Progress Illinois

Yesterday, Fox Chicago's Dane Placko revealed how city workers hurry each week to beautify the Chicago locations that get selected for Mayor Daley's press conferences -- even going so far as to spray brown shrubs "with green paint."  Why the constant scramble?  Because the mayor "is notorious for keeping notes when he sees something he doesn't like."

But it's not just downed trees and graffiti that Daley complains about.  Sometimes it's the community members themselves. Around the time that developers were eyeing the soon-to-be-demolished Stateway Gardens public housing development, Chicago police officers were tasked with clearing south State Street of "loiterers," as Jamie Kalven (my father) reported back in March 2003:

[T]he presence of poor African-Americans on one-and-a-half blocks of State Street—the sight of which is said to have upset the Mayor—has been treated at the highest levels of the [Chicago Police Department] as a major priority requiring the mobilization of multiple divisions. [...] An officer in the Public Housing Section described it as “overkill.” It’s not a matter of law enforcement, he said, it’s a matter of “pleasing the boss”—the Mayor.

Yesterday, I noted that 43rd Ward Committeeman Michele Smith is gearing up to give incumbent Ald. Vi Daley a run for her money.  Smith and Daley both began June with $200,000 cash-on-hand.  But there may be another player in that race.  Attorney Rafael Vargas is kicking off his campaign tonight and campaign finance records show that he had $150,000 in the bank as of July 1.  Of that amount, $125,000 came in the form of loans, including $80,000 from two of his colleagues at the law firm Futterman Howard Ashley Watkins & Weltman (the firm that is challenging Illinois' transit funding on the grounds that it discriminates against minority passengers).  To learn more, check out his bio and campaign website.