took the Springfield trip Wednesday — up on the Capitol steps with mayors from across Illinois, pushing back on Pritzker cutting the Local Government Distributive Fund even further below its original 10% floor. Chicago’s looking at twelve million dollars gone; sixty million statewide. Twelve million dollars — that’s transit accessibility, that’s community investment, that’s the exact stuff that actually changes what a block looks like. And it’s coming out of cities that are already getting shorted on a fund that was never fully funded to begin with. The LGDF was supposed to be 10% of state income tax revenue. It’s sitting at 6.47%. That’s not a rounding error — that’s decades of the state quietly picking municipal pockets. And credit to Advantage News and The Center Square for keeping the receipts on this one. And here’s what gets me — Johnson had to go to Springfield and stand on the steps with suburban mayors just to get the governor’s attention on money that was already supposed to be theirs. That’s where we are. Evanston Now, with Hannah Meisel:
A Cook County judge on Monday pushed off her scheduled ruling on whether to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate alleged abuses by federal immigration agents during last fall’s “Operation Midway Blitz.” Judge Erica Reddick will now announce her ruling on May 21, giving lawyers behind a petition to appoint an independent prosecutor time to supplement the legal record with a major new report from a state panel that memorialized accounts of agents’ behavior toward immigrants and citizens alike.
The Midway Blitz special prosecutor ruling got pushed to May 21st — Judge Reddick wants lawyers to get that new state panel report into the record first. Credit where it’s due, Capitol News Illinois had the courthouse detail. So the question on the table is whether Cook County can actually go after federal immigration agents for perjury and conspiracy. That’s not abstract — that’s about whether anybody answers for what happened to people in this city. And Reddick is also pressing Burke’s office on whether they’ve got the legal runway to even pursue nonviolent charges against federal agents. That’s the real friction point — jurisdiction, not just politics. We’ve put links to all the stories from today’s episode in the show notes, so if something caught your ear, you can dig in there.
That’s The Chicago Daily Fix for this Tuesday, May 12th. This is a Lantern Podcast.