Stories by Heather Cherone

Mayor Lori Lightfoot will face the biggest test of her time in office on Wednesday when she details her plan to fill the massive budget shortfall caused in part by the coronavirus pandemic.

A member of the Wilmette Library Board of Trustees who also works as a state lobbyist sued the city of Chicago, seeking to overturn a ban on elected officials from outside Chicago from lobbying city officials.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot and two of her closest allies on the Chicago City Council remain at odds over long-stalled efforts to put an elected board of Chicago residents in charge of the Chicago Police Department.

In all, the city’s order warns residents against travel to 30 states and Puerto Rico.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot warned Chicagoans that the city is experiencing another wave of the coronavirus pandemic, with confirmed cases rising sharply across the city to levels last seen in late May.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker warned Illinois residents Friday that the entire state is seeing a surge in confirmed cases of the coronavirus, as the state set a single-day record for new infections and reported 38 deaths linked to the virus.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced on Friday that Illinois’ ban on evictions would be extended until Nov. 16, as state officials continue to send grants to Illinois residents struggling to make ends meet.

Inspector General Joe Ferguson’s report details several instances when Eddie Johnson got special treatment after being discovered unconscious behind the wheel of his vehicle near 34th Place and Aberdeen Street last year.

“This has not been a good week in Chicago,” said Dr. Allison Arwady, urging people to avoid gatherings, wear masks and keep 6 feet of distance from others. 

Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle plans to consolidate two clinics into Provident Hospital and change its full-service emergency room to a stand-by emergency department. “We are strengthening Provident Hospital. It is here to stay. Period,” she said.

The economic collapse caused by the coronavirus pandemic presented an “extraordinarily challenging” set of circumstances to the county’s finance team, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle said a day before unveiling her $6.9 billion spending plan.

In a typical year, approximately 3% of property owners do not pay their taxes, according to Chicago officials. But in 2021, a projected 10% of property owners won’t pay their tax bills, which would cost the city $65.2 million.

Chicagoans should not travel to the Hoosier State, said Dr. Allison Arwady, the commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health. The city’s quarantine order now includes 25 states and Puerto Rico.

A ban blocking elected officials from outside Chicago from lobbying city officials will remain in place after aldermen unanimously rejected a proposal from Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Tuesday to ease the ban.

Restrictions designed to stop the spread of the coronavirus in the Metro East area of Illinois near St. Louis will be lifted at 5 p.m. Friday after the number of confirmed cases has dropped significantly, state officials announced.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot said Thursday that President Donald Trump bears at least a measure of responsibility for inspiring anti-government groups to plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

The fund will be used to help Black and Latino neighborhoods, which continue to see disproportionately higher rates of infections and deaths as compared with citywide rates and those in primarily white and affluent communities.

Chicago officials now have the power to strip multimillion-dollar tax incentives from companies that “betray the public’s trust” — but lawyers for the city have determined the new rules cannot be used to punish the firm that botched a demolition in April.

Two proposals to spend $9.1 million to repair the CTA’s Lake Street bridge and the Dearborn Street subway stalled Tuesday amid objections from aldermen about efforts to hire firms owned by female, Black and Latino Chicagoans.

Aldermen sided with the mayor on Tuesday in a dispute over a proposal to build a 48-unit affordable housing complex in Jefferson Park, turning back an effort by Ald. Nicholas Sposato (38th Ward) to block the development.

City officials are working to craft a plan to fill a projected $1.2 billion budget shortfall in the 2021 fiscal year — without the hope of more aid from the federal government.

The funds will allow “tens of thousands more patients served, better access to care for the underserved and integrated care for the whole person,” officials said.

The warning about the increase in confirmed cases of the coronavirus in Indiana is designed to give Chicagoans who routinely cross the border time to prepare for the state to join the other 22 states now on the quarantine order, officials said.

Matthew Beaudet would become the first Native American commissioner in the city’s history. “I’m humbled by it,” Beaudet told WTTW News before his confirmation hearing.

Efforts to transform a Northwest Side tax program created in the 1980s amid the racist panic that greeted the election of Chicago’s first Black mayor are stalled — nearly two years after new leadership promised a fresh start.

A plan to transform a long-vacant lot in Jefferson Park into an apartment complex that reignited the furious debate surrounding Chicago’s massive affordable housing shortfall faces a key vote Tuesday.