My Blog

Tag: Chicago

  • Stripping Chicago Spending, Bare Down

    “What do a Chicago strip club
    and the President’s campaign fund have in common?    ”

    ANSWER:  BOTH were paid- with public funds- as “VENDORS” to the City of Chicago.
    _______________________________________

    Yesterday, OpenTheBooks.com upgraded it’s transparency portal to include the City of Chicago checkbook from 2002-2011.

    It contains $74 billion in vendor payments. Last year 69,800 entities received checks.

    Here’s what I found while scanning the data…

    The City of Chicago approved checks to both The Admiral Theatre Inc, a Chicago strip club, and Obama For America, the president’s campaign organization. According to data received, both share the same “vendor code.”  Yet, neither organization exists in Chicago’s current transparency portal: click here and here.

     

    The Admiral Theatre strip club received $5,197.78 in City of Chicago checks. Sixteen checks range from $1.20 to $1,900. A buck twenty?

    See a database of City payments to The Admiral here.

     

    The check to Obama for America raises more questions. The campaign received a $1,000 check on August 28th, 2007. For some reason, theydidn’t disclose this to the Federal Election Commission: click here, and Open Secrets- here.

    Click here for my Freedom of Information Act Request seeking more information. See the detailed accounting data surrounding the check: vendor code, transaction id, PO#, fund, department, amount, check number, and date.

     

    Surely, the City will have some sort of explanation. Because, public funds used for campaign purposes violates federal and state law. And, we know that no Illinois or city worker would ever violate those laws, right?

     

    The City has five days to respond to our request for additional information. I can barely wait for the naked truth.

    You can search for yourself at www.openthebooks.com

    Sincerely,

    ADAM ANDRZEJEWSKI
    Chairman | For The Good of Illinois PAC

     

  • Chicago Aldermen: White Collar Criminals

    An analysis of pension fund documents for 21 aldermen who retired under the plan shows they are in line to receive nearly $58 million during their expected lifetimes, though contributions and assumed investment returns are predicted to cover just $19 million, or a third of that sum.

    The pension deal was inked more than two decades ago, but the costs began to kick in recently. Most of the 21 aldermen in the Tribune/WGN-TV analysis have retired within the past five years, and there are 53 more in the pipeline.

    Former Ald. Thomas Allen is a prime example. After retiring from the City Council in 2010 at age 58, Allen went on to become a Circuit Court judge while also collecting roughly $90,000 a year from his city pension. During his lifetime, he stands to receive more than $4.2 million in benefits, though contributions and assumed investment returns are expected to cover only $1 million.

    via Chicago Tribune.

    We’re doomed.  Chicago will not be able to sustain itself under this kind of dead weight.  The taxpayers are going to be asked to provide more and more payments for services they will not receive.

    Glad the Tribune is on the story now… but where has it been for the last 20 years?  Where’s the Sun-Times (the “Bright One”) on this?

    We’re going bankrupt and no one cares.

  • Worst Housing Market Is In?

    New data out of Standard & Poor’s this morning painted a somewhat mixed picture of the U.S. housing market: showing home prices may have hit bottom.

    via Business Insider.

    Hit bottom?  Unlikely.  But what I really wanted to show what this chart:

    Looking at the worst performing cities:  Atlanta, Las Vegas, Chicago.

    In January 2011, I wrote:

    Further, when a developer gets a piece of land, financing, or other services from the TIF it lowers the developer’s costs. This causes an interesting thing to happen. This developer has a competitive advantage over a developer who has to buy land or services at market rate. Therefore, this developer can sell units either cheaper or at a higher margin than the developer without the TIF. This interferes with the market forces, causing more units to be built in TIF districts than would otherwise by market forces alone. This over-development has caused Chicago’s housing market to be overly sensitive to the nationwide collapse in real estate. In Chicago we have overbuild so many housing units that we have damaged not only the home owners market but also the rental market. Thousands of condos build to be owner occupied are now rentals. Standard rental apartments are going unfilled because of the cheap flood of rental condos.

    I believe I was right then… and right now.

  • Building a New Chicago

    I was skeptical of Rahm coming in as mayor.  But as time goes by I’m getting more and more impressed by his ability to take on the unions, manipulate the media, get things done, outmaneuver worthless alderman, and most importantly develop and articulate his vision for the city.  (It appears that) He gets it.   You can say a great number of things about Rahm Emanuel; but you can’t say that he doesn’t think big.

    There are several stories out this week about Rahm’s Building a New Chicago plan.

    Unveiling a plan for “Building a New Chicago,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Thursday promoted a package of infrastructure initiatives that included very little that was new — except for its $7 billion price tag and its ambitious framing as a mission comparable to the city’s rebuilding after the Great Chicago Fire.

    via Chicago Tribune.

    The Tribune’s piece quotes local hacks:

    “It was a State of the Union speech in Chicago.  I think it was a good blueprint for Chicago’s future.”
    — Alderman Richard Mell (33rd Ward)

    … and the not so hacky:

    “I think this speech was aimed toward Chicagoans in general, and aimed toward business, because actually, these types of pronouncements are out there to encourage businesses to say, ‘I’m thinking of coming to Chicago, I want to open a place in Chicago, I want to do business in or with Chicago.’  These are all speeches geared toward making us an attractive option in a very global economy.”
    — Alderman Patrick O’Conner (40th Ward)

    This is where the Sun-Times nails it:

    Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Thursday urged major airlines squeezed by skyrocketing fuel prices to come to the table a year early and negotiate a fourth new runway at O’Hare Airport as part of a $7.3 billion plan to rebuild Chicago’s infrastructure and create 30,000 jobs.

    via Chicago Sun-Times.

    O’Hare.

    It’s almost as an afterthought it mentions some of the other projects, the story’s nearly last paragraph:

    Other projects include: fixing 26 miles of CTA slow zones and renovating, repairing or rebuilding 100 CTA stations over the next ten years; building a new Green Line station at 22nd and Cermak; acquiring 180 acres of park land over five years and building 12 new parks, 20 new playgrounds, and eight artificial turf fields; building a new Malcolm X College and a new classroom building at Olive-Harvey College.

    Companies will come to Chicago because of O’Hare.  People will want to live here because of O’Hare.

    Rahm’s not wrong to make the comparisons to rebuilding after the Chicago Fire.  The Chicago Fire permitted the city to change the entire layout of the downtown area, build Grant Park, move the stockyards, and become a the Midwest rail transportation center for the country.  St. Louis could have easily bested Chicago due to it’s Mississippi River and centralized rail center location.  It was the Chicago Fire that really permitted Chicago to become what it was… not St. Louis.

    Airplanes are today’s rail cars.

    Miami International put together an interesting document which ranks airports for 2010:

    NATIONALLY

    • Total Passengers  –  O’Hare  is 2nd
    • International Passengers  –  O’Hare is 5th
    • Total Cargo  –  O’Hare is 5th
    • Total Freight  –  O’Hare is 5th
    • International Freight  –  O’Hare is 4th
    • Total Aircraft Movements  –  O’Hare is 2nd

    O’Hare is the lifeline we need to dig out of the hole we’ve (Daley’s) made for ourselves.  It’s right to prepare O’Hare for the next 50 years of service when we’re going to ask more of it.

    The plan’s not perfect.  But perfect if the enemy of good.

  • Most Bedbug Infested Cities

    Orkin announced its top 50 bed bug cities for the past year and several of them are popular spring break destinations. The following cities are ranked in order of the number of bed bug treatments Orkin performed from January to December 2011.

    via Chicago Tribune.

    Thoroughly revolted that we’re number 2.

  • At Least 10 Dead, Dozens Wounded In Weekend Violence

    A bizarre weekend where the high exceeded 80 degrees also brought a rash of violence across Chicago, which left at least 10 people dead and some 40 others wounded.

    via CBS Chicago.

    There’s no end in sight.  CPD is so undermanned that little can be done.

    Whatever the Mayor’s is doing, it’s not working.