A.D. Q&A with A.D. Quig

Chicago Public Schools families have logged four days of canceled classes and counting this month. Citing the December COVID surge, the botched rollout of take-home testing over the holidays, and low numbers of families opting for their kids to be regularly tested or to get their shot, the Chicago Teachers Union voted last Tuesday to work remotely through January 18. The city called that vote an illegal work stoppage. The district canceled classes and blocked union members from accessing their work. This is the third standoff Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has had with the union. The mayor and her public health commissioner and CPS CEO Pedro Martinez have insisted schools are just as safe as, or even safer than, staying home.

This week's guest, Stacy Davis Gates, the vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union, responds to the mayor’s charge that the work stoppage is a political play. She also discusses whether this learning interruption will send CPS families packing for private schools or the suburbs, her own family’s experience of instability in the district and her possible interest in running for mayor in 2023.

Chicago is poised to end 2021 with more than 800 homicides, the most violent year in a quarter century. Discussing the rising violence is Susan Lee, chief of strategy and policy at Chicago CRED – an anti-gun violence organization. CRED works with men at risk – of being shooting victims or becoming a shooter themselves. It connects them with cognitive behavioral therapy, life coaching and job opportunities, conducts street outreach to defuse conflict and broker peace agreements between rivals, and advocates for more funding for programs like theirs. Preliminary studies suggest CRED and similar organizations, like READI and Communities Partnering for Peace, are working. A Northwestern University analysis of CRED’s impact starting in 2019 shows program participants were potentially 50% less likely to be shot and and 48% less likely to be arrested. That work is, again, preliminary, but in a span of crime like Chicago’s experienced recently, it's worth doubling down on, Lee argues.

A.D. Quig talked with Lee on Dec. 13 not only about her work at CRED, but also her brief time as Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s deputy mayor for public safety. Lee left after a little over a year amid a rash of other high-profile exits in the city’s public safety space, and has since been critical of the city’s response to the spike in homicides and shootings. Lee talks about what she believes is driving that surge, how it compares with – and outstrips – other big cities, and what a shallow bench of public safety policymakers means, long term. Lee also discusses why she believes 2022 is a turning point year, as the city invests tens of millions in anti-violence efforts.

After roughly three years of upending the Cook County Assessor’s office, Fritz Kaegi is in re-election mode. He’s responsible for setting the values for 1.8 million parcels across the county, which help determine local property tax bills. He came into office on an ethics crusade, pledging to end patronage while also fundamentally rejiggering how the office values big commercial buildings. He’s got early reports that indicate his values are closer to the mark. But politics is never that simple, and he’s got challenges on multiple fronts. One is an opponent in June’s democratic primary, Kari Steele, who argues his reforms have destabilized the business environment. He’s facing similar criticism from some big building owners who have seen assessed values jump in some cases by more than 70 percent, putting a bigger share of the county’s property tax burden on their shoulders. And he’s seeing some of his numbers get knocked down by the Board of Review, a three-member body that hears property tax appeals. Kaegi’s walking a fine line with the BOR. He’s criticized their practices – saying they’ve undone a surprising number of his decisions compared to other jurisdictions – and their policies, including that members haven’t barred donations from property tax attorneys. This episode digs into why, despite those criticisms, Kaegi won’t be using his bully pulpit to elect other like-minded officials to the Board of Review. A.D. Quig spoke to the Cook County Assessor on December 9, fresh off a hearing with the Chicago City Council’s Finance Committee. That hearing was called by an alderman who said Kaegi engineered “a deliberate shift of tax burden” that was harming economic activity in the county. But it ended up as a lovefest. A.D.'s conversation with Kaegi starts there.

On this week's episode of A.D. Q&A, Dr. Emily Landon, a professor and the medical director for infection prevention and control at UChicago Medicine, describes what we know – and don't yet know – about omicron. "On paper, it looks like a superpredator," Landon says of the variant, which appears more transmissible and less susceptible to vaccines. It will take days or weeks to know how it affects more vaccinated populations. "What we need to know is how fast this spreads and how well it does in, basically, a cage match against delta. Then how effective vaccines really are with it." Ideally, omicron may be very spreadable and include a sickness equivalent to the cold, giving plenty of people natural immunity. But right now, "we really don't know" if omicron will be a superpredator, a "nothingburger," or more likely, Landon says, something in between. Landon discusses what the new variant may mean for the return to the office many hoped for at the start of 2022. She also shares what grade she’d give Gov. Pritzker for his handling of the virus, areas where they’ve disagreed, and why she still thinks hosting Lollapalooza the way the city did was a bad idea.

Congressman Adam Kinzinger of Illinois has been a national media fixture for more than a year – a Republican ushered into the U.S. House during the Tea Party wave, he turned into a vocal critic of President Donald Trump and “The Big Lie” about election fraud. He was one of ten Republicans who voted to impeach Trump and one of only two to create a special committee to investigate the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. More recently, he was one of only 13 to vote for the infrastructure bill.

Kinzinger has long been rumored to want to run for higher office. He threw jet fuel on those rumors when he announced in late October that he wouldn’t be running for the House again. Now the speculation centers around whether he’ll run for U.S. Senate, Illinois governor, or even President. A.D. Quig talks with Kinzinger about what’s next for “Country First,” his political action committee that’s raising money and making endorsements across the country, his thoughts on whether the Senate is as toxic as the House, and as you might’ve heard last week, how he thinks he would fare in the governor’s race. Kinzinger addresses all of that, plus whether fences have been mended with the family members that disowned him, whether corporate America is sticking to its political promises, and what the Virginia gubernatorial race tells us about the GOP’s embrace of Trump.

While we’re thinking about big Thanksgiving meals, few folks in Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration have more on their plates than Samir Mayekar, deputy mayor for economic and neighborhood development, a.k.a. the mayor’s business guy. He’s a Day One Lightfooter who came from the tech world, running a Bronzeville-based lithium battery materials startup called NanoGraf. Now he’s the go-to in the administration on a series of key agenda items: the Chicago casino, the city’s post-COVID recovery, development programs like Invest South West, and keeping a watchful eye on the city’s growth sectors like film, life sciences, and food innovation. It’s a lot to juggle, made all the more difficult during a pandemic that has at times made the Loop a shadow of what it once was, hobbled tourism and transit, and contributed to an increase in crime levels the city hasn’t seen since the 90s. A.D. Quig talked to Mayekar about all of that, plus the Bears’ future in Chicago, Mayekar’s recent time on paternity leave, and a “lasagna” of programs to help struggling Loop buildings find new life.

In the latest census, the overall share of the Latino population across Illinois grew to 18.2 percent, up from 15.8 percent a decade ago. Their share of the voting-age population grew to 11.2 percent, up from 8 percent. Meanwhile, Chicago has been solidified as a city roughly equally divided between white, Black and Latino people. With Chicago’s Black population on the decline, Latinos are now the second-largest racial or ethnic group, and could surpass the city’s white population in the coming decades. With that in mind, Latino groups and elected officials are pushing for more representation--whether it’s a lawsuit challenging the number of Latino-influence districts in the Illinois General Assembly, aldermen pressing for more majority Latino wards and Latinos in the top levels of government, or a new Latino influence district in Congress. A.D. Quig discussed the current state of play with Jaime Dominguez, an associate professor at Northwestern University who focuses on race and ethnicity, urban, Latino, and Chicago politics. They discussed the shifting ideological dynamics and the balance of power in the City Council, how the grip of the Democratic Party has slipped among Latino voters nationally, and the difference between symbolic and substantive representation of Latinos.

After more than a decade away, Pedro Martinez rejoined Chicago Public Schools as CEO with an overflowing inbox. A safe reopening amid the pandemic was first and foremost, but testing was low, and so was the number of eligible kids who were fully vaccinated. There were kids who couldn’t get to school, thanks to a shortage of bus drivers. And there were dirty classrooms, thanks to a shortage of custodians. A.D. Quig spoke with Martinez on Nov. 3 – before the departure of CPS’ facilities chief over those dirty classroom, and before the district announced Nov. 12 would be a day off so CPS families and kids aged 5-11 could get their COVID vaccine. COVID aside, Martinez needs to address continued falling enrollment, relations with the Chicago Teachers Union after the 2019 strike and a budget that faces an uncertain future after federal relief dollars run out. And there’s more to do. Building on what he did running one of San Antonio’s school districts, Martinez hinted he wants to relieve pressure on CPS’ booming magnet schools – and offer better options to kids closer to their homes. Following reported abuses at the Chicago Park District, and years after CPS weathered its own sexual abuse scandal, he says he wants to get tougher laws and reporting requirements in place. He also wants to restore trust with the union, says Mayor Lori Lightfoot gets a bad rap, and argues the fight over an elected school board is not over.

As Chicago closes the book on a pandemic-fueled violent summer, Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx explains her progressive approach to prosecutions: fewer felony drug and shoplifting charges, and more emphasis on gun violence. Foxx, the county's lead prosecutor, goes in-depth on the controversies that have kept her office in the headlines, including the sometimes-rocky relationship with city and suburban police, a public disagreement with Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Superintendent David Brown on the initial charging decision in a recent West Side shooting case and Foxx's ongoing commitment to bail reform.

As the Chicago City Council takes up Mayor Lori Lightfoot's $16.7 billion budget proposal, A.D. Quig asks, Does this budget set the city up for a roaring recovery? Are we spending money on the right programs? She discusses the budget's economic implications with Justin Marlowe, Professor at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy and associate director of the school's Center for Municipal Finance. He is an expert with UChicago's Urban Network.