Johnson-backed proposal would put additional requirements on new industrial developments. Industry is pushing back.
Some advocates for heavy industry are worried. None deny minority neighborhoods on the South and West sides suffer more from the dirty air, water and soil that historically came from steel mills, smokestacks and truck traffic. But they say if Johnson's proposal puts more obstacles in the way of new industrial businesses getting started, it could squelch much-needed job creation.
'We need to make sure we're not disincentivizing industry, because these jobs are needed throughout the city,' said Jonathan Snyder, executive director of North Branch Works, a nonprofit advocate for economic development along the North Branch of the Chicago River. 'If we send a signal that coming here is an expensive, complicated process, we will not be successful in attracting business.'
Called the Hazel Johnson Cumulative Impacts Ordinance, a tribute to the late Far South Side environmental and community activist, the proposed law was introduced at the April 16 City Council meeting and referred to the rules committee.
If passed by the full City Council, it would establish a community-based environmental justice advisory board and require industrial companies seeking new development permits to conduct community health assessments, ensuring their projects would not further damage public health.
Supporters of the ordinance point out it will have no impact on businesses that don't have significant environmental footprints, including new restaurants, retail and other commercial development. And developers with proposals for new heavy industry are already required to conduct air quality assessments and traffic studies, so community health assessments should not be much of an additional burden.
'If it passes, it would be an important example of a local government stepping up to address what we now understand about the cumulative effects of pollution, at a time when the federal government is trying to tear those efforts down,' said Robert Weinstock, director of the Environmental Advocacy Center at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, who represented the Southeast Environmental Task Force in a federal complaint against the city.
Snyder says the legislation could already be out of date. Modern industrial operations are far cleaner than Chicago's old mills and factories, which dumped toxic waste near low-income communities like the Altgeld Gardens public housing development, which Hazel Johnson resided in, leading to elevated rates of respiratory and cardiac ailments.
'We're not in the era of smokestacks just spewing things into the atmosphere,' Snyder said. 'Maybe we're trying to regulate a problem that doesn't need regulating.'
Snyder and other advocates say they don't outright oppose the legislation. They plan to press council members and city officials to provide more details about how the ordinance will work, including which pollutants get measured, how much the additional studies will cost businesses and whether needed projects could get canceled.
'The idea of the ordinance is well-intentioned, but what will the effects be, both intended and unintended?' asked Jim Longino, director of industrial and business services at the Greater Southwest Development Corp., an economic development and fair housing agency on the city's Southwest Side.
The biggest worry is that the ordinance will hurt the city's reputation as a business hub, said Ted Stalnos, president of the Calumet Area Industrial Commission, a nonprofit that promotes economic development on the South Side and northwest Indiana.
'The last thing Chicago needs as we're headed toward a fiscal cliff is something that discourages business,' he said.
The Hazel Johnson ordinance grew out of a 2020 federal civil rights complaint filed by the Southeast Environmental Task Force and other groups challenging the city's concentration of polluting industries in certain neighborhoods. It was filed after the administration of then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot inked a deal with Ohio-based Reserve Management Group, allowing it to move a notorious metal shredder in the affluent Lincoln Park neighborhood on the North Side, often cited for pollution, to the Far Southeast Side near the Calumet River.
Lightfoot reversed course on the shredder after the administration of President Joe Biden urged the city to consider the Southeast Side's high level of pollution, and how that epitomized 'the problem of environmental injustice.' In 2022, city officials denied the company a permit, and a Cook County judge in August 2024 upheld that decision.
Several other high-profile environmental controversies recently cropped up on the South and West sides. In 2020, Hilco Redevelopment Partners botched the demolition of an old coal plant's smokestack, blanketing Little Village homes with dust and debris. Southeast Side environmental activists also fought successfully to remove huge mounds of gritty black petroleum coke left for years near their homes.
Regulators investigated more than 75 Southeast Side polluters for Clean Air Act violations since 2014, including some that poisoned yards and playgrounds with manganese, a dangerous metal often used in steelmaking.
The Southeast Environmental Task Force and the city settled the federal civil rights complaint in 2023. The settlement required City Hall to complete an assessment of neighborhood pollution. It showed many South and West Side communities faced long-term environmental burdens. The settlement also called for the city to revamp planning, zoning and land-use practices to protect hard-hit areas, paving the way for the Cumulative Impacts Ordinance.
Reserve Management Group officials say their shredder project has been unfairly targeted. The company says it spent more than $80 million on the new Southeast Side facility at 11600 South Burley Ave., called Southside Recycling, and included an onsite wastewater treatment plant, air monitors and other advanced pollution controls absent from the old North Side facility. It was completed in 2021, and would have employed about 100, but Lightfoot's reversal stopped it from opening. The company is suing the city, claiming officials had no authority to deny a permit.
'Regardless, any good faith cumulative impact assessment would have resulted in the City approving our state-of-the-art facility that met all legal requirements,' according to a written statement from Steve Joseph, CEO of Reserve Management Group. 'Further, it would have helped the City achieve its sustainability goals by reusing over 500,000 tons per year of obsolete metal in an environmentally safe way by utilizing the most advanced pollution control technologies.'
Stalnos, a Southeast Side resident and former steelworker, said keeping Southside Recycling shut kills jobs and damages Chicago's reputation among potential investors, and further restrictions will worsen the problem.
'I spent 15 years working onsite at the Republic/LTV steel mill on Avenue O,' Stalnos said, 'and back then the (Hazel Johnson) ordinance would have been wonderful, because 50 years ago the industry had some bad players. It doesn't now.'
Between 1951 and 1977, the mill where Stalnos worked dumped slag near the intersection of 126th Street and Avenue O, contaminating the land and a nearby creek with lead, chromium and other compounds, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It is now a Superfund cleanup site.
The Metropolitan Planning Council, an independent nonprofit, favors Johnson's proposal. Its analysis shows polluting industries still present problems for city residents, especially in Black and Latino communities where most of Chicago's heavy industry is concentrated.
'While all Chicagoans ultimately suffer the environmental and health harms of industrial pollution, the evidence is clear that residents living in closest proximity to polluting uses bear these impacts most directly, intensely, and disproportionately,' stated MPC CEO Dan Lurie in an April letter to City Council members.
The planning group's analysis was bolstered by other research on Chicago completed in 2022 by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and spelled out a uniform process to ensure new businesses would not wreck people's health, he stated.
'The clear, citywide- and evidence-based approach of the proposed ordinance would replace the current approach that is used to make heavy industry land-use decisions, which is ad hoc and site-by-site,' Lurie stated.
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San Francisco Chronicle
5 hours ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Black mayors of cities Trump decries as 'lawless' tout significant declines in violent crimes
As President Donald Trump declared Washington, D.C., a crime-ridden wasteland in need of federal intervention this week and threatened similar federal interventions in other Black-led cities, several mayors compared notes. The president's characterization of their cities contradicts what they began noticing last year: that they were seeing a drop in violent crime after a pandemic-era spike. In some cases the declines were monumental, due in large part to more youth engagement, gun buyback programs and community partnerships. Now members of the African American Mayors Association are determined to stop Trump from burying accomplishments that they already felt were overlooked. And they're using the administration's unprecedented law enforcement takeover in the nation's capital as an opportunity to disprove his narrative about some of the country's greatest urban enclaves. 'It gives us an opportunity to say we need to amplify our voices to confront the rhetoric that crime is just running rampant around major U.S. cities. It's just not true,' said Van Johnson, mayor of Savannah, Georgia, and president of the African American Mayors Association. 'It's not supported by any evidence or statistics whatsoever.' After deploying the first of 800 National Guard members to Washington, the Republican president is setting his sights on other cities including Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles and Oakland, California, calling them crime-ridden and 'horribly run." One thing they all have in common: They're led by Black mayors. 'It was not lost on any member of our organization that the mayors either were Black or perceived to be Democrats,' Johnson said. 'And that's unfortunate. For mayors, we play with whoever's on the field.' The federal government's actions have heightened some of the mayors' desires to champion the strategies used to help make their cities safer. Trump argued that federal law enforcement had to step in after a prominent employee of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, was attacked in an attempted carjacking. He also pointed to homeless encampments, graffiti and potholes as evidence of Washington 'getting worse.' However statistics published by Washington's Metropolitan Police contradict the president and show violent crime has dropped there since a post-pandemic peak in 2023. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson scoffed at Trump's remarks, hailing the city's 'historic progress driving down homicides by more than 30% and shootings by almost 40% in the last year alone.' Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles, where homicides fell 14% between 2023 and 2024, called the federal takeover nothing but a performative 'power grab.' In Baltimore, officials say they have seen historic decreases in homicides and nonfatal shootings this year, and those have been on the decline since 2022, according to the city's public safety data dashboard. Carjackings were down 20% in 2023, and other major crimes fell in 2024. Only burglaries have climbed slightly. The lower crime rates are attributed to tackling violence with a 'public health' approach, city officials say. In 2021, under Mayor Brandon Scott, Baltimore created a Comprehensive Violence Prevention Plan that called for more investment in community violence intervention, more services for crime victims and other initiatives. Scott accused Trump of exploiting crime as a 'wedge issue and dog whistle' rather than caring about curbing violence. 'He has actively undermined efforts that are making a difference saving lives in cities across the country in favor of militarized policing of Black communities,' Scott said via email. The Democratic mayor pointed out that the Justice Department has slashed over $1 million in funding this year that would have gone toward community anti-violence measures. He vowed to keep on making headway, regardless. 'We will continue to closely work with our regional federal law enforcement agencies, who have been great partners, and will do everything in our power to continue the progress despite the roadblocks this administration attempts to implement,' Scott said. Community organizations help curb violence Just last week Oakland officials touted significant decreases in crime in the first half of this year compared with the same period in 2024, including a 21% drop in homicides and a 29% decrease in all violent crime, according to the midyear report by the Major Cities Chiefs Association. Officials credited collaborations with community organizations and crisis response services through the city's Department of Violence Prevention, established in 2017. 'These results show that we're on the right track,' Mayor Barbara Lee said at a news conference. 'We're going to keep building on this progress with the same comprehensive approach that got us here.' After Trump gave his assessment of Oakland this week, she rejected it as 'fearmongering.' Social justice advocates agree that crime has gone down and say Trump is perpetuating exaggerated perceptions that have long plagued Oakland. Nicole Lee, executive director of Urban Peace Movement, an Oakland-based organization that focuses on empowering communities of color and young people through initiatives such as leadership training and assistance to victims of gun violence, said much credit for the gains on lower crime rates is due to community groups. 'We really want to acknowledge all of the hard work that our network of community partners and community organizations have been doing over the past couple of years coming out of the pandemic to really create real community safety,' Lee said. 'The things we are doing are working.' She worries that an intervention by military forces would undermine that progress. 'It creates kind of an environment of fear in our community,' Lee said. Patrols and youth curfews In Washington, agents from multiple federal agencies, National Guard members and even the United States Park Police have been seen performing law enforcement duties from patrolling the National Mall to questioning people parked illegally. Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson said the guard troops will not be armed but declined to elaborate on their assignments to safety patrols and beautification efforts. Savannah's Johnson said he is all for partnering with the federal government, but troops on city streets is not what he envisioned. Instead, cities need federal assistance for things like multistate investigation and fighting problems such as gun trafficking, and cybercrimes. 'I'm a former law enforcement officer. There is a different skill set that is used for municipal law enforcement agencies than the military,' Johnson said. There has also been speculation that federal intervention could entail curfews for young people. But that would do more harm, Nicole Lee said, disproportionately affecting young people of color and wrongfully assuming that youths are the main instigators of violence. 'If you're a young person, basically you can be cited, criminalized, simply for being outside after certain hours,' Lee said. 'Not only does that not solve anything in regard to violence and crime, it puts young people in the crosshairs of the criminal justice system.' A game of wait-and-see For now, Johnson said, the mayors are watching their counterpart in Washington, Muriel Bowser, closely to see how she navigates the unprecedented federal intervention. She has been walking a fine line between critiquing and cooperating since Trump's takeover, but things ramped up Friday when officials sued to try to block the takeover. Johnson praised Bowser for carrying on with dignity and grace. 'Black mayors are resilient. We are intrinsically children of struggle,' Johnson said. 'We learn to adapt quickly, and I believe that we will and we are.'
Los Angeles Times
8 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's embrace of unchristian Christian nationalism
Pete Hegseth, widely considered the least qualified Defense secretary in American history, is hardly anyone's version of the ideal Christian husband and father. Only 45 years old, he's been married three times. His first marriage — to his high school sweetheart — lasted a mere four years, deteriorating after Hegseth admitted to multiple extramarital affairs. A couple of years later, he married his second wife, with whom he had three children. During that marriage, he fathered a child with a Fox News producer who eventually became his third wife. He paid off a woman who accused him of sexual assault (he denies the assault). He routinely passed out drunk at family gatherings and misbehaved in public when inebriated, according to numerous witnesses. His own mother once accused him of being 'an abuser of women,' though she later retracted her claims when Hegseth was facing Senate confirmation. Still, the Senate's Republican majority, cowed by President Trump, confirmed his appointment. Hegseth has two qualities that Trump prizes above all others. He is blindly loyal to the president, and he looks good on TV. After his installation, Hegseth proceeded to fire top military brass who happened to be Black or women or both. He has restored the names of Confederate generals to Army bases (Bragg and Benning). His petty 'anti-woke' crusade led him to strip the name of the assassinated gay rights leader Harvey Milk, a former Naval officer who served honorably, from a Navy ship. And he has considered doing the same to a ship named in honor of the abolitionist and Civil War hero Harriet Tubman. He has said that women do not belong in combat roles, and has kicked out transgender soldiers, cruelly stripping them of the pensions they earned for their service. In March, he shared classified information about an impending American airstrike in Yemen on an unsecured Signal group chat that included his wife, on purpose, and the editor of the Atlantic, by accident. He is, in short, the least serious man ever to lead this nation's armed forces. As if all that weren't dispiriting enough, Hegseth is now in bed (metaphorically) with a crusading Christian nationalist. Earlier this month, Hegseth made waves when he reposted on social media a CNN interview with Douglas Wilson, the pastor and theocrat who is working hard to turn the clock back on the rights of every American who is not white, Christian and male. In the interview, Wilson expounded on his patriarchal, misogynistic, authoritarian and homophobic views. Women, he said, should serve as 'chief executive of the home' and should not have the right to vote. (Their men can do that for them.) Gay marriage and gay sex should be outlawed once again. 'We know that sodomy is worse than slavery by how God responds to it,' he told CNN's Pamela Brown. (Slavery is 'unbiblical,' he avowed, though he did bizarrely defend it once, writing in 1990 a pamphlet that 'slavery produced in the South a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before the War or since.') When a new outpost of his church opened in Washington, D.C ., in July, Hegseth and his family were among the worshippers. CNN described Hegseth's presence as 'a major achievement' for Wilson. 'All of Christ for All of Life,' wrote Hegseth as he endorsed and reposted the interview. That is the motto of Wilson's expanding universe, which includes his Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, the center of his Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a network of more than 100 churches on four continents, parochial schools, a college, a publishing house and media platforms. 'All of Christ for All of Life' is a shorthand for the belief that Christian doctrines should shape every part of life — including government, culture and education. Wilson is a prolific author of books with titles such as 'Her Hand in Marriage,' 'Federal Husband,' and 'Reforming Marriage.' His book 'Fidelity' teaches 'what it means to be a one-woman man.' Doubtful it has crossed Hegseth's desk. 'God hates divorce,' writes Wilson in one of his books. Given the way sexual pleasure is celebrated in the Old and New Testaments, Wilson has a peculiarly dim view of sex. I mean, how many weddings have been graced with recitations from the Song of Solomon, with its thinly disguised allusions to pleasurable sexual intimacy? ('Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine.') Wilson's world is considerably less sensual. 'A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants,' he writes in 'Fidelity.' 'A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.' Mutual sexual pleasure seems out of the question: 'The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party.' Ugh. There is nothing particularly new here; Wilson's ideology is just another version of patriarchal figures using religion to fight back against the equality movements of the late 19th and 20th centuries. They are basically the hatemongers of the Westboro Baptist Church dressed up in respectable clothing. 'Some people may conflate Christian nationalism and Christianity because they both use the symbols and language of Christianity, such as a Bible, a cross and worship songs,' says the group Christians Against Christian Nationalism on its website. 'But Christian nationalism uses the veneer of Christianity to advance its own aims — to point to a political figure, party or ideology instead of Jesus.' What you have in people like Hegseth and Wilson are authoritarian men who hide behind their religion to execute the most unchristian of agendas. God may hate divorce, but from my reading of the Bible, God hates hypocrisy even more. Bluesky: @rabcarianThreads: @rabcarian
Chicago Tribune
8 hours ago
- Chicago Tribune
Stacy Davis Gates: Chicago families deserve to go back to fully funded schools
For the first time in years, when parents drop off their children to school this year, they will be in smaller class sizes. Elementary students will have access to the state-mandated recess Chicago Public Schools previously didn't provide. Libraries are reopening. Our homegrown national model for public education, sustainable community schools, is expanding to 16 more campuses this year. Black students will be taught in classrooms where the right to learn their history is enshrined in our contract and all students will have greater access to sports, arts, music and a nurse and counselor. School will be one of the safest places immigrant students can be due to our expanded sanctuary protections. Students with disabilities will be supported by 215 new case managers. LGBTQ+ students will arrive at schools with staff support, access to all-gender restrooms and protocols against bullying. All of these improvements to the school day are a result of the contract educators fought hard for over the past year and ratified in April. And they all require the governor and Democratic majority in Springfield to pay our district what is owed. While parents were fulfilling back-to-school shopping and educators were equipping classrooms with supplies out of their own pockets, the state that withholds money from CPS was holding a hearing to find out why the district is in financial trouble. The answer is obvious. It's a choice. It is not a math problem. The difference between a cost and an investment is one's values. The difference between a deficit and a robbery is one's tax bracket. At a time when Illinois' wealthiest 5% are getting handed $8 billion in tax cuts from President Donald Trump, Gov. JB Pritzker's budget provided $10 billion in tax breaks and other incentives at the state level to tech corporations and the ultra-rich. Combine those and you're looking at $18 billion in giveaways to those who need it least. That's enough to eliminate CPS' entire $1.6 billion funding gap more than 11 times over. The governor says he wants to fund Illinois schools fully, but has yet to create a budget to reflect that desire. Meanwhile, books are locked in libraries because schools don't have librarians. We're losing art and music teachers at schools deemed 'fine arts.' High schools operate without math and science teachers. CPS just laid off crossing guards, security guards, janitors and — at a time when Trump is cutting SNAP for families — CPS is planning to cut the one hot meal some students have access to. Our schools have been cut to the bone and constantly asked to do more with less. But this isn't just underinvestment. It is also extraction. While banks prey on the false scarcity by demanding an even higher premium on loans, research shows that for Cook County is being shortchanged in terms of state funding. For every dollar it sends to the state of Illinois in tax revenue, it receives only 90 cents back. Meanwhile southern regions in Illinois receive $2.81 for every dollar of tax revenue created. The Blackest school district in the state, with the highest homeless student population, the highest bilingual population and the highest special needs population hasn't just experienced disinvestment. Black and brown families in Chicago have been subsidizing the education of students outside city limits for as long as the system has been designed to deprive our own children of equal opportunity. This back-to-school season is the result of more than a decade of work to undo the damage done by privatizers and school closers. We are in the midst of a reconstruction in our city to make good on what formerly enslaved ancestors dreamed of for their descendants when they broke the back of the Confederacy, ended the Civil War, and created public schools, labor rights and public health. We need a partner in our governor and the Democratic supermajority, not just a debt that's past due. We need being a blue state during Trump's authoritarianism to mean something. As much as is spent to try to demonize our union, we're more in-line with the people of our state than anyone arguing for cuts or to deny our children the education they deserve. Ninety-one percent of Illinoisans, when asked, believe in the right to a public education and 71% support increasing funding for schools. When asked where that money should come from, 63% of Americans say raise taxes on corporations and the ultra-rich. States such as Massachusetts are proof positive that this isn't rhetorical, it's successful. There they implemented a millionaire's tax that raised $2.2 billion in its first year alone — double what was expected. This revenue was used for universal free school meals, free community college and transit improvements. No millionaires fled the state. The state's millionaire population increased by 38%. Just last week, Massachusetts adopted an initiative to Trump-proof their education infrastructure while Illinois Democrats hold hearings asking why schools are broke. With 78 Democrats in the House and 40 in the Senate, that's more than enough to call a special session and do the same. Trump is actively dismantling public education, attacking communities of color, and transferring wealth to billionaires. The question for our state is simple: Will you be a beacon that stands up to the president, protects democracy and fights for our children? Or will you passively complement his plan for our schools through inaction? The state set the goal of at least adequately funding our schools by 2027. But the most recent budget opens that gap to $1.6 billion dollars owed instead of closing it. The steps are simple. End the tax breaks. Fund our schools. Turn the political theater into political leadership. Our students are waiting. Stacy Davis Gates is president of the Chicago Teachers Union.
