Video: Alds. Jason Ervin (28th Ward), Gilbert Villegas (36th Ward), Stephanie Coleman (16th Ward) and Scott Waguespack (32nd Ward) discuss the latest on the map-making process. (Produced by Alexandra Silets)

Negotiations over a new ward map that will shape Chicago politics for the next decade remained deadlocked Tuesday, with no sign of a possible compromise less than a day before the deadline set by state law.

During an interview on “Chicago Tonight” Tuesday, neither Black Caucus Chair Ald. Jason Ervin (28th Ward) nor Latino Caucus Chair Ald. Gilbert Villegas (36th Ward) gave any ground in the battle for political power in Chicago.

Ervin said the Black Caucus will not accept a map with fewer than 17 wards with a majority of Black voters.

“We believe that is the proper number for our community,” Ervin said.

At the same time, the Latino Caucus has demanded a map with no fewer than 15 wards with a majority of Latino voters.

“Our community is being locked out,” Villegas said.

Both groups have endorsed calls from Asian American groups in Chicago to craft a ward centered around Chinatown that has a majority of Asian American voters — but neither group wants that ward to reduce their share of political power.

Ervin urged Villegas to accept a map with 14 wards with a majority of Latino voters — one more than the current map — and said his members would accept a map with one fewer ward with majority of Black voters than the current map.

Villegas said that proposal was a nonstarter, saying it would violate the Voting Rights Act.

If 41 alderpeople do not agree on a map before midnight, the final decision could be made by voters for the first time in 30 years via a referendum.

“The 41 votes are not there,” Villegas said.

More negotiations “would have to happen real quickly” before the Latino Caucus files an alternate map with the Chicago City Clerk, triggering a referendum, Villegas said.

“The reality is this has been the least transparent process in probably the city’s history,” Villegas said, noting that 14 alderpeople may be asked to vote on a map that they — and Chicagoans — have not yet seen.

Just 36 alderpeople have seen the Rules Committee map, which has been drawn behind closed doors and not released to the public.

Ervin said that was an unfair characterization.

Video: The conversation continues with Alds. Jason Ervin (28th Ward), Gilbert Villegas (36th Ward), Stephanie Coleman (16th Ward) and Scott Waguespack (32nd Ward). (Produced by Alexandra Silets)

Even after a referendum is triggered, a vote of 41 alderpeople could approve a map and avoid asking voters to pick from all of the submitted maps as part of the June 28, 2022, primary election.

Prospects for a compromise dropped precipitously just before 1 p.m. Tuesday, when Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s office announced she had flown to Washington, D.C., to meet with federal officials to discuss President Joe Biden’s infrastructure agenda as well as COVID-19 relief efforts.

The mayor’s second trip to the nation’s capital in 15 days meant she would not be present to preside over not just one but two scheduled meetings of the Chicago City Council set for Wednesday, the deadline set by state law for the City Council to approve new boundaries for the city’s 50 wards.

It would be nearly unprecedented in Chicago history for a mayor to miss a City Council meeting, especially one with such a crucial item on the agenda. If the meeting takes place, Ald. Brendan Reilly (42nd Ward) would preside in his role as president pro tem of the City Council.

Less than 30 minutes after the mayor’s announcement, Ald. Michelle Harris (8th Ward) canceled a planned meeting of the City Council’s Rules Committee that had been set to start at 1 p.m. — meaning that Chicagoans would be forced to continue to wait to see a proposed map that could be voted on as soon as Wednesday.

Always fraught, this year’s remapping effort is particularly tense because of the city’s changing racial makeup. While Chicago’s Black population dropped 10%, its Latino population jumped 5% and its Asian American population surged 30%, according to the 2020 census.

State law requires Chicago wards to be “nearly equal as practicable” while being as “contiguous” and “compact” as possible while complying with the Voting Rights Act, which is designed to protect the voting rights of Black, Latino and Asian residents.

Since Chicago’s population in 2020 was 2,746,388 residents, each ward should have 54,928 residents, according to data presented to the Chicago City Council.

First term Ald. Stephanie Coleman (16th Ward), who could see the boundaries of her South Side ward change significantly, said she hoped the final map would unite Englewood in one ward so she could better serve residents “not political pettiness.”

Ervin blamed the decision by the Latino Caucus to put out a citywide map proposal for making the map-drawing process acrimonious.

However, Villegas said the map-drawing process has been complicated by the decision by Harris to hire attorney Michael Kasper, who frequently represented former House Speaker Michael Madigan, to draw their new ward map.

Although the map drawn by Kasper for the City Council has not yet been released publicly, sources told WTTW News that it was drawn to protect indicted Ald. Ed Burke (14th Ward), who faces a trial in 2022 on 14 counts of corruption, and Ald. Marty Quinn (13th Ward), a close ally of Madigan.

By protecting Burke and Quinn, who are both white, the map drawn by Kasper for the Rules Committee, reduces the number of wards that could have a majority of Latino voters and would ensure the Black Caucus has 17 wards with a majority of Black voters.

“This is just a ploy to disenfranchise Latinos,” Villegas said.

Other flashpoints in the remap battle are:

–Lincoln Yards: Ald. Scott Waguespack wants the massive development to be part of the 32nd Ward, not Ald. Brian Hopkins’ 2nd Ward.

–Bridgeport: Ald. Patrick Daley Thompson is urging his colleagues not to break up the 11th Ward in order to create a ward with a majority of Asian American voters centered in Chinatown by remapping the ancestral seat of the Daley political machine.

–The 78: The massive development south of the Loop and north of Chinatown is now part of Ald. Byron Sigcho Lopez’s 25th Ward, but could become part of Ald. Pat Dowell’s 3rd Ward — and could become the home of Chicago’s casino.

Contact Heather Cherone: @HeatherCherone | (773) 569-1863 | [email protected]

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The racially polarized fight over the boundaries of the ward map that will shape Chicago politics for the next decade intensified Monday as the breach between Chicago City Council’s Black and Latino caucuses widened amid claims of “gaslighting” and backroom dealing.

The Chicago City Council has until Wednesday to approve a new ward map based on the results of the 2020 census. If 41 alderpeople do not agree on a map before midnight, the final decision could be made by voters for the first time in 30 years via a referendum.

The acrimony spilled into full public view Monday afternoon during a meeting of the Chicago City Council’s Rules Committee that was delayed for more than two hours as alderpeople attempted to revive closed-door negotiations that broke down over the weekend.

Rules Committee Chair Ald. Michelle Harris (8th Ward) did not unveil her proposal for the ward map, saying that she was waiting on members of the Latino Caucus to respond to her latest effort to broker a compromise.

While praising the City Council’s “white aldermen” for privately negotiating the boundaries of their wards in the closed-to-the-public map room at City Hall, Harris blasted the City Council’s Latino Caucus for putting out their own map. In all, Harris said 36 of the City Council’s 50 members participated in that process, which could leave her five votes short of avoiding a referendum.

Harris said that once the committee’s proposal was released, it would not be likely to change. That would seem to conflict with Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s demand, which she repeated on Monday, for alderpeople to allow members of the public to have a substantive chance to review a proposed ward map before a vote.

Harris’ statement brought a furious response from Ald. Gilbert Villegas (36th Ward), who accused Harris of pitting the Black and Latino caucuses against each other in the battle over the new ward map.

Villegas accused Harris of running the “least transparent” map making process anywhere in the state and poorly serving Chicagoans of all races and ethnicities.

However, Harris defended the process she has overseen as one that was designed to be respectful of all City Council members by not allowing one alderperson to claim part of the territory now represented by one of their colleagues without his or her permission.

Several times Harris said the map was “fluid, it’s liquid, always changing.”

Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa (35th Ward) accused Harris of “gaslighting” the members of Latino Caucus by suggesting they refused to negotiate with their colleagues.

Instead, Ramirez-Rosa said it was Harris and Rules Committee lawyer Michael Kasper who told him and other members of the Latino Caucus told they could not submit proposals to include territory now in other wards — unless those census tracts were majority Latino.

Ald. Susan Sadlowski Garza (10th Ward), a close ally of Lightfoot, said she had the same experience.

“It hasn’t been a give and take, at least for me,” Sadlowski-Garza said.

Always fraught, this year’s remapping effort is particularly tense because of the city’s changing racial makeup. While Chicago’s Black population dropped 10%, its Latino population jumped 5% and its Asian American population surged 30%, according to the 2020 census.

While the Black Caucus is determined to draw a map with at least 17 wards with a majority of Black voters, the Latino Caucus has demanded a map with no fewer than 15 wards with a majority of Latino voters. Both groups have endorsed calls from Asian American groups in Chicago to craft a ward centered around Chinatown that has a majority of Asian American voters — but neither group wants that ward to reduce their share of political power.

There are now 18 wards with a majority of Black voters and 13 wards with a majority of voters who are Latino.

State law requires Chicago wards to be “nearly equal as practicable” while being as “contiguous” and “compact” as possible while complying with the Voting Rights Act, which is designed to protect the voting rights of Black, Latino and Asian residents. 

Since Chicago’s population in 2020 was 2,746,388 residents, each ward should have 54,928 residents, according to data presented to the Chicago City Council.

After deferring to the City Council for months, Lightfoot said Monday at an unrelated news conference that she attempted to broker an agreement on a new ward map during negotiations during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, but was unsuccessful.

“It is unfortunate that it is coming down to the last minute,” Lightfoot said. “There has to be transparency.”

Lightfoot declined to say how long the public should be given to review a proposed map or whether she would reject a map if it failed to meet that standard.

“The process has been very tough, there is a lot of emotions that have built up on all sides,” Lightfoot said. “I think people need to come to the table, play the long game and get something done. Whether the council is going to be able to get themselves organized in a way that makes it happen, I don’t know the answer to that.”

Contact Heather Cherone: @HeatherCherone | (773) 569-1863 | [email protected]

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The public probably can’t separate myth from fact about Madigan, but most elected Democrats couldn’t really complain about his results in the General Assembly or at the ballot box. Then, after decades in power, the federal probe into Commonwealth Edison proved to be prime fodder last year for Republicans, who splashed the utility’s scandal across campaign ads — never forgetting to loosely pin the tale to Madigan.

Currie acknowledged that a federal probe into Commonwealth Edison admitting to bribery and influence peddling played a role in Madigan’s exit. He hasn’t been charged with wrongdoing but his associates have, and that hung over work in the Legislature and on the 2020 campaign trail. “There were people who stood by him who then said we can’t do that anymore,” Currie said.

After the 2020 election, where Republicans successfully beat back Betsy Dirksen Londrigan, a Madigan-supported Democratic candidate for Congress, and a progressive income tax ballot initiative that was supported by Gov. J.B. Pritzker, many Democrats sensed their moment to cut Madigan off. Pritzker, a Jewish liberal billionaire who had never held public office before and funded his own campaign, openly called on the speaker to address the “ethical cloud hanging over his head.” And Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin laid Londrigan’s loss at Madigan’s feet on local television. Before the end of November 2020, enough of Madigan’s caucus — the people with the power to take his gavel away — had deserted him, laying the groundwork for his departure the following February.

Stepping into the unknown

Those following in Madigan’s stead might appreciate his efficiency but want to be free of his baggage.

Welch, the new speaker, and Kelly, a freshly minted party chair, have so far promoted transparency and collaboration. They are encouraging more of their allies to be a part of decision-making and strategy, which, in government or politics, typically means more layers, more talk and more time. That has made the center of political gravity more decentralized.

State Rep. Deb Conroy, a Madigan critic who chaired the House Democratic Women’s Caucus and now is women’s caucus whip, said lawmakers are already crafting better policy in the wake of his departure.

A recent clean energy bill aimed at cutting carbon emissions passed after months of hand-wringing among environmentalists, labor unions, legislators and Commonwealth Edison, the utility whose pay-to-play scandal helped boot Madigan. Coal industry jobs were at stake, nuclear plants were threatening to close and Pritzker wanted a climate win. The process was messy — something Madigan wouldn’t have tolerated — and required lawmakers to hold a rare special session to pass it in September. Some legislators said the bill was stronger because of the more deliberative process, but some grumbled that the former speaker would have done it faster.

“That’s true,” Conroy said. “Everybody isn’t going to be happy when it’s good policy. When you strong-arm something through, there are more winners and losers, and you end up with 71 [votes] instead of the 83 who approved it with 13 Republican votes included. I don’t think that would have happened in the past.”

And when it comes to money, the Illinois Democratic Party has already been forced to diversify its political fundraising and how it supports politicians statewide — not just the state House candidates who were Madigan’s priority. It’s a change some loyal Democrats welcome: The party says it has attracted 350 new first-time contributors since Kelly became chair in September.

“As a donor, one of my fears is always that [politicians] are raising money just to raise money,” said Robert Clifford, a personal injury attorney and major donor to Illinois and national Democrats, including Obama and Hillary Clinton, who supports the new process. “It goes into a black hole versus really working for a candidate. When I’m writing a check for a candidate, I have a better chance of assessing that candidate versus donating to the bigger party.”

Illinois Speaker Michael Madigan leaves Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner’s office during a veto session at the State Capitol on Dec. 1, 2016, in Springfield, Ill. | Seth Perlman/AP Photo

What happens to Madigan’s fingerprints on the Democratic get-out-the-vote operation, known as “the program,” may remain unclear until the election season is in high gear. Still, perhaps the biggest departure from Madigan’s path — in a state that has long eschewed term limits for mayors, legislators, and governors — is Welch’s interest in capping the speakership at 10 years.

But for all the change, former Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn, a proud Irishman who didn’t fall in line with Madigan or Richard M. Daley, still sees a fatal flaw: The state’s transactional politics aren’t going to change, he said — regardless of color — without new ways to hold politicians accountable. “We don’t have an initiative process where voters can put ethics measures on the ballot,” he said, pointing, as well, to a lack of conflict-of-interest laws that might prohibit lawmakers from voting on legislation they have a personal or financial interest in. “That’s the essence of machine politics.”

Illinois lawmakers recently passed a raft of ethics reforms in their 2021 session, including barring lawmakers from being employed as lobbyists in certain circumstances and requiring lawmakers to wait six months before becoming lobbyists if they leave before their term is up.

Quinn, who was governor from 2009 to 2015, summarized the law as “weak soup.”

After all, while Madigan has relinquished his most prominent posts, he still sits on the Democratic State Central Committee, the political body that provides infrastructure and helps support candidates. And he remains the boss of Chicago’s 13th Ward, with a say over local political and judicial candidates, and the power to assign jobs and prioritize some city services.

And from Illinois House Minority Leader Jim Durkin’s vantage point, nothing has changed. Just look at the recent redistricting changes by Democrats, he said, where Democrats factored in a range of political calculations.

“Virtually every Democrat in the House — including Speaker Welch — at one time or another campaigned or listed on an editorial board questionnaire that politicians should be out of the business of drawing maps,” Durkin said in a phone interview. “But look at the legislative maps, Supreme Court redistricting map, and congressional map.”

The redistricting panel that recently drew up new political boundaries in Illinois were also veterans of the process — and former allies, attorneys and aides to Madigan.

“The Irish are gone but the machine is in full operation, and they’re running at full speed ahead,” Durkin said.

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That’s despite the city of Chicago’s population, 2.71 million in 2019, being about one-third New York’s 8.42 million that year. 

RentHop has data back to 2016, and Chicago has out-ratted New York by a wide margin in the comparable period for each of those years (first 11 months plus 10 days). That prompted RentHop to label Chicago “the forever rat capital in the U.S.” 

The last time Matt Brown saw a rat was two days ago, in the alley behind his house in Kilbourn Park on the Northwest Side. He’s used to it, and so are his two daughters, ages 2 and 11. 

When Brown drives the girls home from activities and the kids notice rats in their alley, he said, “They point and laugh.” 

RentHop reports 311 rat complaint data on four major cities: New York, Chicago, Boston and Washington, D.C. Shane Lee, a data analyst for RentHop, said in an email that the four cities compile and post their data in similar ways, so the study is apples-to-apples, and that they are “some of the most densely populated cities in the nation. Denser population usually means more apartment buildings, more food sources, and therefore, more rodents.” 

Not only did Chicago’s tally of rat complaints come in far higher than New York, it’s more than the combined number of complaints in New York, Boston and Washington (40,239). 

Complaints rose in 2021 in three of those cities and fell in Boston. In Washington and New York, the year-over-year increase was bigger than in Chicago. Even so, Lee said, with a gap of about 34,000 complaints between Chicago and New York, “it’s unlikely for New York to take over the ‘Rat Capital’ title.” 

RentHop’s data, based on 311 calls, lines up with an annual “50 rattiest cities” ranking put out by pest control service Orkin. Its figures, based on the number of rat treatments it provides, have ranked Chicago as the rattiest for seven years running. 

Monica Patel has lived it. After she spotted a rat in the living room of her Uptown apartment one night in March or April 2020, her landlord performed rat abatement that included plugging the hole the rat used to enter her home. About a year later, another rat used that same hole to enter her apartment, and she also spotted a dead rat on the property outside. 

When her lease expired, Patel moved to an apartment in Lakeview. She had been ready to move for other reasons, she said, but, “The rat incidents,” she said, “definitely expedited the process.” 

Mimi Simon, a spokeswoman for Chicago’s Department of Streets & Sanitation, said in an emailed statement that the city has seen an increase in rat complaints during the pandemic and that “crews are out each day to bait alleys and backyards, and we are reallocating our resources to help ensure adequate coverage.”

This fall, the department opened two new rodent control offices, so that it now has three, on the North and South sides and a central city location. 

Simon said residents can help control the spread of rats by sealing garbage cans tightly, cleaning up yard refuse and taking other measures listed on the city’s website. 

Lee and Simon both said rats have likely been more visible in residential areas since the start of the pandemic because widespread restaurant closings have meant less food for rodents in the trash bins, sending them scurrying into other locations to find food. Simon said people who adopted pets during the pandemic may mean there’s more dog poop being left behind, also attracting rats. 

“The pandemic most likely has boosted rat sightings,” Lee said. The New York Times reported last week that that city’s rodent problem has spiked during the pandemic. 

There may be far more sightings than there are calls to 311. Brown, the Kilbourn Park dad, said his alderman, Ariel Reboyras, 30th, puts out signs asking people to clean up after their dogs to help control the rat problem and that city-issued yellow-and-red rat abatement signs are posted in his alley. 

Even so, Brown hasn’t called 311 about rats. 

“It never occurred to me,” Brown said, “in part because it took like nine months to get a new garbage can, so I would assume every one of those 311 services is so backed up that no help is coming.” 

Andre Gordillo hasn’t called 311 about rats, either. Gordillo, who lives in Little Village, said he sees “plenty” of rats in his neighborhood, most recently when he was parking his car and a rat was scrounging on the adjacent sidewalk. His landlord has been assiduously fighting a rat problem in the backyard with traps.

On a visit to New York recently, Gordillo saw even more rats, which didn’t surprise him. “It’s a dirtier city,” Gordillo said. “They dispose of their trash on the sidewalks, which attracts rats.” 

Gordillo has a theory on the big differential between Chicagoans and New Yorkers calling 311 about rats. It’s probably not that there are more than twice as many rats in the far smaller of the two cities, he said, “it’s that New Yorkers are used to it and don’t complain. Rats come with the territory if you live in New York.” 

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“Today the city of Chicago is only about 40,000 more Latino residents from them becoming the majority ethnic group,” Dominguez points out. “We’re going to see that soon.” As of the latest Census, Chicago is “officially a tri-part city”—split roughly evenly between Black, white, and Latino. But Latinos overtook African Americans as the second largest racial or ethnic group in the city as of 2020.

In debates over city, state and congressional maps, there’s been a strong emphasis on drawing more districts to reflect Latinos’ growing share of the population: Illinois added a brand new Latino-influenced district stretching from Chicago’s Northwest Side into DuPage County. State mapmakers are defending their maps in court against a challenge from MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which argues the new General Assembly maps do not sufficiently represent Latino population growth over the last decade.

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And the City Council’s Latino Caucus is standing firm on a demand for at least 15 majority-Latino wards as a deadline looms to approve new lines. That follows a concerted push from the caucus for Mayor Lori Lightfoot to appoint more Latinos to positions of power across city government. (She’s since named Pedro Martinez to run Chicago Public Schools, Rosa Escareño to clean up the Park District, and Celia Meza as her right hand legal counsel.)

On this week’s episode, Dominguez discusses the shifting ideological dynamics within the City Council’s Latino Caucus, how the grip of the Democratic Party has slipped among Latino voters nationally, and what the media gets wrong about the issues that matter to the Latino electorate.

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Originally Appeared Here

Rahm Emanuel appears on “Chicago Tonight” on Monday, May 13, 2019.

One of former Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s most vocal critics told members of the U.S. Senate weighing the former mayor’s nomination to be President Joe Biden’s ambassador to Japan that there was no evidence Emanuel covered up the police murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald in 2014.

In fact, former Inspector General Joseph Ferguson told the members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in a three-page letter dated Oct. 18 that Chicago’s former mayor should be praised for his response to the shooting that has shadowed his bid to return to public office more than three years after announcing he would not run for another term as mayor.

“There is a complete absence of factual basis to support the claim that Mayor Emanuel was involved directly or indirectly in a ‘cover-up’ of the McDonald shooting videos,” Ferguson wrote in a letter obtained by WTTW News on Oct. 28.

Representatives of Emanuel did not respond to inquiries about the letter, and Ferguson declined to comment for this story.

Read Ferguson’s full letter.

During his confirmation hearing on Oct. 20, Emanuel faced pointed questions from U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon), who suggested that it defied belief that Emanuel did not know that the dash cam video showed now-former Officer Jason Van Dyke shoot McDonald 16 times in October 2014, even as the teen moved away from the officers.

Emanuel has repeatedly said he did not see the video until it was released publicly in November 2015, prompting protests and upending Chicago politics.

However, Ferguson said his probe determined that withholding videos like the one that showed McDonald’s murder was the longstanding practice of the city’s Law Department in an effort not to thwart ongoing criminal investigations. That policy was changed by Emanuel in February 2016, on the recommendation of the Police Accountability Task Force.

Charged by Emanuel with investigating McDonald’s shooting death, the task force included Ferguson and was led by Lori Lightfoot, who was then president of the Chicago Police Board and would be elected mayor of Chicago in April 2019.

That task force operated independently and its findings were “unconstrained,” Ferguson wrote.

“Then-Mayor Emanuel, to his eventual discomfort, asked that the truth be found and reported, with the chips to fall where they may,” Ferugson wrote.

In addition, Emanuel should be admired for acknowledging that a “code of silence” existed in the Chicago Police Department that protected officers who committed misconduct and violated the constitutional rights of Chicagoans, Ferguson said. That declaration exposed the city to legal jeopardy in cases where Chicagoans alleged they were abused or mistreated by officers, Ferguson wrote.

“[Emanuel] chose a principled over transactional path,” Ferguson said, noting that he often clashed with Emanuel.

Ferguson also credits Emanuel with supporting a “thoroughgoing independent investigation” of the Chicago Police Department.

“In all of these respects, Mayor Emanuel was fully supportive of a comprehensive inquiry resulting in full accountability, again, letting the chips fall where the evidence indicated,” Ferguson said.

Emanuel announced he would not seek a third term as Chicago mayor in 2019 just weeks before a jury convicted Van Dyke of second-degree murder for shooting McDonald 16 times in rapid succession.

McDonald’s death weighs on him, Emanuel told senators.

“There’s not a day or a week that has gone by in the last seven years I haven’t thought about this and the what-ifs and the changes and what could have been,” Emanuel said during his confirmation hearing. “A grave tragedy occurred seven years ago. And that tragedy sits with me, as it has, every day and every week for the last seven years.”

Merkley and U.S. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) voted to reject Emanuel’s nomination.

While dissenting votes from two Democratic members of the committee would be enough to tank nearly any other nomination made by Biden in the U.S. Senate, Emanuel’s bid to become the United States’ representative in Japan advanced with the support of several Republican committee members, including U.S. Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho).

Five Republican senators including Risch and Sen. Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, a former ambassador to Japan, who introduced Emanuel at his confirmation, have said they will support Emanuel.  U.S. Sens. Roy Blunt, of Missouri, Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, and Susan Collins, of Maine, have also expressed support, according to The Washington Post.

The full U.S. Senate has not yet scheduled a vote on Emanuel’s nomination amid a blockade of all of Biden’s nominees to State Department posts led by U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas.)

Contact Heather Cherone: @HeatherCherone | (773) 569-1863 | [email protected]

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After Fraternal Board of Police President John Catanzara announced his retirement from the Chicago Police Department, Mayor Lori Lightfoot blasted the decision as an effort on his part to “run away from accountability,” continuing a war of words with the union leader that has stretched on virtually since the moment he took office.

In a scathing statement, Lightfoot criticized Catanzara’s resignation from the department, which he tendered at a Tuesday meeting of the police board.

“Not a surprise that a man of hate – as John Catanzara has demonstrated over and over that he is – would run away from accountability,” she said. “The evidence of his guilt was overwhelming as set forth in the hearing, and he clearly sought to avoid the eventual reckoning by resigning, under investigation, and then divesting the Police Board of jurisdiction.”

The union president’s resignation from the department means that the disciplinary hearing against him will end, and the board will no longer be able to take action against him on the allegations that he was facing.

Catanzara announced his intention to resign following a Monday meeting of the Chicago Police Board. The meeting was convened to evaluate charges of misconduct against Catanzara, which had led to his suspension from the police department.

The violations were largely related to actions and online statements made by Catanzara, including his comparison of the city’s vaccine mandate to Nazi Germany, posts in which he called Muslims “savages (who) deserve a bullet,” and posts in which he appeared in his police uniform and expressed messages of support for former President Donald Trump.

According to documents posted online, Catanzara wrote “Let’s go Brandon” in the remarks section of a personnel action request confirming his retirement. The “Brandon” phrase is often used in right-wing circles as a stand-in for a profane message aimed at President Joe Biden.

 Catanzara called the disciplinary board meeting a “circus,” and expressed his belief that he would not get a fair hearing before the board. He also announced plans to potentially run for mayor in 2023, and said his resignation would deprive Lightfoot of the chance to say that she had fired him from the department.

“I will have my vindication when I tell her to get the hell out of my office and give me the keys in 2023,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times.

Catanzara in the meantime says he plans to continue in his position as union president.

Lightfoot, who has been a vocal critic of Catanzara’s, said that the city of Chicago must “reject hate,” and that the messages sent by the union boss flew in the face of that goal.

“We cannot move beyond the very difficult circumstances that we have all endured these last 20 months unless we reject hate in all its forms, and stand united around our common values as a city that is always stronger when we work together as neighbors,” she said.

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With the infrastructure bill now law, Congress’ attention this week is turning back to the Build Back Better legislation, a sweeping collection of social programs and economic incentives that President Biden has placed at the center of his agenda.

For many Democrats, the legislation is an opportunity to address many issues that were eventually dropped from the infrastructure law. That’s especially true for climate change. The infrastructure bill did contain some measures that were designed to put the brakes on carbon dioxide pollution that’s warming the atmosphere, especially in promoting the deployment of electric vehicles.

The Build Back Better Act goes much farther, allocating $550 billion for measures designed to address climate change. There is a bevy of tax credits on everything from electric bikes to nuclear power, along with buying electric trucks for the post office and funding climate research by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

For Rep. Sean Casten, an Illinois Democrat who just returned from the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, the two proposals are intertwined.

“The reason they’re in two separate bills is because President Biden wanted to see how much we could get done in a bipartisan basis and then, if necessary, do the rest through reconciliation,” Casten said, referring to the process by which the Senate can pass budget-related measures by a simple majority without getting filibustered.

“For all practical purposes, if you are promoting bipartisanship in Washington, D.C., you are not prioritizing climate change,” he said.

“A lot hangs right now on not being able to lose a single vote in the Senate. (That) is going to determine the degree to which we deliver what the president has asked of us, what the world has asked of us what the science demands,” Casten said.

Casten went to Glasgow along with a delegation that included House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and more than 20 other House members. President Biden, former President Obama and several top Biden administration officials attended. It was a marked contrast from the climate summit a few years ago under the Trump administration, when roughly a dozen U.S. officials attended.

World leaders were following U.S. politics closely to determine the fate of climate measures. They knew the details of the Build Back Better plan and the reservations of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who has repeatedly demanded the proposal be scaled back.

While the negotiations in Glasgow did not result in major breakthroughs, Casten said he was impressed by the actions of private companies to address the climate crisis.

“The private sector in America is already there. It’s tragic, but it’s true: The government is following the private sector,” he said.

In fact, some of the criticism of American businesses from abroad is that they are eager to build renewable energy projects in places vulnerable to climate change, but the U.S. is doing little to mitigate the rising sea levels and extreme weather caused by the already warming atmosphere, Casten said.

That’s almost the exact opposite approach that the federal government is taking at home, he noted. It’s far easier for Congress to fund levees to protect the Houston shipping channel than it is to move the Houston economy away from oil and gas production.

Casten said Illinois is well-positioned to benefit from climate-friendly policies. He likened it to Germany, a manufacturing powerhouse that has been moving away from coal-fueled power plants.

“Illinois has a huge wind resource. We’ve got rapidly growing solar resources. We’ve got really interesting players in electric vehicles that are in Illinois. We have cutting edge battery technologies coming out of Argonne (National Laboratory),” he said. “We’re exceptionally well-positioned to be on the beneficial end of this transition.”

Members of the American delegation to the Glasgow climate conference, from Sean Casten’s Facebook page.

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Get more in-depth, daily coverage of Chicago politics at The Daily Line.

CITY HALL — City rules will allow dog owners to bring their companions into some Chicago bars under an ordinance that advanced out of a City Council committee on Monday.

The City Council Committee on License and Consumer Protection unanimously endorsed Ald. Brendan Reilly’s (42nd) proposal to narrow the city’s ban on non-service animals in businesses so that it only applies to “retail food establishments” as opposed to any “place where foodstuffs are sold or on display.” The upshot is that the ban would no longer apply to bars that don’t serve food. 

Bar owners have complained to Reilly that city health officials are ticketing their businesses because they allow dogs on the same premises as cocktail garnishes like lemons and limes, which can be defined as “foodstuffs” under city code. His proposal would “make sure that our tavern owners aren’t being ticketed for something they’ve been doing for some time,” Reilly said.

“There’s a very popular practice where customers are allowed to bring their dogs to sit on their outdoor patio space during the warm weather months, and it’s really been embraced by many of the neighborhoods in the city,” the Downtown alderman said. “So this simply is to clarify that as long as a tavern license isn’t serving food … it’s OK for them to allow their customers to bring their dogs in for a visit.”

He added that the provision “will not mandate dogs in taverns” but will empower bars owners to allow four-legged patrons if they want.

Pet-friendly bar owners have been rankled by sporadic visits from city inspectors who issue citations of up to $500 for violating the city’s health code, according to Pat Doerr, managing director of the Hospitality Business Association of Chicago.

“Alderman Reilly’s ordinance clears up a long time source of confusion over whether dogs are allowed indoors even when their spots don’t serve food,” Doerr wrote in a text message to The Daily Line. “A good day for Chicago’s dogs and the neighborhood taverns that welcome them.”

The committee had also been scheduled during its meeting on Monday to take up a separate ordinance sought by Reilly to ban pedicab drivers from playing loud music during overnight hours. But license committee chair Ald. Emma Mitts (37th) pocketed the item instead of bringing it to a vote.

A spokesperson for the Chicago Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection wrote in a statement to The Daily Line on Monday that the department “is ready to work with the Alderman and looks forward to conversations with the pedicab industry.”

Finally, the committee referred to the City Council Committee on Committees and Rules a proposal by Ald. Brian Hopkins (2nd) to tighten some regulations on crane operators in the city, including by requiring them to carry liability insurance. Aldermen re-routed the measure at Hopkins’ request.

Hopkins proposed the ordinance earlier this year at the request of the union IUOE Local 150, who argued it was “primarily a safety measure,” Hopkins told The Daily Line on Monday. But the alderman put the brakes on the proposal after other trade unions raised concerns about how much it could cost workers, he said. Hopkins opted to send the measure to the rules committee as a way to “park it somewhere” while he tries to strike a compromise and considers re-referring the measure to the zoning or workforce committee, he said.

Local licensing provisions 

The license committee also approved 13 hyperlocal licensing ordinances in wards around the city, including a proposal by Ald. Susan Sadlowski Garza (10th) to allow city workers to boot cars in her ward. Booting is currently banned in Garza’s ward and 17 others.

Garza told committee members that she proposed allowing car booting as a way to fight back against “a lot of predatory towing companies in the 10th Ward that prey on our constituents.”

“I think this is very admirable way [to ensure that] if people are parked illegally, they will have a chance to rectify it without having to go to the tow company and pay tow fees,” Garza said.

Ward-level booting prohibitions last took the license committee spotlight in June, when Ald. Daniel La Spata (1st) pushed through a prohibition on booting in his ward. He called for a citywide reassessment of booting rules, which he said lack a formal “appeals process” outside of drivers complaining to their ward offices.

Related: Aldermen call for citywide reform of ‘predatory’ car booting, delay home-sharing crackdown

The committee also voted to lift 11 local liquor moratoria to allow various new bars and liquor stores to open around the city.

All items advanced by the committee on Monday will face a final vote by the City Council during its meeting on Wednesday.

Get more in-depth, daily coverage of Chicago politics at The Daily Line.

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One more time, Chicago.

Remap, that decennial exercise in real-life musical chairs, is going to be big in the news again this week. But other news will come from Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s trip to Washington, and continuing struggles in Congress over President Joe Biden’s agenda.

The remap news will start at City Hall, where the City Council is drawing ever-closer to its Dec. 1 deadline to approve a new ward map. Another public hearing in the Rules Committee is scheduled for Monday, but the two brief meetings held last week did not include any discussions of proposed maps from the City Council’s Latino Caucus (sponsored by some other non-Latino members of the City Council) or an independent group known as the Chicago Advisory Redistricting Commission.

Rules Committee chair Michelle Harris did sound open to a hearing on the Latino Caucus map earlier this month. “We have not gotten any indication they’re going to give a hearing on our map or any other one” at this point, says Ryan Tolley, the Policy Director at Change Illinois, the group leading the independent remap effort. He did hint there’s some support behind closed doors on their map, but none have publicly come forward.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker also is expected to deal with the remap effort. The proposed new congressional map now has been sent to him, and there’s little reason for him not to sign it quickly. As soon as he does, the focus will shift to U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis, R-Taylorville, who has said he will have more to say about his political future once the map is official.

Some party leaders are leaning on him hard to run against Pritzker, but Davis has told associates he’s leaning the other way.

Back at City Hall, Chicago’s major athletic teams hoping for a final vote on an ordinance allowing sports betting will have to wait, it appears. 

Following a heated no-vote hearing in which Chicago billionaire Neil Bluhm argued that stadium-based sports books would cannibalize revenues from the new casino owner—and in turn, the city—a final vote on that measure was scheduled for Tuesday afternoon, but cancelled not long after. With no sportsbook or final map, the City Council meeting this Wednesday looks to be less eventful than usual.

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Before then, Lightfoot will be in Washington, D.C., along with Pritzker for the signing of the infrastructure bill today. The mayor has not been to Washington since before the pandemic, when she met with top Democratic lawmakers, the Black Congressional Caucus and Ivanka Trump. We reported on what Illinois would be getting from the spending bill in last week’s forecast.

While Lightfoot is in town, perhaps she could lean on feuding House Democrats to finally approve the second part of Biden’s big rebuild package, which focuses on human infrastructure but also would raise the cap on state and local tax deductions from the current $10,000 to more than $70,000.

When the House votes depends on when the Congressional Budget Office puts together its estimates of the budget impact of the bill. Meanwhile, funding for the regular operations of the federal government runs out in early December, and Democrats will have to work out a reprieve from the debt ceiling by then, too.

Finally, we’ll perhaps be hearing more from that war of words between Pritzker and GOP businessman Ken Griffin. Perhaps in the spirit of the season they’ll give it a rest. Perhaps.

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