The Fraternal Order of Police, Lodge 7, which represents most rank-and-file cops, said it planned on filing a grievance over the error so that the city would have to pay that interest charge instead of workers.

The flub is hitting Tier 2 members of the Policemen’s Annuity and Benefit Fund of Chicago, those who started working for the CPD on or after Jan. 1, 2011. Those members make up roughly half of the more than 12,000 active members of the fund. Sworn officers contribute 9% of their salary to their pension, which is automatically withdrawn from paychecks.

PABF, in a letter to members, said the error was because of a “fiscal year discrepancy” with the city.

“This letter serves to inform you of a payment shortfall in your pension contributions,” the message from PABF Executive Director Kevin Reichart reads. “Due to a fiscal year discrepancy with the City of Chicago, the retroactive salary contract payment you received 1/1/2022 was counted by the City toward your 2022 annual salary cap.”

As part of the new contract for Chicago police officers approved by the City Council in late 2023, union members received a 2.5% base salary increase that applied retroactively to the start of 2022.

“The city did not withhold the correct 9% of members’ salary and duty availability pay for the required payment,” according to a post on the fund’s website.

Reichart did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the city’s Finance Department.

Per state law, the fund “must receive the required contributions,” plus 3% interest. Members are asked to sign a letter of acknowledgement and cut a check to the PABF for the salary cap correction.

Failure to pay up by Aug. 31 means that original amount — plus interest — would be withheld from pensioners’ annuity payments when they retire. The union says the charge for some members is as low as about $80, and for others as high as $1,300.

“I know nobody likes to get a bill, and it should have never happened,” FOP President John Catanzara said in a video posted to the union’s YouTube page Monday. He blamed “incompetence” in CPD’s Finance Department and chastised the pension fund for not bringing the issue to the members’ attention earlier.

The union will be filing a class-action grievance demanding the city pay the 3% interest charge “that the pension fund is looking to hammer our officers with,” Catanzara said.

Given that those workers paid state and federal income tax on those earnings, Catanzara said the city should also refund the equivalent of the taxes charged on that income.

“I don’t know where this all ends up. It’s pretty disappointing where we’re at with this department and this administration,” Catanzara said.

The PABF is among the lowest-funded city pension funds, with enough assets to cover 21.76% of its obligations through the end of 2022.

aquig@chicagotribune.com

jgorner@chicagotribune.com

But after anti-war, pro-Palestinian demonstrations roiled college campuses this spring and led to clashes between protesters and police, the specter of the chaos surrounding that summer’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago looms as the party returns in August to mark the renomination of President Joe Biden.

To be sure, the landscape is vastly different than it was in the late 1960s, even amid resurgent political violence driven predominantly by the far right. Nevertheless, the influx of potentially tens of thousands of protesters into Chicago during the Aug. 19-22 convention, some of whom have vowed to take to the streets without city permits, raises questions about how prepared Chicago police are for any ensuing unrest.

While similar concerns arose ahead of the last Chicago DNC in 1996, as well as the NATO summit in 2012, divisions among the Democratic coalition are deeper this year, with progressives upset over Biden’s ongoing support for Israel in its war against Hamas as well as his recent order clamping down on migrant crossings at the southern border.

Policing has changed substantially over the past several decades, especially for large gatherings such as national political conventions.

Still, with the whole world watching Chicago once again, avoiding any echoes of 1968 — when blue-helmeted officers beat protesting Yippies and working journalists alike in what a government report later termed a “police riot” — will be an important test for a department that remains under a federal consent decree over its long-running “pattern and practice” of civil rights violations.

In the lead-up to this year’s convention, organizers and police officials have downplayed concerns about possible unrest and sought to dispel any comparisons to the events that culminated in the infamous “Battle of Michigan Avenue.”

“This will not be 1968,” said Chicago police Superintendent Larry Snelling while acknowledging he understands the comparison given national protests of the Israel-Hamas war. “Our response as a Chicago Police Department will be a lot more deliberate … a lot more controlled because our officers are being trained in the best way possible to respond to any level of civil unrest.”

It’s not just the Police Department that has a lot riding on a peaceful convention.

The political stakes are high, both for Biden as he seeks to again defeat former Republican President Donald Trump and for local Democrats who will play prominent roles at the party gathering and in managing the situation outside.

That’s particularly true for Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who was pivotal in bringing the convention to Chicago and will use the event to elevate his national profile as a key Biden surrogate and potential future White House contender, as well as Mayor Brandon Johnson, who has perhaps a greater affinity with those planning to protest than with the police under his command who are charged with keeping order.

“If you’re Biden and the Democratic Party and the mayor of Chicago, you just want peace and calm and stability,” said Andrew Baer, a University of Alabama at Birmingham history professor who studies policing and social movements. “You don’t want the bad optics of either suppressing a protest or the protest embarrassing the coronation of Biden.”

Despite changes in both policing practices and the political environment, “there’s clearly a through line from ’68, through the (Cmdr. Jon) Burge era, into the 2000s and up to the present day,” said Baer, author of “Beyond the Usual Beating: The Jon Burge Police Torture Scandal and Social Movements for Police Accountability in Chicago.”

Today, as then, there is a sense among many police of feeling “misunderstood and kind of unnecessarily tampered with” by outside forces, Baer said.

“That degree of always-simmering resentment felt by police rank and file, and the Fraternal Order of Police and the unions, and the supervisors and administrators of the Police Department always makes for a potentially explosive environment, whether it’s at a street arrest or a public protest or national political convention,” he said.

‘2020 snuck up on us’

One need not look all the way back to 1968 to see what can go wrong when hordes of protesters and lines of cops meet in the streets.

Indeed, the training Snelling’s officers have been undergoing ahead of the DNC was spurred not only by Chicago’s selection as the host city but also by the department’s response to widespread civil unrest in 2020.

Officers in Chicago were unprepared for the simultaneous and unpredictable nature of large protests and chaos that erupted over three days after George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer in late May of that year. While the department improved its response to other incidents in the weeks that followed, protests over the city’s Christopher Columbus statues and also high-profile police shootings highlighted similar struggles.

“2020 snuck up on us,” Snelling acknowledged in a recent Tribune interview. “Let’s tell the cold, hard truth. We did not have the level of preparedness to deal with something that was that random that popped up on us.”

The department is applying lessons learned from the 2020 response in preparation for the DNC, Snelling said.

While CPD took issue with some of the findings in a recent inspector general report on policy and training updates since the 2020 unrest, Snelling said any use of force or pepper spray during the DNC would be “proportional” to the reality on the ground.

“We’re not just going to walk in and spray a crowd of people. Even if they’re breaking the law, if they’re peaceful, we’re not going to use OC (pepper) spray,” Snelling said. “Now, if we have an all-out fight, where people are attacking police officers, are attacking each other, and we need to use OC spray, that call will be made by a higher authority based on the totality of circumstances and what’s occurring in the field in that time.”

The situation on the ground should be much different in August for a number of reasons, not least of which is the major role the U.S. Secret Service will play in controlling the areas surrounding the major convention venues, the United Center and McCormick Place.

Like every major party convention since 2000, this summer’s DNC — along with the Republican National Convention a month earlier in Milwaukee — is designated a National Special Security Event, making the Secret Service the lead agency for security planning. Each convention host city also received $75 million from Congress to help cover equipment and other security costs.

“We’ve got a tremendous working relationship with Chicago police, as well as a multitude of other agencies, both local and federal, that will be contributing to this whole-of-government approach that we’re taking,” Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle told reporters during a visit last week that included tours of the convention venues.

Outside the yet-to-be-finalized security zones around the venues, where most if not all the protests are expected to take place, Chicago police will be running the show, however. The convention will come near the end of what are typically more violent summer months as well as after large-scale events like Lollapalooza and the NASCAR street race.

In an effort to relieve some of the tension building ahead of the DNC, lawyers for the Johnson administration indicated in federal court Thursday they were preparing to offer a deal to protesters who’d sued the city over its alleged efforts to block marches within “sight and sound” of the convention venue.

While private negotiations remain ongoing, the city indicated protesters would be offered a “United Center-adjacent route.”

Regardless of the outcome of those discussions, the city will have to manage the movement of an estimated 50,000 delegates, staff and public officials to and from the convention venues south of downtown and on the West Side, in addition to handling security checkpoints and traffic rerouting to accommodate Biden, who is expected to attend the convention on the final day.

CPD’s task of working with other organizations and maintaining order will come with the city under a national and international spotlight it didn’t have to contend with in 2020 when protests were taking place across the country, said Cara Hendrickson, the former chief of the Illinois attorney general’s public interest division, where she helped negotiate the consent decree.

“The way CPD and other law enforcement agencies respond will be very visible to Chicagoans and the world,” she said. “It’s a very public test of law enforcement’s current ability to keep people safe.”

Trying to assure the public

Despite assurances of readiness from the top brass, one veteran CPD supervisor, speaking on a condition of anonymity for concern of reprisal, gave a blunt assessment of the department’s readiness to tamp down on summer gun violence on top of its DNC responsibilities.

“Our strategy is eight hours ahead, right?” the supervisor told the Tribune in mid-May. “It’s very short-term and there’s no long-term planning to this, but if you ask them then they’ll say there is, but they won’t tell you what.”

In 1968, of course, Mayor Richard J. Daley also sought to assure the public and his fellow Democrats the situation in Chicago would be under control, though he focused more on maintaining order than allowing room for dissenting voices.

That year’s gathering at the International Amphitheatre in the New City neighborhood came amid widespread protests over the Vietnam War, a backlash so strong that President Lyndon Johnson chose not to seek reelection. It also came just months after the assassination of Democratic presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy and violent uprisings that April in Chicago and elsewhere in the wake of the Rev. Martin Luther King’s assassination.

“Leading in, Daley was talking about how he was going to uphold law and order in Chicago,” said Heather Hendershot, a Northwestern University communications professor and author of the recent book “When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America.”

While Daley was “Mr. Democrat,” his rhetoric echoed that of GOP nominee Richard Nixon, whose campaign capitalized on the ensuing disorder in Chicago to win in November, Hendershot said.

“(Daley) sent out this message that, ‘We are prepared to do whatever we have to do to maintain order in Chicago. We will keep our city safe,’ this kind of thing,” she said. “And people knew there was going to be a lot of violence, and it really scared a lot of people away.”

The result was a crowd of only about 10,000 predominantly white protesters during the 1968 DNC, Hendershot said, a group that was outnumbered by police and members of the National Guard.

The protests this year could be substantially larger, Hendershot said, pointing to the more than 100,000 people who protested President George W. Bush and the Iraq War during the 2004 RNC in New York.

Somewhat encouraging, though, is that this year Johnson and police officials are “not releasing a bunch of press releases to scare people or to say, ‘We’re going to have law and order,’” she said. “They will occasionally say something like, ‘We will engage in constitutional policing, which, obviously, is what all policing should be.”

‘Whac-A-Mole’

But what policing should be doesn’t always match reality when officers are confronted with large groups of protesters in unpredictable settings.

The George Floyd protests in 2020 created a no-win for cops, protesters and nearby businesses, according to three separate reports — CPD’s own after-action report, a scathing probe by the city’s inspector general, and a 464-page special report covering the summer’s incidents from the independent monitoring team responsible for tracking the city’s progress in the court-ordered consent decree.

Cops were left vulnerable, exhausted and under-resourced, in part because the department had not prepared for that scale of unrest since 2012, when Chicago hosted the NATO summit.

Officers struggled to control disorganized crowds and distinguish between protesters protected under the First Amendment and those responsible for looting, vandalism or assaulting cops. Many cops were deployed without protective gear, radios or bullhorns to communicate dispersal orders. At times, equipment failed in the field during lengthy shifts. Some cops were left without adequate or timely transportation to transfer arrestees or move other cops to a place to rest, use restrooms, eat or drink.

One officer described the department’s strategy during the George Floyd protests as Whac-A-Mole, with self-guided platoons of officers putting out metaphorical fires while still leaving others smoldering.

Accountability measures lapsed as well. Some officers were unfamiliar with the department’s mass arrest policies, resulting in some arrestees suspected of looting, arson or violence being released or having charges dropped. Some officers also covered or removed their name tags or badges, turned off their body-worn cameras, were deployed without them or had the camera batteries die on them in the field.

The independent monitoring team reported hearing from community members that “officers were verbally abusive toward them; pushed and shoved them; tackled them to the ground; pushed them down stairs; pulled their hair; struck them with batons, fists, or other nearby objects; hit them after they were ‘kettled’ with nowhere to go or after being handcuffed; and sprayed them with pepper spray (OC spray) without reason.”

Misconduct settlements stemming from the protests have been costly for taxpayers.

On top of tens of millions spent on overtime and damage to local businesses, a WTTW analysis found the city had paid $5.6 for settlements and attorney fees. As of April, 32 lawsuits related to officer misconduct had been paid out. Thirteen were pending in federal court.

Following 2020, CPD has been “training, working, preparing, revising orders,” and working with parties involved in the consent decree to update mass arrest and use of force policies, Snelling said. The department is also working to ensure officers “get as much time off as possible” in the weeks leading up to the DNC to ensure “we have the maximum manpower that we can have out there” while not pulling officers from the city’s most violent neighborhood beats.

Command staff members have been through “multiple days of training for field force operations” to know how to guide manpower. The department has set aside 1,370 “flex” body cameras across several area offices, purchased 40 passenger vans, and additional radios to distribute to each police district.

Lessons of 2020

Even so, the city’s inspector general recently highlighted shortcomings in those plans, including opaque written policies about the use of pepper spray and kettling, which is the act of corralling crowds into a closed space. The city’s crowd-control policies also contain “outdated” theories that assume bad actors are present and that people in mass gatherings are inclined to act like a mob, the IG said.

Snelling denied the department used kettling tactics but nonetheless said the lessons of 2020 are being applied to this summer’s preparations.

DNC training has already been tested at protests, including at several college campuses across the city, Snelling said, noting that most “ended with no violence.”

“Even in situations where we’ve had to make arrests, we gave these people multiple, multiple opportunities to voluntarily comply and leave,” Snelling said. “Only as a last resort we made arrests.”

CPD on Thursday invited members of the press to McCormick Place to observe about 150 officers take part in training exercises tailored for the expected protests and potential unrest during the DNC. Drills focused on defensive tactics, crowd control and medical aid, as well as officer wellness.

Snelling said the department also will use a “line relief” tactic to provide cops reprieves when needed.

“These are human beings who are standing out here, having insults hurled at them, probably things thrown at them,” Snelling said Thursday. “At some point, the human nature kicks in and the possibility or the likelihood of making a mistake becomes greater. This is why now we have that line relief where we can take those officers off the front line and bring in a fresh batch of officers who can deal with the situation.”

Given the possibility of mass arrests, officers also are receiving training on properly processing suspects taken into custody in potentially volatile situations.

Will there be mass arrests?

But some planning to protest the convention are taking issue with comments Snelling made at a separate media briefing earlier last week.

“First Amendment protection is only there if you’re not committing a crime,” Snelling said. “You can be acting out peacefully and still breaking the law.”

Hatem Abudayyeh, executive director of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, said after a court hearing Thursday that Snelling’s words were “very concerning.”

“This sounds like nothing more than a threat from a police department that has a history of violence against protesters,” said Abudayyeh, whose group is one of the organizations suing the city over its previous plans to keep protesters away from the main convention sites.

Civil liberties advocates also have taken issue with the department’s latest policy on mass arrests. In April, a coalition of the community groups that triggered the consent decree asked the judge overseeing the agreement to block the Police Department from implementing the mass arrest policy drafted earlier this year.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois and other groups argue the new proposal is overly broad, fails to make proper accommodations for people with disabilities and non-English speakers, and marks a step back from a First Amendment policy negotiated after the “violent and unconstitutional response” to the 2020 protests, according to the filing.

The groups are asking Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer to intervene swiftly because “CPD officers are already being trained on the infirm policy for the DNC.”

Meanwhile, Hendrickson, now the executive director of the public interest group Impact for Equity, notes that police leaders will have the complex task of not only coordinating with other city departments but other law enforcement entities.

CPD “is going to be called upon to make difficult judgment calls rapidly, in real time, over the course of many days or weeks. And understanding who has responsibility for making those decisions, who is the backup to the person who has the responsibility to make those decisions if they’re not available. … I don’t know the answers to those questions at this point,” Hendrickson said.

Snelling said plans are still being worked out for the role outside agencies — the National Guard, the Cook County sheriff’s office, Illinois State Police or other local police departments — would play, but said they would not be charged with managing crowds.

“We want to put them in other areas where they can protect certain venues,” he said. “That frees up Chicago police officers who have been very well trained to go out there and deal with the possibility of civil unrest.”

‘We’re ready’

If the past is precedent, Johnson — an organizer who has said he values demonstrations — would be directly in charge of making major decisions on how to respond to potential unrest.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot made the final call to raise downtown bridges, use pepper spray, enact a citywide curfew, and call in the National Guard during the 2020 protests. Johnson has repeatedly said violence or vandalism would not be tolerated, but has emphasized “the fundamental right of our democracy, the First Amendment, is protected.”

Snelling said he is in “constant contact” about preparations with Johnson and his deputy mayor for community safety, Garien Gatewood. Raising bridges and enacting curfews in 2020 were a response to riot activity, not protected First Amendment protests, he said.

“We will not allow people to come here and destroy our city,” Snelling said. “We’re ready. We’re prepared to deal with whatever comes our way. But we would love for everything to end peacefully. Do we expect that that’s going to happen? No. That’s our wish.”

On the political side, Democrats have been quick to voice their support for Chicago police and the larger security effort — and to shift the focus to the GOP convention in Milwaukee, which could attract some of the same right-wing groups that instigated the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

The Democratic National Convention Committee declined to make convention chair Minyon Moore available for an interview. But in a statement, convention spokeswoman Emily Soong echoed what organizers have been saying for months in response to questions about protests and possible disruptions:

“Peaceful protest has been a fixture of political conventions for decades, and while Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans stoke political violence, we will continue to support the ongoing security coordination at all levels of government to keep the city safe for delegates, visitors, media, and all Chicagoans, including those exercising their right to make their voices heard.”

For Pritzker, who courted the convention before the deadly Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel sparked a war that has divided Democrats, the gathering is a chance to show his mettle on the national stage, said Chris Mooney, an emeritus professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

That will be particularly true in the face of possible mass protests, he said.

“Even though he … didn’t expect this, didn’t think of it when he was lobbying for this (convention), he has earned himself the opportunity to show how excellent he is as a public leader,” Mooney said.

Chicago Tribune’s Jake Sheridan contributed. 

While the report from Inspector General Deborah Witzburg acknowledged several of the department’s strides — improving its written policies and procedures after the fumbled response to unrest in 2020 — it highlighted a lack of community input in those policies and “outdated concepts and tactics” in CPD’s plans to manage crowds.

CPD officials shot back that the report is “based only on documents” and did not include interviews or observation of training sessions in advance of the DNC. The Police Department disagreed with several findings, arguing it had worked with the parties overseeing compliance with the consent decree to put those updated policies together.

Thursday’s 50-page inquiry follows up on a scathing 2021 review of the department’s actions during the unrest in the summer of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd.

That report found CPD “was under-equipped and unprepared to respond to the scale of the protests” and “identified failures within intelligence assessment, major event planning, field communication and operation, administrative systems, and, most significantly, from CPD’s senior leadership.”

That lack of preparedness endangered cops and protesters and allowed some of those accused of serious crimes to evade arrest or accountability, the review and CPD’s own after-action report concluded.

In May 2020, as looting and violence flared up across the city, the Police Department designated a parking lot near Guaranteed Rate Field as its “mobilization center.” Resources for officers were far from adequate, though.

Cops were ordered to start their tours of duty at the parking lot instead of their normal district station, hindering them from picking up certain pieces of equipment. As many as four officers had to share a single radio, and none of the officers assigned to the mobilization center had a body-worn camera — “a must” for the 2024 DNC, police Superintendent Larry Snelling told the Tribune Thursday.

CPD leaders at the mobilization center didn’t have a roster of personnel assigned to be there, so they relied on rank-and-file cops to form their own “platoons” to be dispatched across the city. One CPD deputy chief said the command structure in the parking lot was “sketchy.”

In the four years since, the IG acknowledged CPD improved its planning with other city departments to respond to large-scale events, practiced for those events and beefed up its inventory of cameras, encrypted radios and passenger vans to transport officers during emergencies.

“There’s better infrastructure in place for a coordinated city response, interdepartmental plans, clarity in the new proposed policies around mass arrest procedures and use of force reporting,”  Witzburg told the Tribune. “I also think there are some areas of concern, candidly.”

For one, the department is already training members on policies while it is still gathering community input, she said. The department also “lacks comprehensive guidance” for roll calls during a mass event — where the department should be communicating clear and consistent information to cops about to take to the street, Witzburg said.

The report says some of the city’s training materials related to crowd responses rely on old theories from the 1960s and 1990s that assume crowds have a tendency to affect individuals negatively and can lead to conflictual or criminal behavior. That belief — along with an assumption that bad actors are present — can risk “inducing or escalating” CPD’s response, the report said. More updated theories caution that police response can trigger people in the crowd to act more resistant and disorderly.

CPD’s guidance also “continues to permit the use of OC spray on passive resistors in a mass gathering setting,” she said, while other departments, like Philadelphia, “have very explicit guidance” that pepper spray “shall not be used” in a First Amendment gathering against “passive resistors.”

Department policy also lacks specifics about when the department can use corralling tactics sometimes known as kettling, Witzburg said. “Neither do they say that they are prohibited, nor do they offer guidance on when they might be permitted,” she said.

“We don’t do kettling,” Snelling said. The department uses “encirclement” to either rescue someone injured within a crowd or apprehend a target of arrest, he said.

“When we have a group of peaceful protesters who are sitting, and even if they’re breaking the law, we do not spray those people. … We have a different way of removing those people without using that level of force,” Snelling said. “If we have an all-out fight where people are attacking police officers or attacking each other and we need to use OC (pepper) spray, that call will be made by a higher authority based on the totality of circumstances and what’s occurring in the field.”

CPD’s response also said department training — including a recent course from the Federal Emergency Management Agency — includes the more updated and nuanced crowd behavior theories.

In 2020, the IG found cops were deployed without cameras, covered them up, had cameras with batteries run low or depleted after being deployed for so long, or didn’t turn them on, “leaving member-civilian interactions to go unrecorded or unreported.” That meant identifying cops accused of misconduct or corroborating conflicting narratives “were severely compromised,” the IG found. In some cases, cops couldn’t pick up cameras from their home districts.

Since then, the department has set aside 1,370 “flex” body cameras across several area offices and purchased 40 passenger vans. In 2020, several cop cars were smashed or had their tires slashed, stranding officers or making it difficult to transport arrestees.

At an unrelated news conference Thursday, Mayor Brandon Johnson said he had not seen the report but said the city “is committed to constitutional policing.”

“Look, we’re still assessing and reviewing all of our safety provisions and plans for the DNC. And again, keep in mind, we’re going to work with the Secret Service and other local law enforcement agencies to ensure a peaceful but yet energetic convention,” Johnson said. “I’m confident that we’ll be prepared and ready when the day comes.”

Tribune reporter Alice Yin contributed.

aquig@chicagotribune.com

scharles@chicagotribune.com

The request from the AG’s Charitable Trust Bureau earlier this month follows Tribune reporting last month about a potential conflict of interest and spending issues at the nonprofit foundation while it was pursuing an expanded partnership with the county’s public health system. In the process, foundation leaders spent nearly $80,000, entered into contracts and hired attorneys with ties to one of the board’s leaders, at times without the rest of the board’s approval, according to a memo prepared for the board by the law firm Riley Safer Holmes & Cancila.

A spokesperson for Attorney General Kwame Raoul said the office does not comment on potential or pending investigations.

But in a letter dated April 29 and obtained by the Tribune, the bureau asked for governing documents dating back to January 1, 2020; copies of policies, statements and waivers from officers, directors and key employees related to conflicts of interest; a copy of the Riley Safer memo and an explanation of why the firm was hired.

The board’s executive director, Sylvia Zaldivar, declined a Tribune request for comment. She denied impropriety in an interview last month and said the memo contained inaccuracies. Board Chair Joseph Flanagan declined an interview at the time, but said board members took “corporate governance matters very seriously.”

That partnership, a so-called master services agreement with Cook County Health, would have drastically changed the foundation’s current role from fundraiser to potential administrator of clinical trials or other direct programming involving the health system.

During negotiations, the memo said the board’s executive director contracted with vendors and law firms without proper board approval. One of those law firms, Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton, was paid $51,700 to negotiate with CCH, even though board secretary Gerald Haberkorn was, or was about to be, a partner at the firm.

The foundation also paid $27,800 to the Law Offices of Marc J. Lane for advice on the MSA even though the firm’s invoices “contained wholly inadequate descriptions of services provided by the firm,” and board members did not review or approve the hiring or payments.

In the January memo and a follow-up report in April obtained by the Tribune, Riley Safer said while Zaldivar produced a letter from Haberkorn to Flanagan disclosing his conflict of interest, they did not receive any documents laying out a full disclosure of the conflict to the board, an investigation of alternatives to avoid that conflict, or board action granting Haberkorn a waiver.

An updated report said foundation leadership also failed to provide documentation that justified payments for work to Marc J. Lane.

Bill Quinlan, an attorney, was one of the board members who originally requested that Riley Safer dig into the negotiations. Quinlan said he was concerned about a fast-moving shift in the foundation’s mission that he did not feel the board had been fully briefed on.

“We were taking on, conceptually, all this responsibility when we didn’t seem to have infrastructure in place and we hadn’t discussed it,” he said.

The findings of the Riley Safer report raised several red flags, Quinlan said, as did Zaldivar’s disagreement with its findings. He was unsurprised to see the AG’s letter.

The bureau’s job is to ensure donations to foundations are properly spent. It can request the foundation undertake specific changes to ensure compliance with the state’s charitable trust act, can enforce those changes in court, revoke the foundation’s charitable status, issue fines to the foundation or individual officers.

Quinlan said he and several other board members “are very concerned, they’re giving their reputations, their name, their efforts, and in many cases, their money, and they want to make sure it’s used in the best method, no one can claim we’re using money improperly.”

Danielle Stilz, another board member who pushed for the Riley Safer review, is similarly concerned. “I know ($80,000) doesn’t sound like a ton of money when talking about a hospital … but if you’re raising a total of $500,000 to $600,000 in unrestricted funds, that’s unacceptable in the nonprofit space,” Stilz said. “It’s a waste of money, money that’s supposed to go to the hospital.”

The probe has not touched Cook County Health, the public department that runs Stroger Hospital and other county medical facilities. “I am not aware of any requests made to CCH for information” from the attorney general, spokeswoman Alexandra Normington said Friday.

Though Cook County Health dropped plans for an MSA last summer, it did grant the foundation $1.5 million to administer the Provident Scholarship Program, which awards up to $20,000 to health care students who are from, and dedicated to serving, underrepresented communities in Cook County.

Asked whether the probe changed its plans for the scholarship, Normington said CCH requires a report about who was awarded scholarships at the end of the program, “and our contracts provide CCH the ability to request audits.  CCH staff are involved in the review and scoring of scholarship applicants using standardized criteria and evaluation matrix. We are confident that the allocated scholarship dollars will be awarded and disbursed appropriately.”

aquig@chicagotribune.com

After a lengthy and largely behind-the-scenes search, Tirrell Paxton, a deputy at the county’s Office of the Independent Inspector General, was formally unveiled as a special selection committee’s pick for the office’s new leader.

Paxton’s nomination will head to the Cook County Board’s Legislation and Intergovernmental Relations Committee. If approved by the committee and the full Cook County Board, his six-year term would begin in June.

The office investigates waste, fraud and abuse across county government, including at the Forest Preserves and Metropolitan Water Reclamation District. Its first — and last — permanent independent IG, Pat Blanchard, retired in October 2022. Since then, general counsel Steven Cyranoski has been serving on an interim basis.

The office has most recently been hunting down county employees suspected of federal Payroll Protection Program fraud. In past years, it investigated the scandal involving the removal of toilets from then-candidate J.B. Pritzker’s home in a “scheme” to receive a property tax break, nepotism and hints of patronage practices at the county’s Board of Review, and a Cook County commissioner pushing cops to scrap a friend’s parking ticket.

Paxton has worked at the office since 2010. He is currently deputy inspector general of the Compliance & Program Review Division, where he conducts investigations, program reviews and surveys.

Before joining the office, Paxton was an auditor and fraud investigator at Ernst & Young LLP, according to his inspector general’s office biography. He was also previously an associate attorney concentrating in bankruptcy law at DLA Piper, and a law clerk for Judge Ronald Barliant in the federal bankruptcy court.

Blanchard announced his exit years early to give the county a long runway to find his successor. But the already cumbersome selection process — which included two special committees and a national search — was delayed on multiple fronts.

The final pick was held up, at least in part, because the original ordinance mandated two commissioners from each political party serve on the selection committee. The county board only has one Republican, so commissioners had to tweak the rules last summer.

After the search committee made its recommendations, county officials deferred consideration until after the fall budget process and winter holidays, county general counsel Laura Lechowicz Felicione told the Tribune earlier this month.

Out of two final candidates, a special selection committee chose one last week in closed session. Paxton’s name was not revealed until Thursday. The office’s mandate could expand further after November: the Democratic nominee for Circuit Court clerk, Mariyana Spyropoulos, has proposed giving the OIIG oversight of that office.

Chicago Tribune’s Olivia Stevens contributed.

aquig@chicagotribune.com

The fine follows an inspector general investigation and a November probable cause finding from the board, which Conyears-Ervin was given the opportunity to rebut in the interim. In line with ethics board policy, Conyears-Ervin was not named.

“We have engaged in this process with seriousness and good faith, and are disappointed in today’s action,” Conyears-Ervin spokesman Brian Berg said in a written statement. “We are evaluating all options available to us, and remain confident that a fuller airing of the validity of these years old allegations and questionable actions of investigators will paint a fuller picture — and we look forward to that day. Until then, we will continue to respect what is supposed to be a confidential process.”

Monday’s fine comes on the heels of a separate $60,000 penalty levied against the treasurer by the same board last month. They found on “multiple occasions,” Conyears-Ervin violated her fiduciary duty, made unauthorized uses of city property and conducted prohibited political activities, according to a board summary.

The Tribune first reported on allegations made by former aides Tiffany Harper and Ashley Evans, who said they were retaliated against and ultimately fired after reporting the misconduct. Former Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration paid out a $100,000 settlement to the two, then fought for roughly two years to conceal the details of their whistleblower complaint.

Mayor Brandon Johnson released that information after taking office.

Separately, Chicago ethics leaders on Monday criticized Johnson for failing to fill vacancies on the city’s ethics board and an “abrupt” pullback from plans to tighten rules for contractors and candidates for city office.

William Conlon, the typically amiable chair of the seven-member Board of Ethics, criticized Johnson’s slow pace to fill two vacant spots on the board, which have been empty since July 2022 and March 2023.

Two other members’ terms will expire this summer. If those four positions aren’t filled before the end of July, the board will not have enough members to legally meet.

“As you can tell, we are still down two members, a task that can’t be that difficult,” Conlon said during Monday’s board meeting. “We have two members whose terms are set to expire at the end of July. Two clear-thinking, independent, thoughtful people who do their homework and are here participating every time. Why they have not been reappointed baffles me.”

Johnson spokesman Ronnie Reese said three candidates will be submitted for those board vacancies this month “with approval anticipated at the June City Council meeting.”

Steve Berlin, the board’s longtime executive director, added that he was “sad to report” there were “no current plans to hold a committee meeting or ethics committee hearing on the proposed amendments” to the city’s ethics ordinance.

Though ethics changes were legislative hallmarks of the early months of Johnson’s two predecessors, the mayor has not embraced any new changes to the city’s oversight rules. Without mayoral support, such changes typically wither on the vine in the City Council.

“I know that Ald. (Matt) Martin is disappointed in this as well,” Berlin said.

Martin, 47th, chair of the City Council Committee on Ethics and Government Oversight, took up the board’s proposed changes and said they would be a priority for passage this spring. Instead, the committee has canceled two scheduled meetings in recent months.

Martin told the Tribune he was “frustrated” about the board vacancies and confirmed there was no timeline to take up ethics reform.

“I don’t think that we’re yet in a place where there’s alignment across the committee and the mayor’s office,” regarding ethics ordinance amendments, Martin said, declining to comment on the misalignment. “So we’ll continue to work on that, but I don’t have a timeline for when we might be able to take those up.”

The mayor’s office did not comment on the amendments.

The board’s proposed changes — spurred in part by Tribune reporting — include barring contractors who work for aldermen from getting involved in any city decisions that benefit their own financial interests, or that benefit other clients or employers.

The changes would also “make clear that no candidate or political fundraising committee may, for example, send emails soliciting political contributions or campaign work to city employees or officials to their official city email addresses,” a response to Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s mayoral campaign sending emails to Chicago Public Schools staff seeking student interns.

Earlier this year, Johnson described those proposed reforms as “a positive step toward a more accountable city government,” but did not otherwise comment on his ethics priorities.

During Monday’s ethics board meeting, Bryan Zarou, policy chief for the Better Government Association, said there was an “abrupt” and “troubling” pullback of mayoral support from the ethics amendment ordinance and he had not received a clear explanation why.

Conlon described that as an “unfortunate surprise.”

In the meantime, Martin said his committee would hold hearings on inspector general findings and audits and potentially codify an old executive order banning lobbyists from donating to the mayor.

Four registered lobbyists were initially dinged by the board for donating to Johnson’s campaign. That violated a 2011 executive order signed by former Mayor Rahm Emanuel barring such donations.

The board found, though, it had no authority to enforce the order, nor did the city’s inspector general have power to formally investigate potential violations. The board dismissed the cases against those lobbyists.

While Johnson returned the donations and his campaign said the policy was “sound and necessary,” he said last month that codifying the rule is not something he’s “spent a lot of time thinking about,” according to WBEZ, and that he would “take another look at it.”

aquig@chicagotribune.com

As he approached his first anniversary in office, the freshman mayor whose political career began at the firebrand Chicago Teachers Union looked right at home before the adoring crowd of self-proclaimed troublemakers at the annual Labor Notes conference in April near O’Hare International Airport. During his speech to the group, Johnson commended the City Council’s controversial, razor-thin January endorsement of a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas  war.

“I’m also proud that the city of Chicago led the way the beginning this year of passing a resolution calling for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza,” he said. “And I’m so grateful that I got a chance to vote to break the tie.”

Outside, meanwhile, protesters were clashing with Rosemont cops. Hundreds of pro-Palestinian demonstrators banged on a police car to demand the release of one of them who had been detained.

Johnson, celebrating his newfound role as the boss of the nation’s third-largest city with a roomful of union bigwigs at the annual strategy session, was not the target of the rally-turned-skirmish by rank-and-file labor groups outside the event, the Labor for Palestine National Network said.

But the chorus of protesters singing the labor anthem “Which side are you on?” while fighting with baton-wielding officers illustrated a difficult reality for him one year into his term: How does a mayor who proved his bona fides through audacious organizing against the establishment set the tone for peaceful protests amid a swelling antiwar movement ahead of the Democratic National Convention’s arrival in Chicago this August?

As with other issues during Johnson’s first year, the question touches on the conundrum of his jump from underdog mayoral candidate to chief executive. His campaign caught fire because he vowed to fight the status quo. But to some, his administration now represents the status quo.

Like his fifth floor predecessors, Johnson has been thrown a series of curveballs over the past 12 months, making it tougher for him to find his footing at the outset as he’s up against a sharp learning curve in occupying the most powerful seat in Chicago government.

The very costly and divisive migrant crisis waiting on Johnson’s desk from day one crowded out many of his early legislative victories centered on worker’s rights, and saddled him with high-profile setbacks as he stumbled through how the city could house tens of thousands of asylum-seekers.

Though momentum is returning in the wake of him clinching the passage of an ambitious $1.25 billion bond plan to fund affordable housing and development, pockets of Johnson’s progressive base are restless. They object to decisions l such as keeping embattled Chicago Transit Authority chief Dorval Carter as well as a campaign about-face on a publicly financed Chicago Bears stadium.

Jason McGrath, a Chicago-based strategist who was a pollster for the last three mayors, said Johnson should be concerned about these “calls coming from inside the house.”

“It’s a very, very hard job, and I think he’s finding now that it’s a lot easier to throw bombs from the sideline than it is to be in the ring and actually defuse them,” McGrath said. “Right now, there are too many people who are openly criticizing him who should be with them. And if that’s not a flashing red light yet, it certainly will be soon.”

Aldermen have said they felt bigfooted over decisions from placing migrant shelters in their wards to the city’s impending cancellation of the ShotSpotter contract, and his political capital in Springfield is on much shakier footing than a year ago.

If the mayor was concerned about the drumbeat of negativity, however, he did not betray that in an interview with the Tribune.

Instead, Johnson accentuated his wins, touting the recent bond plan eight times during the 30-minute sit-down. He also pointed to other progressive gains, such as the city allocating $250 million for affordable housing and homelessness services and $100 million for violence prevention, abolishing the tipped subminimum wage, expanding mandatory paid time off and increasing the city’s youth jobs program by $76 million.

It’s all a part of righting historic wrongs, Johnson said, a process that will take time. While he didn’t specifically ask for patience after 12 months, the mayor took pains to paint as well-established the structural oppression he says he was elected to fix.

“We’ve had 40 years of gross neglect and disinvestment within the city of Chicago, right?” Johnson said when asked about his administration’s weakest spot. “And so part of my responsibility, of course, is to address the age-old systems of failure and to build a better, stronger, safer Chicago, and that is something that I’m committed to doing.”

The migrant crisis

As a candidate, Johnson invoked vivid imagery of unleashing rivers of investment to flow through Chicago’s left-behind communities, writing off the premise of budgeting being a zero-sum game as a “false choice.”

“The table is big enough,” Johnson said during a March mayoral debate. “Now listen, whether you like salt or sugar on grits, it’ll be on my table. And for our brown families, whether you like red sauce or green sauce, it’ll be on my table.”

The mayor’s messaging since assuming office has often signaled a grimmer reality — much of that outside his control.

More than 41,000 asylum-seekers have made their way to Chicago since August 2022, when Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott sent the first of what would become hundreds of migrant buses in a bid to overwhelm the liberal city and erode its pro-immigration values.

It soon dawned on the fledgling administration that the city’s migrant shelter apparatus, though rapidly growing, could not keep pace. As the population of migrants sleeping outside Chicago police stations peaked at 3,900 — with up to 850 others camped out at O’Hare — that fall, pictures of the threadbare tent cities shocked the nation. The Johnson administration was ultimately able to move them inside the shelter system right before the harsh winter arrived.

On the City Council floor, Black aldermen who feared their communities were once again being shortchanged in favor of newcomers expressed outrage during rancorous debates over each migrant spending item.

The growing resentment in the body helped drain the good feelings out of what should have been Johnson’s early honeymoon period when new mayors are often able to accomplish important agenda planks without expending much political effort.

“That was partially what the right-wing governors intended for it to do: To cause chaos, to split diverse populations,” Ameshia Cross, a Democratic political strategist, said. “It was maniacal, but it was also something that has tended to work. … Pitting them against each other is not hard when you don’t have enough resources to go around.”

The cascading tensions laid bare how the mayor who vowed to bring prosperity and equity to those in need found himself dealt an extraordinarily bad hand. But how his team navigated the next several months nonetheless drew reproach from multiple corners of the city.

The gripes have spanned turf wars over where in the city the migrants should stay to discomfort from the left over implementing shelter evictions in the face of fiscal headwinds.

In his Tribune interview, the mayor struck an unapologetic stance when pressed on how he responded.

Asked how he would have differently to the situation upon taking office, knowing what he knows now, Johnson said “I wish that Congress would actually do its part and pass substantive immigration reform.”

On whether his philosophy of Chicago having “enough” for everyone was wishful thinking, Johnson responded that his $1.25 billion bond package — which schedules the city to pay off $2.4 billion in accumulated debt through 2061 — is “20 times the amount of dollars that we have made for the migrant mission.” (Chicago’s migrant response has cost $372 million, according to the city.)

“You actually can do both-and,” Johnson said. “I’m optimistic in this moment because everything that I said that we need to do as a city together, we are doing that.”

To be sure, other local officials agree that the federal government left Chicago high and dry by allowing mass waves of asylum-seekers into the country with no support for the cities that would absorb them. But as time went on, an ongoing sense of disorganization and lack of coherent answers over the most pressing issue in City Hall began to erode goodwill.

One recent sign of progress is that the city’s shelter census has dropped from a peak of 15,700 at the end of last year to 7,800 last week. That comes as the tempo of buses from southern states remains subdued — and after 650 shelter residents so far have been evicted under a Johnson policy dictating they can stay for no more than 60 days unless they have children or meet other exemptions.

Johnson’s closest allies on the left have pressured him about that very decision.

After a November Johnson news conference announcing the 60-day policy (on the same week he passed his 2024 city budget, thereby undermining the good news for him of that major City Council victory), progressive Ald. Daniel La Spata texted the mayor: “Hey sir, This quote, ‘sacrifice the needs of Chicagoans in support of those who wish to become Chicagoans,’ I don’t agree with it.”

Johnson promptly responded that he was available to talk, according to a Freedom of Information Act request of the mayor’s texts. The eviction policy was ultimately delayed until March.

The mayor’s botched plan last fall to erect a temporary winterized base camp for 2,000 migrants atop former a industrial site in Brighton Park was one of his most embarrassing defeats, as Gov. J.B. Pritzker yanked state funding for the entire proposal in late November amid concerns the city’s environmental remediation work was shoddy. It was one of several tense first-year moments between Johnson and Pritzker.

Brighton Park migrant camp

But asked whether he believed that episode damaged trust in his administration, the mayor reiterated that the scope of what’s required to care for and resettle the asylum-seekers is far too great for one municipality alone.

Then he applauded his November ordinance to crack down on what he said were “rogue” transportation companies dumping migrants in Chicago.

“Do you know that not a bus has arrived in the city of Chicago since the end of December?” Johnson said. “Not one bus. Why? Because we put forth a structure that I promised that I would do: to create a real operation that’s centered around people’s humanity.”

While buses have technically stopped entering the city, the Tribune has reported they are instead simply dropping off migrants outside city limits now, sometimes in neighboring counties. From there, the passengers often board the Metra to the landing zone set up by the administration near Union Station and await a bed in Chicago’s shelter system.

That’s an outcome Johnson acknowledged privately, before he sought to coordinate drop-offs with suburban leaders. In a December text to CTU President Stacy Davis Gates obtained via a public records request, the mayor shared a Fox News headline with his close ally that read: “Buses respond to Chicago’s new penalties and restrictions by dropping migrants in secret locations.”

“Secret,” Davis Gates responded. “Wow.”

Progressive leadership

Johnson’s April runoff victory represented a seismic disruption to business as usual at City Hall, as he became the first progressive to win the Chicago mayor’s seat in decades.

In practice, there have been signs the new administration has struggled with transitioning into the executive role, as evidenced by his top surrogates repeatedly wading into political storms, and vacancies in government positions remaining unfilled. Other figures on the left have publicly broken with him more and more.

The stunning downfall of Johnson’s signature progressive plan the Bring Chicago Home referendum in the March primary election further hinted that the political winds from a year ago have shifted.

But Davis Gates, the CTU president and his longtime friend, said it would be unfair to expect Johnson to dismantle the old system of government this soon.

“This idea that in a year our government is going to transform from a neoliberal ‘close, consolidate and cut’ system, I think is an unreasonable expectation,” Davis Gates said. “We are undergoing a seismic transformation in a very small amount of time. The fact that Brandon Johnson has been able to accomplish everything that he has in the past year is nothing short of miraculous.”

Meanwhile, the Democratic Socialist aldermen Johnson tapped for powerful committee assignments upon taking office have stepped into various minefields that gave opponents openings to pounce on the narrative that the mayor’s inner circle is too extreme and lacks decorum. Though Johnson isn’t necessarily concerned with being attacked for his leftist roots, the constant drama has forced him to stick his neck out for his allies in remarkable ways.

Besides the November tie-breaker vote Johnson cast to rescue his former floor leader and ex-Zoning Committee chair, Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, 35th, following bullying allegations, the mayor found himself facing an effort last month to strip Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez, 25th, of his Housing Committee chairmanship.

That uproar hinged on Sigcho-Lopez’s choice to stand in front of a charred American flag at a rally outside City Hall to protest the DNC. The alderman said he didn’t see the flag.

“It’s been a little bit surprising to me because I know him to be an extraordinary organizer, but everything seems so disorganized,” Aviva Bowen, a Democratic strategist in Chicago, said about the mayor. “He also seems to have empowered — and even platformed — some of the rabble-rousing.”

Sigcho-Lopez told the Tribune he believes the censure attempt against him did not show weakness in progressive leaders but their commitment to justice: “I think he has not looked away, the way other administrations have.”

Asked whether there was room for improvement in his administration’s ability to maintain relationships, Johnson pointed to successes. “Look at what we’ve accomplished together working with City Hall,” he said, before again listing his $1.25 billion bond deal and legislative victories from last year.

Months of vacancies languishing on several government-appointed boards have also led to grumblings of city business being stymied and that his administration struggles to nail down the bread-and-butter basics of running City Hall. He did not reveal his pick for commissioner of the critical Department of Housing, Lissette Castañeda, until December, for example, while other key cabinet spots took until last month to be filled.

There have been material consequences to this hesitancy. A failure to fill a Zoning Board of Appeals vacancy that existed from the previous administration, for example, led to a tie vote in February that sank a proposed homeless shelter in Uptown supported by both the Johnson administration and local Ald. Angela Clay, 46th.

Johnson responded to a question about whether he has regrets about the ZBA inaction by saying, “Our appointments are working well. We have the most diverse administration in the history of Chicago,” and listing the racial makeup of his appointees.

Other vacancies for which the mayor had been publicly urged to speed up his search process include the Chicago police oversight board and the the ethics board. The latter concerns were aired by Johnson’s handpicked Ethics Committee chair Ald. Matt Martin, 47th, another progressive ally.

Johnson further rankled some in his progressive base when he adamantly backed the Chicago Bears’ plan for a $5 billion stadium that would be half-funded by taxpayer dollars, even though he vowed on the campaign trail not to support such a public subsidy.

And he has resisted growing calls to oust Carter, the CTA chief. Asked by the Tribune whether he has at least looked at potential replacements for him, Johnson said discussing those topics is “irresponsible.”

“Having questions about how we build a transportation system that ultimately meets the needs and demands of the people of Chicago, those questions are welcome,” Johnson said. “Determining who I get to fire and hire, I find that to be irresponsible and I won’t discuss personnel matters publicly.”

The Carter problem could certainly become a progressive voter one, as transit issues have particularly resonated among liberals along Milwaukee Avenue and the lakefront who carried Johnson to the runoff.

Fiscal approach

Rahm Emanuel measured his economic development accomplishments by cranes in the sky. Lori Lightfoot tallied dollars spent on the South and West sides.

Johnson, meanwhile, centers his economic wins around workers: new jobs or protections, higher pay or delivery of affordable housing.

For a business community already wary of Johnson’s “tax-the-rich” electioneering, his early council pushes to expand paid time off, phase out the city’s tipped wage credit and ask voters to raise a tax on property sales through the Bring Chicago Home referendum proved their apprehension right.

They punched back this spring by bankrolling the anti-Bring Chicago Home push, a marked example of Chicago business leaders acting in open opposition to the mayor.

Nonetheless Jack Lavin, head of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, said there are many areas in which he agrees with the administration.

Lavin approves of Johnson initiatives to explore cutting red tape for developers, forging ahead with the O’Hare’s revamp and converting LaSalle Street office space into housing with city subsidies. The same goes for the mayor’s $1.25 billion bond, which will be funded by phasing out the city’s reliance on tax increment financing. The mayor’s police superintendent pick, Larry Snelling, also put business stakeholders as well as conservative critics at ease.

Johnson kept to his word he would not raise property taxes — a chief business concern — in his first budget despite staring down a yawning $538 million deficit, rising migrant response costs and ever-present pension and debt obligations. Fiscal watchdogs, however, warned Johnson’s reliance on one-time measures to balance the books would be difficult to repeat as structural imbalances remain.

In addition to rising pension costs, the CTA and Chicago Public Schools are both facing fiscal cliffs and might also need revenue boosts.

How the mayor will shore up all these looming shortfalls is unknown, but as a candidate he floated reviving the corporate head tax, upping the hotel levy, implementing new charges on securities trades and creating a jet fuel tax. Johnson did not answer the Tribune’s question on which of those priorities remain most viable.

“The business community can absorb some, but I think their view is, ‘Are you targeting us, or is there a more comprehensive plan?’” said Greg Goldner, an Emanuel ally, CEO of Resolute Consulting and Bring Chicago Home opponent.

While the next three years are certain to be uncertain, this summer will bring one of Johnson’s biggest tests yet — the arrival of the DNC.

The mass Chicago police arrest of pro-Palestinian protesters at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago this month reflected one prognosis of what could come. Speaking with the Tribune about that incident, Johnson showed that a year into his term on the fifth floor of City Hall, he can still speak like a radical organizer.

“In some instances, arrests are part of the objective. I’ll say it like that,” the mayor said. “I’ve taken arrest before. It’s not unprecedented.”

Chicago Tribune’s Olivia Olander, Sam Charles and Sarah Frieshtat contributed.

ayin@chicagotribune.com

jsheridan@chicagotribune.com

aquig@chicagotribune.com

Some programs will also see their American Rescue Plan Act funding scaled back or canceled so other initiatives better aligned with Johnson’s vision can instead get the money, administration officials told reporters in a briefing. That includes starting back up the guaranteed income program launched during Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s tenure, but nixing her administration’s plans for a sobering center and support for low-barrier homeless shelters run by outside agencies.

Following the failure of the Johnson-backed Bring Chicago Home ballot referendum that would have raised money for homeless services, the proposal also calls for a slight funding boost for a rapid rehousing plan to help those experiencing homelessness.

Chicago received $1.9 billion in ARPA funds during the coronavirus pandemic. Under federal rules, city and state ARPA beneficiaries must obligate all of their funds by the end of 2024 and spend them by the end of 2026. Johnson administration officials said formal announcements about what the shifts will pay for will happen in the coming days.

So far, the city has laid out how it plans to spend 88% of its ARPA dollars and spent 79%, Budget Director Annette Guzman told reporters.

A significant portion of the roughly $234 million in unobligated funds are supposed to be dedicated to community initiatives.

Guzman said since Johnson took office, staff took a fresh look at planned spending and decided to also shift roughly $80 million in obligated, unspent funding away from programs where there was a “high risk” dollars would not make it out the door by the deadline. Several of the 21 high-risk programs will have their funding reduced, as will a small number of medium-risk programs.

Only two programs will be scrapped: a planned $5 million sobering center — a place for intoxicated people to sober up in as an alternative to an emergency room or jail cell — and $500,000 to support outside groups running “low barrier” homeless shelters. Such shelters would have included storage units for possessions and places for those experiencing homelessness to keep their pets.

The city has “been unable to find a program administrator” for the sobering center despite having put out requests for proposals, Guzman said. She said officials don’t believe they could find an administrator for the low-barrier shelters before the end of this year, either.

The city will double down on what they’ve dubbed low-risk programs where it is easiest to get money in the hands of beneficiaries. That includes $32 million to relaunch the city’s guaranteed income program, in which low-income families would receive monthly $500 no-strings-attached payments.

Compared to the budgeted amounts in the city’s 2023 ARPA performance report, the city’s rapid rehousing program — which supports homeless households moving from a shelter or the street to permanent housing — would see a roughly $5 million increase, to $32 million.

Other programs getting a boost: Tourism and hospitality recovery would receive an additional $3.5 million; the artist relief and works fund would see an additional $2 million; and the city’s initiative to boost capacity at mental health service providers would receive an additional $1.8 million.

aquig@chicagotribune.com

Team officials said during their public unveiling Wednesday the Bears would pledge $2.3 billion in private money while asking the state agency charged with stadium development projects to borrow less than half of that — $900 million — to build a long-sought, year-round indoor replacement for century-old Soldier Field.

But a deeper look at the financial details of the Bears’ full plans shows the costs, especially over the long term, are drastically higher.

In addition to the $900 million in borrowing, the Bears want the state’s stadium agency, the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority, to refinance about $430 million in existing debt for previous projects and take out about $160 million more to set up as a so-called liquidity fund to cushion the city of Chicago from future shortfalls in revenue from a 2% city hotel tax that’s supposed to cover the cost of the borrowing.

Counting interest and other long-term costs, the proposed new borrowing would tally up to at least $4.8 billion over four decades, said Frank Bilecki, ISFA’s CEO.

In addition, the Bears are seeking up to $1.5 billion in infrastructure money, not counting the debt the public will incur, that the team says would be needed to fully realize its vision for a year-round venue and surrounding park space that Mayor Brandon Johnson said Wednesday would be “the crown jewel of the city of Chicago.”

The bill could even go up even more if the agency borrows additional money for the football stadium or other projects, such as a new White Sox or Red Stars stadium.

Although some costs would be offset by interest earned on the money parked in the liquidity fund, according to a financial expert familiar with the team’s plans who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the proposal in detail, the total price tag of the proposed borrowing is just one of many issues the Bears must tackle. They have pledged overt transparency along the way.

While Johnson has embraced the Bears’ vision, Gov. J.B. Pritzker and other state leaders — who must approve the borrowing plan at ISFA and, potentially, infrastructure dollars to make the team’s lakefront vision a reality — have been openly skeptical.

Pritzker, who for years has expressed wariness about using public funds to help build stadiums for professional sports franchises, on Friday reiterated that his door is not closed but that he must be convinced any use of taxpayer dollars reaps sufficient public benefits.

“I’m a Bears fan, and I want to see a domed stadium in the city of Chicago,” the governor said at an unrelated event. “But again, the question is, ‘Who’s paying for that?’

“And it seems to me that the team owner who benefits most ought to be the principal provider of the capital, and when I say principal, I mean the vast majority of it. And the taxpayers — to the extent that they’re putting anything up here — should be getting return on the investment that they’re making.”

The Bears answer to that question so far has been a projection that a new domed stadium would generate 37% more in local taxes than Soldier Field currently produces while delivering well-paying construction and permanent jobs. The city, county and state would annually net $64 million in additional amusement, hotel, income and sales taxes from the new stadium, they estimate.

But economists generally look askance at sports franchise claims that spending public dollars on professional sports stadiums is a good investment of taxpayer resources. Such developments rarely result in enough economic activity to boost per capita income, long-term jobs or sufficient tax revenue to recoup the cost of the subsidy, studies have found.

“From the city’s point of view, this would be one of the worst decisions they could make,” said Allen Sanderson, an economics professor at the University of Chicago and noted stadium skeptic.

Spending public money on the project would be akin to the team having used its No. 1 pick in Thursday’s NFL draft not on USC quarterback Caleb Williams but “to draft Brandon Johnson,” Sanderson said.

The grand vision for the new Bears stadium involves several moving pieces: the demolition of Soldier Field except for the historic colonnades and the stadium’s south-end horseshoe, construction of a new stadium hundreds of yards away to the south, and improvements to the surrounding public land that is part of the Museum Campus.

Though taxpayers, in one form or another, are slated to foot a substantial part of the bill, the Bears argue they are making one of the biggest investments in city history by investing $2 billion in equity and debt from the McCaskey family as well as a $300 million NFL loan.

The team has not yet finalized plans for naming rights or the sale of personal seat licenses. Both could be used, along with other revenue streams, to help cover a portion of its stadium costs.

The Bears’ $1.5 billion infrastructure wish list would be rolled out in three phases over five years, according to the plan.

The $325 million first phase — which Bears officials said was necessary to open the new stadium’s doors — involves moving utilities and roadways with the goal of reducing the bottleneck drivers currently sit through at McFetridge Drive.

The next two phases — costing an estimated $510 million and $665 million, respectively — include demolishing the old stadium, adding parking and expanding a bus depot, as well as building new parks and playfields. Phase three includes restoring the century-old colonnades, retail space and a possible hotel.

The latter two phases represent the bulk of public benefit Johnson and Bears President Kevin Warren highlighted during Wednesday’s presentation — athletic fields for Chicago Public Schools sports teams to use, field house facilities, and year-round amenities that would ultimately increase the current green space by nearly 20%. Johnson described the “miraculous” renderings as a fulfillment of Daniel Burnham’s vision for the city’s lakefront.

But the public funding for those infrastructure changes was unclear. Officials said they hoped to tap federal Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Act funding, including dollars set aside specifically for green infrastructure. The city is responsible for finding that money.

“We really look for the city to work with the state on that and what programs are available,” Bears Chief Operating Officer Karen Murphy said Wednesday.

The stadium refresh would require again tapping ISFA, which has so far paid $549.5 million for the 2001 “spaceship” renovation of Soldier Field. That tally is on track to hit $1.1 billion by 2032 under the current debt schedule.

Currently, ISFA pays down the debt with state hotel tax revenues, which are later replenished with funds from an additional 2% tax on city hotel stays. There also is a static $5 million annual payment each from the city and state.

When all ISFA bonds for Soldier Field and the White Sox stadium are paid off, the revenue from the 2% tax will be used to repay the city for what has been swept from its share of state income tax revenue to cover hotel tax shortfalls. Once that is repaid, the revenue would begin flowing to McCormick Place.

Under the Bears’ proposal, however, the 2% city tax would be used to continue paying stadium-related debt for another 40 years.

The 40-year term is unprecedented for state borrowing and suggests there is more debt than an ability to repay it under a more typical timeline, said Matt Fabian of Municipal Market Analytics, an independent research firm.

“That’s a very long time for an asset that typically doesn’t last 40 years. It’s one thing for Washington, D.C., to sell century-long bonds for their sewer system, because that’s going to last. But a stadium — to tie up taxpayer dollars for 40 years is a massive bet on this being a good idea,” he said.

The economic returns on a stadium have proven to be scant compared with other economic development measures like housing or transit improvement, Fabian said. The city and state would be better off saving taxpayer dollars to fund more urgent projects like infrastructure that protects against climate change.

“You shouldn’t be using up your borrowing capacity spuriously right now,” he said, suggesting the city focus on keeping “the lake out of downtown.”

However, the financial expert familiar with the team’s plans said 40-year financing has become relatively standard for large stadium projects.

Backers argue the taxpayer brunt is largely borne by visitors to Chicago, rather than residents. But when hotel tax revenues fall short of the required payment, the city has to make up the difference with its share of state income taxes.

That’s happened twice in recent years thanks to cratering hotel stays during the COVID-19 pandemic. Hotel tax revenues fell $27.3 million short in 2022 and $8.7 million the following year. That money was automatically withdrawn by the state from Chicago’s cut of state income taxes that goes to local governments. Those funds could have otherwise gone to filling gaps in the city’s budget.

That could become a more frequent occurrence as payments ramp up over the remaining life of the bonds.

The $160 million liquidity fund idea is aimed to address the use of city funds to make up the difference when hotel taxes don’t cover ISFA’s payments.

Creating that fund would add to ISFA’s debt while insulating Chicago. While the city would still be the guarantor of the debt if the liquidity fund is insufficient, the extra coverage would likely stave off several years of shortfalls. It would be set aside immediately from the initial proceeds of any bond sale to fund the project.

Setting aside reserves from a debt issuance is somewhat standard practice, said Ashlee Gabrysch of Fitch Ratings.

However, “this is, I think, slightly different than that, in that it’s anticipating an event that has actually occurred in the past, where the revenues were not sufficient to cover debt service,” Gabrysch said.

While a potential boon to the city’s immediate budget needs, creating such a fund is deficit borrowing, or the equivalent of using a credit card for groceries, Fabian said.

The plans also call for refinancing $430 million in outstanding debt for both Soldier Field and Sox Park. That could represent a repeat of the city’s and state’s histories with so-called scoop-and-toss borrowing — heaping old debt onto future generations.

After last week’s announcement, Pritzker told reporters that “there are aspects of this that are probably nonstarters.”

He didn’t answer directly when asked the next day whether the proposed liquidity fund was one of those aspects.

“The deal that was presented didn’t take into account that taxpayers really aren’t going to do well under that proposal,” Pritzker said.

Another outstanding question is whether hotel tax revenue will grow at a rate fast enough to support the proposed borrowing.

The Bears and Chicago CFO Jill Jaworski said Wednesday their bonding calculations rely on more conservative hotel tax revenue projections: an annual increase of about 4% or 4.5% compared with the 5.6% growth assumption in previous ISFA bonds sales.

While the financial expert familiar with the team’s plans said revenue from the dedicated city hotel tax grew at an annual rate of 4.6% from 1994 to 2023, Fitch’s Gabrysch said the Bears’ assumed growth rate could be overly rosy.

When it comes to business-related levies like the hotel tax, “we look at closer to a 2%” annual growth rate, she said.

Another wrinkle: In an interview Wednesday with the Chicago Tribune Editorial Board, Warren also suggested the team hasn’t “given up” on construction of a hotel, which would be included in phase three, arguing it “would be sold out constantly” given the hoped-for events at the new stadium.

He suggested it would be publicly owned.

“We already have history and tradition,” in the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority’s ownership of the Hyatt Regency at McCormick Place and the Marriott Marquis Chicago. “We know it works, if you check their occupancy and profitability,” Warren said. If lawmakers “like it, we love it.”

A stadium-based sportsbook is not in the cards at the moment, Murphy said, though the team “would be open to talking about it in the future.”

Though the Chicago Park District would remain the team’s landlord, it’s still undecided how much of a cut the district would receive from new events at the stadium, like concerts, NCAA Final Four matchups or a Super Bowl.

Park District revenue from Soldier Field includes Bears games — which brought in $7 million in 2023 — non-Bears events like concerts, nonevent parking and an annual subsidy from ISFA. In 2024, gross revenues are budgeted at $53.9 million — about 9% of all park revenues — against $35.3 million in gross expenses.

After Pritzker publicly said the team is “asking to keep all the revenue from other events that might take place at this stadium,” citing Beyoncé concerts as an example, the Bears issued a statement saying negotiations are ongoing.

“The Chicago Bears, the city of Chicago and all interested parties will need to work together so that we can achieve a mutually beneficial agreement for operating the new stadium and cultural and recreation campus,” the team’s statement said.

A majority of the party’s 80 committeemen — some voting via proxy — also chose the current acting clerk and top Yarbrough deputy Cedric Giles to stay in the post through December, when an elected successor will be sworn in.

The group gathered at IBEW Local 134 Friday morning to hear pitches and lob questions at 15 prospective candidates and spent much of the afternoon deliberating over their picks. They were tasked with choosing an interim replacement and a nominee to place on the November ballot for a special election to replace Yarbrough.

Gordon, who entered the proceedings only days ago with strong backing from several labor unions, told committee members she was “dedicated to continuing and upholding the legacy of the high standard” Yarbrough set for the office and noted to fellow party members that she had given her “blood, sweat and tears to the Democratic Party,” and had built strong relationships across the county and state.

Gordon thanked those unions after party Chair Toni Preckwinkle, also the president of the Cook County Board, announced her appointment. Party officials said there was only one round of voting.

Elected to the County Board in 2022, Gordon was previously executive director of the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus, a trustee at Prairie State (Community) College and director of government relations at Chicago State University.

The vote came relatively quickly after Black committee members met behind closed doors following candidate presentations. Following that meeting, party members said one of the front-runners in the race, state Sen. Napoleon Harris, stepped aside and cleared the way for Gordon.

Gordon will have to prevail in the November election to take over the office responsible for handling vital records such as birth, death and marriage certificates; suburban elections; legislation and proceedings of the County Board; and property transfer paperwork.

The county’s Republican Party has yet to choose their nominee, but Gordon will almost certainly be the overwhelming favorite in the special election.

The clerk earns just shy of $119,000 a year and manages a roughly $75 million annual budget with a staff of 350 employees.

Asked how she would handle an office sometimes criticized as a patronage den, Gordon said she would continue “hiring the best people, putting the best people in positions has always been my motto.”

She also pledged to improve online access to records, potentially embrace AI to help with customer service, improve language access to clerk services and at polling places, and improve voter participation in suburban elections.

Several committee people also asked candidates whether they would ensure county residents using consular or city key cards as their identification could have access to clerk services. Gordon said that was a “no-brainer.”

Other candidates included state Sen. Napoleon Harris, Evanston City Clerk Stephanie Mendoza, county Commissioners Kevin Morrison and Donna Miller, and several others. Water Reclamation District Commissioner Yumeka Brown withdrew her name.

The most pointed questioning was directed at Harris.

In his pitch to party members, Harris addressed the “elephant in the room” — strong opposition from the LGBTQ and abortion rights groups Equality Illinois and Personal PAC ahead of the appointment meeting.

The office does not intersect with abortion access, but it is a key party plank. The clerk’s office does issue marriage, birth and death certificates, as well as changes to gender on vital records. Both groups urged party members not to support Harris because he did not vote on several bills, including the Reproductive Health Act, the Marriage Equality Act and Birth Certificate Modernization Act, which would have allowed transgender people to access the documents that match their gender identity.

“Let me be clear: I believe in a woman’s autonomy of her body and her right to choose,” Harris said. “To (the) LGTB community, I am not homophobic. However, I am a man that believes in autonomy to do what you want to do. Love who you want to love, and you will have my support as well, as long as we have mutual respect for each other. This election is bigger than a quote, is bigger than someone saying what you are and what you believe in.”

Senate President Don Harmon, the committeeperson for Oak Park, said Harris assured him he would be “fair, impartial and welcoming in dealing with birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates, gender and identity related issues.”

But state Rep. Kelly Cassidy, one of the legislature’s strongest proponents of abortion and LGBTQ rights and the committeeperson for the 49th Ward, pressed Harris.

Harris said the Marriage Equality Act was his first vote after being sworn into the General Assembly in 2013 and he was “unsure of which way to vote because my district was kind of half and half, it was split. But more importantly, it was an opportunity for me to learn.”

Harris said he did not “personally” support the birth certificate modernization act, but as clerk, he would not “neglect or deny anyone the ability to get the documentation that they need.”

“But given the opportunity to show, rather than speak to, your support for folks who need these documents to be safe, you chose not to,” Cassidy said. “What I’ve seen is a person who has chosen not to stand up … for my marriage and my community when given the opportunity to do so.”

Harris said, “I apologize that I can’t be with you or haven’t been with you 100% of the time, but I respect your rights, and if you can’t accept that I accept you, how can we accept each other? … I’m as real as it gets, no one can push something on me and then expect me to just shove it down my throat and then I can’t be me … we’re a party of a big tent.”

aquig@chicagotribune.com