Bridget Gainer, 10th District Cook County Commissioner
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2013 Summer Fellowship Program

Cook County Commissioner Bridget Gainer (10th District) is creating a summer fellowship program for college juniors/seniors or recent graduates to assist with community outreach and policy research. The Fellow will represent the Commissioner's office at events, assisting with new media, research, writing, and policy development. 

About the Fellowship Program:
  • This is a stipend position.
  • This is a full-time position and includes evenings and weekends.
  • The position will be based out of the Commissioner Gainer's County Building Office [City Hall] located at 118 N Clark St, Chicago IL.
  • There will be travel throughout the city to attend meetings, seminars, or other events directly related to the Fellowship Program. Please note, the ideal candidate is comfortable riding and navigating public transportation. Any pre-approved fellowship related expenses will be reimbursed, including travel.
  • This would be an ideal internship for candidates looking to work in public policy, political science, communications, or business.
  • With proper notice and according to the requirements of your respective university, this internship may be eligible for college credit.
  • The fellowship program is from June to August 2013. Please note, fellowship program is open to accommodate the fellow's academic calendar. 
If interested - please submit via e-mail a cover letter, resume and a short writing sample to: 
Abin Kuriakose 
Director of Community Affairs and Outreach 
Cook County Commissioner Bridget Gainer - 10th District 
abin@bridgetgainer.com 

About Cook County Commissioner Bridget Gainer
Commissioner Bridget Gainer represents Chicago's northside neighborhoods at the Cook County Board. The County administers public safety (the courts & jails), a health & hospital system which serves 500,000 residents annually, the forest preserve district of 69,000-plus acres, and the property tax system. First elected in 2010, Commissioner Gainer comes to Cook County Government with 20 years of experience in the non-profit, public and private sectors - a career that has provided a strong foundation in finance, human services and the workings of local government. Her top priorities include re-purposing vacant property/land through the Cook County Land Bank, women & children in jail, and public health.


Crain's Chicago Business: "Cook County Pension woes worsen"

May 8, 2013
By: Paul Merrion

Solvency of Cook County's pension funds deteriorated in the last fiscal year, according to a new report, and County Commissioners are pressing anew for reforms. 

The county's main Employees' Annuity and Benefit Fund saw its pension debt grow to $6.79 billion, up $969.5 million last year and an increase of $1.6 billion in the gap between assets and liabilities since 2010. The plan is only 53.5 percent funded, down from 57.5 percent in fiscal 2011, and the fund is projected to be insolvent by 2034. 

A smaller fund for forest preserve workers will be insolvent by 2031, with only 56.7 percent of the assets needed to cover future benefits, down from 61.6 percent last year, according to the actuarial report released last week. 

The county has been negotiating pension reform with its unions for more than a yearwithout resolution as state lawmakers continue to grapple with the issue. 

"Without meaningful pension reforms, the Cook County pension fund will not be able to promise a secure retirement for employees and a sustainable system for taxpayers," Commissioner Bridget Gainer, chair of the county's subcommittee on pensions, said in a statement. "Every year that goes by that we do not address the growing unfunded liabilities, the more draconian solutions will be needed to find sustainable solutions." 

Ms. Gainer said she and Commissioner Joan Murphy, who chairs the Labor Relations Committee, will introduce resolutions at today's county board meeting calling for hearings on the fund's finances and the impact that pension reforms pending in Springfield would have on the funds if the county adopted similar measures. 

If statewide reform is enacted, it wouldn't apply to the county, but it could create a template for the county to follow to make its retirement system more solvent. But county officials haven't calculated how much of their pension problem would be reduced by adopting their own versions of the various pending state reform proposals. 

"Does one of these bills meet 90 percent of our problem? It would be helpful in our negotiations with labor" to know that, Ms. Gainer said in an interview this morning. "We want to solve this problem now, not for the next decade but the next two generations." 

2013 Copyright Crain's Chicago Business Magazine

For a link to the article, click here.

Press Release: "Financial Reports Show Further Decline in Cook County Pension Funded Status"

Contact Information
312-603-4210 
Info@BridgetGainer.com 

May 7, 2013 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 

Financial Reports Show Further Decline in Cook County Pension Funded Status 
Underscores Need for Fair and Sustainable Reforms 

CHICAGO - Actuarial valuations for fiscal year 2012 were recently released for the Cook County Employees' Annuity and Benefit Fund and the Forest Preserve District Employees' Annuity and Benefit Fund of Cook County. The reports show that the Cook County Pension Fund has seen a further decline in funded status; currently at 53.5% this is a 3.8% decrease from last year's funded status of 57.5%. For the County Pension Fund this year's decline continues a decade long trend that has taken the County Pension Fund from 90% in 2000 to its present level of 53.5%. The Forest Preserve Pension Fund has fallen to 56.7% a decrease of 4.9% from last year's funded status of 61.6%. 

"Without meaningful pension reforms the Cook County Pension fund will not be able to promise a secure retirement for employees and a sustainable system for taxpayers," said Bridget Gainer, Cook County Commissioner (D-10), chair of the County Subcommittee on Pensions, "Every year that goes by that we do not address the growing unfunded liabilities the more draconian solutions will be needed to find sustainable solutions." 

The updated 30-year funding projection calculates that the Cook County Pension Fund will now be insolvent by 2034 - 21 years and the Forest Preserve Pension Fund will be insolvent by 2031- 18 years. The unfunded liabilities of the Cook County Pension Fund grew to $6.79 billion, an increase of $969.5 million from 2011 and an increase of $1.6 billion since 2010. The unfunded liabilities of the Forest Preserve Pension Fund increased to $131.9 million, an increase of $20.7 million from 2011. 

Commissioner Gainer and Commissioner Joan Murphy, Chair of Labor Relations Committee will introduce two resolutions at tomorrow's County Board meeting; the first will call for a hearing on the fiscal year 2012 pension fund actuarial valuations and the second will call for a hearing to determine the impact pending legislation in the Illinois General Assembly would have on the Cook County and Forest Preserve Pension Funds if similar reforms were adopted. 

Last April, Commissioner Gainer launched www.OpenPensions.org, an open data pension website for the Cook County Pension Fund as a call to action for retirees, taxpayers and current employees to participate in the pension reform discussion. "In order to find a solution to our pension problem we have to change the way we have the conversation. Workers who rely on a pension from the County should be fully informed and actively involved in the discussions about any changes that will affect their retirement," said Commissioner Joan Murphy. "The path forward must begin by defining a sustainable level retirement security. It is critical that all stakeholders define the level of benefit required to provide a sustainable retirement and restore pension solvency," said Gainer. 

"There is not a one-size fits all solution for pension reform in Illinois. Each fund will need to devise local solutions. There are no shortcuts or quick fixes that can trump collaboration, hard work and the tough decisions that it takes to overcome a problem that has been this long in the making" said Gainer. Without any reform to the Cook County pension system the fund is expected to become insolvent by 2034, jeopardizing the retirements of thousands of county workers and potentially leaving taxpayers on the hook for a huge bailout. 

###

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Chicago SunTimes: "'New Jim Crow' incarcerations raise uncomfortable questions"

May 7, 2013
By: Mary Mitchell

Michelle Alexander, a civil rights lawyer, and author of "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness," is raising uncomfortable questions. 

Although many of us might believe the criminal justice system has its flaws, the notion that the system is intentionally biased against black and poor people is too sinister to contemplate. 

But that's exactly what Alexander is suggesting. 

In a speech at the Union League Club of Chicago last Friday, Alexander pointed out that even though the nation elected its first black president, a couple of blocks from the White House are neighborhoods in which three out of four young black men have already spent time behind bars. 

Because of mass incarceration "a vast new racial undercast now exists in America," Alexander said. 

"The members of the undercast are now largely invisible to those of us who have good jobs, live in good neighborhoods and zoom around on freeways past the virtual and literal prisons in which they live," she said. 

Alexander has gained national recognition for her scholarly work of the criminal justice system. It's what happens to felons after they serve their time and return to their communities that re-create a Jim Crow system. 

These young people come home "saddled" with criminal records that follow them for the rest of their lives and "authorize legal discrimination" against them, Alexander points out. 

In her book, Alexander describes a system that so closely resembles the conditions blacks faced during Jim Crow, it's hard to ignore the similarities. 

For instance, when someone serves his or her time but cannot find gainful employment or, in some cases, even housing, what are they supposed to do? They can't get in a time machine and make different choices. These young people become second-class citizens for much of their lives. 

"The systematic mass incarceration of poor people of color in the United States has emerged as the new caste-like system," Alexander told a room filled with lawyers, prosecutors, public defenders and politicians. 

"One that shuttles young people from segregated neighborhoods, decrepit under-funded and failing schools to brand new high-tech, thriving prisons." 

That certainly seems to be the case in the Chicago area. 

In a commentary published in the Chicago Sun-Times in 2012, John Maki, executive director of the John Howard Association, pointed out that the Illinois prison system has "exploded." 

Despite a budget dripping in red ink, Illinois led the country in increasing its prison population, adding almost 4,000 inmates, Maki noted. Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, who is looking to substantially reduce the prison population in Cook County Jail, praised Alexander's work during her introduction of the law professor. 

"Michelle Alexander points out that a high percentage of folks who are incarcerated in prison need not be, and this holds true for our jails as well," Preckwinkle said. 

"Roughly 90 percent of the people in our Cook County Jail are there because they are awaiting trial, usually because they can't pay their bond. In many respects, the jail is a poor house. What I usually say is that jail is at the intersection of racism and poverty in our country," she added. 

Alexander knows that her claims that the United States has created a system of racial and social control will be tough for some to accept, and admits she, too, was once a doubter. 

"There was a time I rejected this kind of talk out of hand. There was a time when I rejected comparisons between mass incarceration and slavery and mass incarceration and Jim Crow. I believed that those kinds of comparisons were exaggerations, distortions, even hyperbole," she said. 

But after spending years representing victims of "racial profiling" and "police brutality" and trying to help people who had been released from prison overcome legal barriers, Alexander said she had an "awakening." 

"I began to awaken to the reality that our criminal justice system now functions much more like a system of racial and social control than a system of crime prevention and control," she said. 

"We need a shift in public consciousness around all those who are trapped in jobless, segregated ghettos cycling in and out of our prisons and jails."

For a link to the article, click here.

2011 Copyright Sun-Media, LLC.

The Economist: "Cities Finding Useful Ways of Handling a Torrent of Data"

April 27, 2013 
By: Cities & Data Blog

Thanks to Brett Goldstein, Chicago's chief information officer, it is easy to discover a great deal about his city. In the past three months 5,973 vehicles were moved; since the start of 2011, 72,687 complaints about faulty lights in alleyways have been reported; and in the first half of 2012 the tourist-information website was apparently unavailable for 5,870 minutes. (The city says this was caused by a fault in the monitoring software.)

Needless to say, Mr Goldstein will want to get this fixed if he is to retain his annual salary of $154,992. Yet the nugget of data is a tiny detail in a vastly larger enterprise: to make Chicago's data openly accessible and useful to the millions of people who live and work there.

Many cities around the country find themselves in a similar position: they are accumulating data faster than they know what to do with. One approach is to give them to the public. For example, San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago are or soon will be sharing the grades that health inspectors give to restaurants with an online restaurant directory.

Another way of doing it is simply to publish the raw data and hope that others will figure out how to use them. This has been particularly successful in Chicago, where computer nerds have used open data to create many entirely new services. Applications are now available that show which streets have been cleared after a snowfall, what time a bus or train will arrive and how requests to fix potholes are progressing.

New York and Chicago are bringing together data from departments across their respective cities in order to improve decision-making. When a city holds a parade it can combine data on street closures, bus routes, weather patterns, rubbish trucks and emergency calls in real time.

As cities also start to look back at historical data, fascinating discoveries are being made. Mike Flowers, the chief analytics officer in New York, says that if a property has a tax lien on it there is a ninefold increase in the chance of a catastrophic fire there. And businesses that have broken licensing rules are far more likely to be selling cigarettes smuggled into the city in order to avoid paying local taxes. Over in Chicago, the city knows with mathematical precision that when it gets calls complaining about rubbish bins in certain areas, a rat problem will follow a week later.

The next step is to use these predictions to inform policymaking. New York is already doing this, for example by deciding where to send its cigarette-tax inspectors. Chicago is not quite at this point yet, but is ambitiously trying to build an "open-source predictive analytics platform". This means that it will publish as many data as it can, as close to real time as possible, in a way that will allow anyone to mine them for useful insights into the city.

Moreover, the software Chicago plans to create will be made public, allowing other cities to use it to set up similar systems of their own. (New York keeps its analysis behind closed doors and uses proprietary technology.) It is a big job and means cleaning up 10 billion lines of unstructured data. The hope is that entirely new services will emerge, as well as a great deal of new intelligence about how the city works.

It is still unclear whether Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago, is ready to let data run his city. If he is not, then all these efforts will result in little more than a City Hall think-tank. Mr Emanuel seems committed. One obstacle is clear, though. All these data will also allow the public to scrutinise the mayor and his officials more closely than ever before.

Copyright 2013 The Economist

Wall Street Journal: "The Pension Rate-of-Return Fantasy"

April 9 2013
By: Andy Kessler

It has been said that an actuary is someone who really wanted to be an accountant but didn't have the personality for it. See who's laughing now. Things are starting to get very interesting, actuarially-speaking. 

Federal bankruptcy judge Christopher Klein ruled on April 1 that Stockton, Calif., can file for bankruptcy via Chapter 9 (Chapter 11's ugly cousin). The ruling may start the actuarial dominoes falling across the country, because Stockton's predicament stems from financial assumptions that are hardly restricted to one improvident California municipality. 

Stockton may expose the little-known but biggest lie in global finance: pension funds' expected rate of return. It turns out that the California Public Employees' Retirement System, or Calpers, is Stockton's largest creditor and is owed some $900 million. But in the likelihood that U.S. bankruptcy law trumps California pension law, Calpers might not ever be fully repaid. 

So what? Calpers has $255 billion in assets to cover present and future pension obligations for its 1.6 million members. Yes, but...in March, Calpers Chief Actuary Alan Milligan published a report suggesting that various state employee and school pension funds are only 62%-68% funded 10 years out and only 79%-86% funded 30 years out. Mr. Milligan then proposed - and Calpers approved - raising state employer contributions to the pension fund by 50% over the next six years to return to full funding. That is money these towns and school systems don't really have. Even with the fee raise, the goal of being fully funded is wishful thinking. 

Pension math is more art than science. Actuaries guess, er, compute how much money is needed today based on life expectancies of retirees as well as the expected investment return on the pension portfolio. Shortfalls, or "underfunded pension liabilities," need to be made up by employers or, in the case of California, taxpayers. 

In June of 2012, Calpers lowered the expected rate of return on its portfolio to 7.5% from 7.75%. Mr. Milligan suggested 7.25%. Calpers had last dropped the rate in 2004, from 8.25%. But even the 7.5% return is fiction. Wall Street would laugh if the matter weren't so serious. 

And the trouble is not just in California. Public-pension funds in Illinois use an average of 8.18% expected returns. According to the actuarial firm Millman, the 100 top U.S. public companies with defined benefit pension assets of $1.3 trillion have an average expected rate of return of 7.5%. Three of them are over 9%. (Since 2000, these assets have returned 5.6%.) 

Who wouldn't want 7.5%-8% returns these days? Ten-year U.S. Treasury bonds are paying 1.74%. There is almost zero probability that Calpers will earn 7.5% on its $255 billion anytime soon. 

The right number is probably 3%. Fixed income has negative real rates right now and will be a drag on returns. The math is not this easy, but in general, the expected return for equities is the inflation rate plus productivity improvements plus the expansion of the price/earnings multiple. For the past 30 years, an 8.5% expected return was reasonable, given +3%-4% inflation, +2% productivity, and +3% multiple expansion as interest rates plummeted. But in our new environment, inflation is +2%, productivity is +2% and given that interest rates are zero, multiple expansion should be, and I'm being generous, -1%. 

So what to do? I recall a conversation from 20 years ago. I was hoping to get into the money-management business at Morgan Stanley MS +2.90% . I wanted to ramp up its venture-capital investing in Silicon Valley, but I was waved away. It was explained to me that investors wanted instead to put billions into private equity. 

One of the firm's big clients, General Motors had a huge problem. Its pension shortfall rose from $14 billion in 1992 to $22.4 billion in 1993. The company had to put up assets. Instead, Morgan Stanley suggested that it only had an actuarial problem. Pension money invested for an 8% return, the going expected rate at the time, would grow 10 times over the next 30 years. But money invested in "alternative assets" like private equity (and venture capital) would see expected returns of 14%-16%. At 16%, capital would grow 85 times over 30 years. Woo-hoo: problem solved. With the stroke of a pen and no new money from corporate, the GM pension could be fully funded--actuarially anyway. 

Things didn't go as planned. The fund put up $170 million in equity and borrowed another $505 million and invested in - I'm not kidding - a northern Missouri farm raising genetically engineered pigs. Meatier pork chops for all! Everything went wrong. In May 1996, the pigs defaulted on $412 million in junk debt. In a perhaps related event, General Motors entered 2012 with its global pension plans underfunded by $25.4 billion. 

In other words, you can't wish this stuff away. Over time, returns are going to be subpar and the contributions demanded from cities across California and companies across America are going to go up and more dominoes are going to fall. San Bernardino and seven other California cities may also be headed to Chapter 9. The more Chapter 9 filings, the less money Calpers receives, and the more strain on the fictional expected rate of return until the boiler bursts. 

In the long run, defined-contribution plans that most corporations have embraced will also be adopted by local and state governments. Meanwhile, though, all the knobs and levers that can be pulled to delay Armageddon have already been used. California, through Prop 30, has tapped the top 1% of taxpayers. State employers are facing 50% contribution increases. Private equity has shuffled all the mattress and rental-car companies it can. Buying out Dell is the most exciting thing they can come up with. Expected rates of return on pension portfolios are going down, not up. Even Facebook millionaires won't make up the shortfall. 

Sadly, the only thing left is to cut retiree payouts, something Judge Klein has left open. There are 12,338 retired California government workers receiving $100,000 or more in pension payments from Calpers. Michael D. Johnson, a retiree from the County of Solano, pulls in $30,920.24 per month. As more municipalities file Chapter 9, the more these kinds of retirement deals will be broken. When Wisconsin public employees protested the state government's move to rein in pensions in 2011, the demonstrations got ugly--but that was just a hint of the torches and pitchforks likely to come. 

Meanwhile, it's business as usual. California Gov. Jerry Brown released a state budget suggesting a $29 million surplus for the fiscal year ending June 2013 and $1 billion in the next fiscal year. Actuarially anyway. 

Or as Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz told Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin, upon learning at a 2011 House hearing about that state's unrealistic pension assumptions: "If someone told me they expected to get an 8% to 8.5% return, I'd say they were probably smoking those maple leaves." 

Mr. Kessler, a former hedge-fund manager, is the author most recently of "Eat People" (Portfolio, 2011). 

A version of this article appeared April 10, 2013, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Pension Rate-of-Return Fantasy.

For a link to the article, click here.
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Atlantic Cities: "America's Most Post-Industrial Metros"

April 8 2013 By: Richard Florida

The American economy has long been transitioning from goods-producing to service. But how has this transition occurred across America's cities and metro areas? What does its geography look like?

To get a finer-grained sense of this, I turn to a new metric which compares the ratio of services to goods produced across metro areas, created by Jose Lobo of Arizona State University and based on data from the U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Economic Analysis. 

For the U.S. economy as a whole, the ratio of services to goods is roughly 3 to 1 (3.22). But there is considerable geographic variation: 210 metros rank well above this average ratio -- including 40 of the 50 largest metros (those with more than one million people) -- and 154 are below the average.

services_goods2.jpg

The map above by Zara Matheson of the Martin Prosperity Institute charts the ratio of services to goods for all metros. Post-industrialism is strongly concentrated across the Boston-New York-Washington corridor, along the Florida coast, in Southern and Northern California, and in other pockets across the country. 

The table below lists the top 20 large metros across the country (those with over one million people) that score highest on the of ratio services to goods.

Rank

Metro Area

Ratio of
Services to Goods

1

Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV 

11.17

2

New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA 

9.86

3

Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, FL 

7.75

4

Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, FL 

5.96

5

Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH 

5.93

6

Baltimore-Towson, MD 

5.90

7

Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta, GA 

5.62

8

Kansas City, MO-KS 

5.35

9

San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos, CA 

5.35

10

Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD 

5.33

11

Hartford-West Hartford-East Hartford, CT 

5.29

12

Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA 

5.26

13

Denver-Aurora-Broomfield, CO 

5.16

14

Columbus, OH 

5.10

15

Chicago-Joliet-Naperville, IL-IN-WI 

4.55

16

San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA 

4.53

17

Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI 

4.39

18

Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA 

4.36

19

Phoenix-Mesa-Glendale, AZ 

4.27

20

Providence-New Bedford-Fall River, RI-MA 

4.20


Washington, D.C., not surprisingly, stands out on this measure with a ratio of 11.17, more than three times the national average. Greater New York is second with a ratio 9.86, roughly three times the national ratio. Miami is third (7.75) more than twice the national average. Many metros along the Bos-Wash corridor have high service to goods ratios: Boston ranks fifth, Baltimore sixth, Philadelphia 10th, Hartford 11th, and Providence 20th. Miami and Tampa, both in Southern Florida, rank third and fourth. In the Sun Belt, Atlanta is seventh and Phoenix 19th. On the West Coast, San Diego is ninth, Los Angeles 12th, San Francisco 16th, and Seattle 18th. But a number of Midwest metros also show a considerable service-orientation. Kansas City is eighth, Columbus 14th, Chicago 15th, and Minneapolis 17th. 

The transition from goods production to service production has been happening for almost four decades now, but it is unfolding unevenly across America's economic landscape, as these numbers clearly show.

For the link to the article, click here.

Atlantic Cities: "After the School Closings, the Real Estate Mess"

April 8, 2013 By: Amanda Erickson 

Across the United States, cities are "right-sizing" their school districts, closing and combining schools to combat crunched budgets and dwindling student populations. In January, New York announced that it would shutter 17 schools; Philadelphia will close 23 of its 242 schools. Detroit, Chicago, and Washington D.C. also unveiled controversial plans to shrink the number of schools they operate. And that's just this year. 

One of the thorniest issues (in what is a veritable forest of mess) is what to do with those school buildings once they're empty. Often, the facilities are in poor shape, with promised renovations put off quasi-indefinitely. Many are located in depressed neighborhoods. And there are only so many developers with the know-how and resources to convert classrooms into condos or a community center. 

Then, there are often complex laws that limit who may or may not take over city-owned property. Some cities ban charter schools from moving into empty traditional schools (officials know that moving a new school into an old school can foment frustration with the district); others require time-consuming input from the community. Laws like these can tie school districts' hands and slow re-development. 

Washington, D.C., for example, has one of the hottest real estate markets in the country right now, the kind that prompts iconic newspapers like the Washington Post to put their historic downtown office building up for sale. Yet many closed public school campuses, such as the former Shaw Junior High School in one of D.C.'s up-and-coming neighborhoods, have sat empty since the last round of school closures in 2008. 

This is thanks in part to a federal law that requires 

the District of Columbia to provide charter schools first dibs on empty school buildings. But few fledgling charter schools can afford the sort of renovations needed at the former Shaw school, and instead D.C. Public Schools has opted for continued mothball status.

It's not unusual for closed schools to sit empty for years at a time. A 2011 Pew Charitable Trusts report estimated that there were 200 vacant public school campuses in six cities -- Philadelphia, Detroit, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C. -- alone. These empty buildings can be a drag on neighborhoods, acting as magnets for blight and crime. And rather than offering cash-strapped cities any sort of windfall, school districts end up paying for maintenance and security anyway. If a water pipe explodes or a group of kids decide to cover the school's doors in graffiti, it's the district that foots the bill. 

Few cities develop any kind of advance plan for school reuse, fearing the appearance of prioritizing a real estate bottom line over students. But that's a mistake, says Emily Dowdall, a senior associate with Pew who worked on the 2011 report.The longer a school sits vacant, the harder it becomes to do, well, anything other than let the building languish as a local eyesore. 

"The time window for finding a productive reuse is actually quite small," she says. "The longer you wait, the more dilapidated and unappealing a building becomes. And from the real estate community's perspective, it makes sense to target buildings that will have better options for reuse." 

"There's really an emotional attachment to these schools."

For an example of what that might look like, Dowdall points to Kansas City, Missouri. 

Of the cities Pew studied, the Kansas City School District closed the largest percentage of its schools. In 2010, the district had 39 closed school buildings to contend with. Administrators designed a comprehensive strategy for getting the vacant properties back on track. (Their district website includes an entire section devoted to school building re-purposing.) They set eight aside for potential future use; another was converted into an administrative building. Then the city school district got to work, conducting a market and technical assessment on each of the remaining 30 buildings. After the assessment, a team made one of four recommendations: sell, lease, demolish, or mothball. 

"We had 30 sites; that's 2 million square feet of buildings," says Shannon Jaax, a city planner who spearheads the effort. "There literally aren't enough resources in Kansas City to redevelop all these sites." 

Once the district decided to try to sell or lease a school, neighbors and potential investors are invited on tours of the building by district engineers. The engineers highlight the pros and cons of each building. The district then solicits proposals from potential buyers. Once they have proposals, the district runs several community meetings to ask for input and ideas. 

"There's really an emotional attachment to these schools," Jaax says. "We wanted to make sure the process acknowledged the input of neighborhoods." 

Buyers must also prove that they can afford most of the redevelopment up front. This avoids the all-too-common problem of buyers purchasing a site and then letting it sit vacant for years. They have managed to sell or lease nine schools this way, Jaax says. And the school district is in the process of identifying ways to convert less desirable sites into assets that still appeal to the community in some way. In some cases, that means the district will decide to demolish the building altogether and put in a community garden or park. In another instance, the district worked with a non-profit to create a community center.  

"Schools are assets of a community, they're centers of community," Jaax says. "We want to make sure these sites are a benefit to the neighborhood, versus a blighting incident." 

Kansas City isn't the only place to have found success with school building conversions. In Chicago, one closed school became an Irish American Heritage Center with a library, museum, and regular step dancing performances. In Lansing, Michigan, an elementary school was turned into a hub for technology start-ups; another was converted into a business incubator. The third was reborn as a gym. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, an old school district's former life has become part of its selling point. The Union Square Condos advertise themselves as "old school, new cool." Developer Brad Veneklase says his company was wooed by the tax benefits -- not only was the city offering a good deal for the building, the property was also designated an enterprise zone complete with special tax breaks for residential developers. 

"There was a lot of old trim work, entry doors built by the students in shop class; stuff that we saved during renovation," Veneklase says. "We reused it in the design and architecture." 

There are some old desks incorporated into the new design too, he says. Currently 185 of the 188 units are occupied. For every success story, though, there's half a dozen derelict public school campuses still waiting on their future. 

For too many buildings in too many cities, old school is the very opposite of cool -- it's a drag on the school district and the neighborhood. 

For a link to the article, click here.

Wall Street Journal: "Chicago Mayor's Pension Conundrum"

April 7 2013
By: Mark Peters

CHICAGO - Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who built a reputation in Washington as a blunt problem solver, is grappling with one of the nation's biggest municipal-pension shortfalls, setting up a showdown with labor unions as he stakes his first term on reshaping city government. 

The former chief of staff to President Barack Obama inherited a retirement system for teachers, firefighters and other city workers that is underfunded by almost $24 billion--and the bills are starting to come due. 

Under Illinois law, the city schools in coming months must resume regular payments to the teachers retirement system at a cost of $404 million a year, or nearly 8% of current Chicago education spending. Mr. Emanuel also faces a state mandate to more than double payments to the pension funds for police, firefighters and other unions. Rahm Emanuel faces a $24 billion shortfall in public-worker pensions. 

If these payments were funded by property taxes, his administration estimates residents would face a 150% increase--an option Mr. Emanuel says he won't consider. 

His other options also are tough. Mr. Emanuel could try to reach agreements on benefits cuts with individual unions, though such efforts so far have fallen flat. Or he could bypass unions by persuading the Illinois legislature to trim pension benefits for city employees and current retirees or give the city the power to do it. 

Much of this could come to a head in the next two months as the legislature grapples with its own huge state-worker pension problems and Mr. Emanuel is pushing for Chicago to be part of any resulting legislation. 

Mr. Emanuel's assessment: Workers are paying into a retirement system that makes unrealistic promises, and the city is offering benefits it can't pay. "The system today as constructed is not honest to the employees and is not honest to the taxpayers," he said in a recent interview. 

Chicago is one of the most dramatic examples of a fiscal crunch that many states and cities face as underfunding, market losses on pension investments and stagnant tax revenue push some pension funds toward insolvency. Mr. Emanuel's national reputation and the city's long history as a cradle of organized labor could make Chicago a key battleground as public-sector unions fight to fend off attempts to claw back benefits. 

Mr. Emanuel won his office in 2011 with little union support as he pledged to shake up the old order. Since then, he has brokered a labor deal at the city's convention center, extended the school day and balanced the city's $8.3 billion budget. 

His relationship with several unions has been rocky. Last month, police sergeants overwhelmingly rejected a pension deal the Emanuel administration saw as a model. The mayor faced off with the teachers union last September in a seven-day strike that didn't address the ballooning pension costs but instead concerned teacher evaluations and layoffs tied to school closings. More recently, the teachers led a pushback against the mayor's plan to shutter more than 50 schools. 

One recent bright spot for Mr. Emanuel has been a decrease in violent crime. While high-profile crimes such as the murder of 15-year-old honors student Hadiya Pendleton grabbed headlines, the murder rate overall dropped 40% in the year's first three months. 

Mr. Emanuel says that pension costs loom over any progress the city makes. Within three years, his administration estimates, annual pension costs for city workers other than teachers will reach $1.1 billion, compared with less than $500 million this year, squeezing services from tree trimming to police patrols. 

"There's a set of choices. Reform pensions and continue to be able do other things that are essential for a great city--or make pension payments and do certain things to the rest of the budget that are not part of a great city," Mr. Emanuel said. 

A recent study by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College of 128 county and municipal pension funds found Chicago with three of the 12 most underfunded systems. Chicago is in "a shockingly bad situation," said Alicia Munnell, the center's director. 

Chicago has chronically underfunded its retirement systems, setting its annual contribution to the pension funds through a state formula rather than amounts set by actuaries. For the teachers fund, the schools were allowed to pay less than actuaries required. Data from the Boston College study show Chicago on average contributed less than half of what actuaries required between 2007 and 2010, while the vast majority of the cities and counties it looked at paid 100% or more. 

Earlier this year, Mr. Emanuel's administration and leaders of the police sergeant's union reached a preliminary four-year contract with a 9% raise in total. In exchange, union leaders pledged to support efforts at the state level to solve the pension issue by reducing cost-of-living increases for current retirees, raising the retirement age and increasing worker contributions. 

Union members rejected the deal by a 6-to-1 margin last month, with rank-and-file officers pushing the sergeants to shoot it down. For some officers, the deal belied the mayor's statements that he wanted to work with unions to resolve the pension shortfall. "To me, being a partner shouldn't mean my way or the highway," said Mike Shields, president of Chicago's largest police union.

For the link to the article, click here.

New York Times: "The Mayor's Geek Squad"

March 23, 2013
By: Alan Feuer

It was a case for a digital Sherlock Holmes. Last fall, the city's Department of Environmental Protection wanted, finally, to crack down on restaurants that were illegally dumping cooking oil into sewers in their neighborhoods - congealed yellow grease is responsible, the department says, for more than half of New York's clogged drains. The question, of course, was how to find the culprits? 

The antiquated answer would have been to have the health department send inspectors to restaurants on blocks with backed-up sewers and hope by chance to catch a busboy pouring the contents of a deep fryer into the street. 

Enter the city's Office of Policy and Strategic Planning, a geek squad of civic-minded number-crunchers working from a pair of cluttered cubicles across from City Hall in the Municipal Building. They dug up data from the Business Integrity Commission, an obscure city agency that among other tasks certifies that all local restaurants have a carting service to haul away their grease. With a few quick calculations, comparing restaurants that did not have a carter with geo-spatial data on the sewers, the team was able to hand inspectors a list of statistically likely suspects. 

The result: a 95 percent success rate in tracking down the dumpers. 

With nothing grander than public data, the Case of the Grease-Clogged Sewers was solved. Data -- or Big Data, as quantitative analysts will call it -- is the tool du jour for tech-savvy companies that have realized that lurking in the vast pools of unprocessed information in their networks are solutions to some of today's most pressing and convoluted problems. A few years ago, Google, for example, took the 50 million most common keywords that Americans typed in search bars and tried to figure out, by comparing them with federal health statistics, where the H1N1 flu virus was to likely strike next. 

According to a new book, "Big Data: A Revolution that Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think," the enormous quantity of information whirling through the ether can affect and enhance our quality of life. 

As the authors put it, "The change of scale has led to a change of state."

Now the city has brought this quantitative method to the exceedingly complicated machine that is New York. For the modest sum of $1 million, and at a moment when decreasing budgets have required increased efficiency, the in-house geek squad has over the last three years leveraged the power of computers to double the city's hit rate in finding stores selling bootleg cigarettes; sped the removal of trees destroyed by Hurricane Sandy; and helped steer overburdened housing inspectors -- working with more than 20,000 options -- directly to lawbreaking buildings where catastrophic fires were likeliest to occur. 

"I think of us as the Get Stuff Done Folks," Michael Flowers who oversees the group, said. "All we do is take and process massive amounts of information and use it to do things more effectively." 

Before being hired in 2009 by John Feinblatt, the mayor's chief policy adviser, Mr. Flowers didn't know much about computer code -- let alone Bayesian statistics. From 1999 to 2003, he worked at the Manhattan district attorney's office, prosecuting homicides and drug crimes. When he left law enforcement, he moved to Washington, where he joined the power law firm Williams & Connolly and later took a job with the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Disenchanted by the smug homogeneity of Washington, Mr. Flowers leapt at the chance in 2005 to travel to Iraq with a team from the Justice Department to work on issues concerning mass graves and on Saddam Hussein's trial. While serving in the Green Zone, Mr. Flowers was responsible for sending investigators to grave sites in the countryside and transporting witnesses against Mr. Hussein to his office -- without getting either group blown up by roadside bombs. It came to his attention that military officers were using predictive informational techniques to determine where and when the bombs were likely to explode. He borrowed those techniques when he returned to New York and went to work for Mr. Feinblatt with the initial, limited task of trying to understand in the early months of the recession what was causing mortgage fraud. 

"We eventually realized there was enormous value in using all our data -- together and proactively," Mr. Feinblatt said. "We'd already done the retroactive act of looking back for accountability's sake. So we tried to use the data prescriptively to figure out what might be coming next." These days, Mr. Flowers, a relative amateur in data analytics is the geek squad's chief tactician and resident asker of questions. He allows the half-dozen post-collegiate techies working under him to ferret out the answers and, at age 43, he refers to them endearingly as "the kids." His office gives the impression of a high-tech start-up -- but without the cool furniture. Nick O'Brien, 30 and the team's chief of staff, works standing at a lectern. Ben Dean, the 24-year-old chief analyst, sits on an ergonomic rubber ball. One drawer in the filing cabinet is filled with spare neckties. These are to spruce team members up for meetings with "That Guy," as Mr. Flowers likes to call his boss, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, invariably chucking a thumb in the direction of City Hall. Two weeks ago, with Mr. O'Brien in Texas for the South-by-Southwest conference, the rest of the team was working on a project to make the city's response to natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy more robust. Catherine Kwan, 24, was doing some "MacGyver stuff," as Mr. Flowers called it, correlating city information with data from utilities, like Con Edison, to put in place a system that would eventually detect, in real time, when a building's heat or lights were out. 

"So what's the current ratio of Con Ed customer accounts per residential unit?" Mr. Flowers asked. (Ms. Kwan's answer: 0.88.) And the ratio of people per unit was "2.6," she said. One of the benefits that come from working with the informational atoms of the city is an almost molecular understanding of New York itself. The youthful quants were surprised to learn, for instance, that it was mathematically possible to create safer streets by encouraging local businesses to keep their doors open later after dark. They also had not known that a significant percentage of 311 complaints derived from certain neighborhoods in Lower Manhattan -- an area they now refer to jokingly as "whine country." 

"What's impressed me most about this job," Mr. Flowers said, "is learning how insanely complicated this city is." 

He mentioned, in particular, the 900,000 buildings the city oversees and the 12,000 tons of trash it picks up daily. "That activity is reflected in the data and on an amazingly detailed level. What we're really running here is an office of New Yorkology," he said. 

WHAT THE CITY KNOWS about its 8 million residents is staggering. Contained in public archives is information about their boilers and their sprinkler systems, the state of their local taxes, the number of heart attacks and fires that occur inside their buildings and whether they have ever logged complaints about roaches or construction noise. Additional data is gathered about their businesses, their commuting habits and their children's test scores. If a parking meter sits outside their apartment, the city knows how many cars have parked there on any given day, the number and dollar amount of tickets handed out and, of course, the identities of those who have received them. 

"There's a deep, deep relationship between New Yorkers and their government," Mr. Flowers said, "and that relationship is captured in the data." In all, a terabyte of raw information -- enough to fill nearly 143 million printed pages -- passes daily through Mr. Flowers's office, and his team's first job, he said, was to get that information into a comprehensible form: to, in effect, create a lingua franca for the bureaucracy's Tower of Babel. 

As Mr. Feinblatt put it, "The data will tell you a story, but only if you do certain things that encourages it to speak." Among the first things the city did was to establish in 1989 the Commission on Public Information and Communication, or Copic, which under the aegis of the Public Advocate's office was charged with helping New Yorkers get better access to municipal information. While "good-government" advocates like Noel Hidalgo, executive director of the Open New York Forum, which advocates for the use of technology in city management, have questioned the effectiveness of Copic, they have also said its existence laid the groundwork for the passage last year of Local Law 11, one of the country's most progressive open-data laws. 
 
"Copic was Version 1.0 for greater transparency in public information," Mr. Hidalgo said, "but it needed updating for the 21st century. Now, with Law 11, there is the potential to radically change how government services are used by citizens. It opens the door to a unique partnership between the city and its residents so that people can come up with innovative ways of using information." 

The law's chief provision created a clearinghouse called the Open Data Portal, which offers to the public hundreds of sets of city data, including the location of Wi-Fi hot spots, the results of restaurant inspections, yearly power use by ZIP code and maps of public parks. Mr. Flowers is responsible for managing the portal -- which just this month placed online all city data now available -- but the information on the site has been employed by a wide variety of people. Two weeks ago, the Office of Financial Empowerment, a city agency that helps low-income residents, held a "hackathon" at which tech geeks using information from the portal built an internal scheduling system for the agency's counselors. The portal has also served as a primary source for hackers in the city's Big Apps competition, which annually awards cash prizes to developers who have created applications like ones helping cyclists avoid city streets where accidents often occur and providing the locations of public restrooms. With each passing week, it seems another hackathon -- think hacking marathon, usually to a beneficial purpose -- is mounted in New York. There was Foursquare's effort in January that resulted in the Nasdrunk app (it matched the closing value of the Nasdaq with smartphone check-ins at various city bars), and then there was Decoded Fashion, which took place during Fashion Week and was billed by its sponsor, Condé Nast, as the world's first fashion industry hackathon. Though many of these events used proprietary data -- Occupy Wall Street held a hackathon this month crunching numbers from its Hurricane Sandy relief effort -- their diversity and frequency have created a kind of hothouse atmosphere, a local data frenzy in which private efforts at analysis have spurred city government on to do the same. 

"I think New York is the natural place for Big Data," Mr. Flowers said. "We have the right culture. We have a mayor who understands that management is measurement. And, of course, we're big enough so that it makes sense analyzing the data that we have. "All the pieces, all the structures, are in place," he said. "In New York, it's kind of like the triumph of the nerds." 

ONE DAY THIS MONTH, Mr. Flowers, in a military swag vest from Iraq, was in his office kicking around ideas for future projects. Unlike the ascendant nerds he mentioned, he tends to speak in a soldier's clipped language: "Mission critical" or "Actionable outcomes." This, indeed, was a "spitballing" session, and the plans being tossed around revealed where he would like to go next with his team. One idea was to analyze, and hopefully reduce, the time it takes for the city to issue permits to new small businesses. Another was to create a public version of the Web site Walkscore.com, on which ordinary people rate the walkability of their cities. His most ambitious plan was a proposal to move beyond public information into the deeper and possibly more profitable mine of social-media data. Every day, he said, there are 250,000 New York-centric posts on Twitter alone -- some concerning trash complaints, others unsanitary restaurant conditions. 

"If Young & Rubicam can use tweets to sell you stuff," he hypothetically asked, "why can't the city use them to make you less sick?" 

This makes civil libertarians uncomfortable, particularly at a time when the Police Department's chief Big Data project -- its use of the Compstat system to guide stop-and-frisk -- is being questioned by the courts. Mr. Flowers insists that he has put in place safeguards, like keystroke logs on his employees' computers, to ensure that information is not abused. Still, groups like the New York Civil Liberties Union say that they are watching public data mining with a guarded, if optimistic, eye. 

 "I think that the Bloomberg administration's attention to data has enormous potential for good," Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the union, said. "Obviously, it means that the city can make and tweak policies based on reality. But the potential for the selective use and release of data is one aspect that raises concern." 

 Another, at least for Mr. Flowers, is whether his geek squad will survive the end of Mr. Bloomberg's tech-friendly tenure. For now, he said, he is proceeding under the assumption that it will, adding that the best way to ensure its viability is to create an appetite among city agencies for the analytical work his group produces. 

"We know that there will always be a Fire Department, a Finance Department, a Department of Buildings," Mr. Flowers said. "So hopefully by building a common data infrastructure that shares information in real time, it won't matter who sits in City Hall." 

Working in his favor is the firm belief among information activists that Big Data's moment, especially in the management of cities, has powerfully and irreversibly arrived. This is a conviction based on certain technological advancements and a discernible shift in how the younger generation sees its relationship to government. What used to be about passively receiving services and dictates is now about participation, said Jennifer Pahlka, the executive director of Code for America, a volunteer group of techies that helps city governments, including New York City's, write code for public projects. 

"Young people, because of social media, have always felt they've had a voice," Ms. Pahlka said. "They're coming from the assumption that government is a hackable system -- an operating system that can be optimized. It's in their DNA, and they just go and do it."

2013 Copyright New York Times

For the link to the article, click here.

Center for Community Progress Features: "Chicago Gets a Land Bank - An Interview with its Champions"

Last year the six-county Chicago region experienced the nation's largest increase in vacant properties, capping off a five-year period in which the number doubled in Chicago and quadrupled in Cook County. While various attempts to stem the tide of vacancy and abandonment had been implemented in the region, from vacant property ordinances to individual communities implementing creative Neighborhood Stabilization Program projects, it became clear that new tools were needed.

To address the virtual epidemic of vacancy and abandonment, in January 2013 the Cook County Board of Commissioners created the a land bank that is the nation's largest from a geographic perspective, covering 946 square miles of territory as well as encompassing 130 municipalities and 5.1 million people. Like similar entities across the nation the land bank "will acquire, hold and transfer interest in real property... to promote redevelopment and reuse of vacant, abandoned and tax delinquent properties; support targeted efforts to stabilize neighborhoods, stimulate residential and industrial development". In contrast to others, however, the land bank was created by the Cook County Board of Commissioners drawing on its unique home-rule powers rather than by State authority.

What follows is an interview with Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and Cook County Commissioner Bridget Gainer, who together were the driving force behind the legislation.

Community Progress: What prompted your interest in the issue of vacant properties?

Preckwinkle: Prior to becoming Cook County Board President, I served as Alderman of the 4th Ward of Chicago for almost 20 years, during which I became very aware of the devastating impact of vacant and abandoned properties, and spent considerable time trying to find solutions that would bring stability and economic growth to the area. When I became County Board President, as I travelled around the county, it became clear that individual municipalities had neither the resources nor the expertise to address the crisis they were experiencing nor the ability to effectively put properties back into the hands of responsible, tax paying owners.

Gainer: When you grow up in a city like Chicago, you know the importance of neighborhoods - how strong ones improve the quality of life for people that live there, but also that they are living organisms that need to be tended. I worked in Englewood and Chicago Lawn in the mid-90s, two South Side neighborhoods -- one already overwhelmed by vacant and abandoned homes and one struggling to maintain. I knew even then we were only scratching the surface of this problem. We could demo a building to remedy immediate public health and safety risks, but we weren't doing anything at the scale or scope necessary to invest, develop or strengthen these neighborhoods. Fast forward to 2009, I am a Commissioner on the County Board; the economic crisis is crippling already struggling communities and the phones in my office were ringing off the hook with requests for help, not only from those undergoing foreclosures, but also from neighbors unable to find anyone responsible for the vacant homes next door. It became clear that we had to be bold or we were going to lose communities to vacancy and foreclosure.

Community Progress: What made you think about land banking as a remedy to the vacant property issue?

Preckwinkle: One of my first acts as President was the creation of a Bureau of Economic Development that could assess the needs and opportunities for community stabilization and economic growth in the County. It became clear that addressing the foreclosure epidemic and assembling land for needed residential, commercial and industrial development was essential to success -- and that land banking, in turn, was critical not only to stop deterioration but to implementing forward-looking plans for healthy growth.

Gainer: It was an evolving process. What started as the establishment of court advocacy for the hundreds of new homeowners going through foreclosure became a need to help the thousands of neighbors and businesses who live and work next to vacant homes through our Vacant Building Ordinance. Knowing that we needed to turn the corner from just maintaining communities to rehabilitating them, I looked to other states that had found smart solutions. I found other jurisdictions that had similar or worse vacancy and foreclosure issues but were seeing stabilization, and in some cases economic growth, and the common denominator was land banking. With the help of the Center for Community Progress, we were able to understand the fundamental elements of a successful land bank and tailor one for Cook County.

Community Progress: Are there any particularly unique features about Cook County's land bank that set it apart from others created across the country?

Preckwinkle: Our size and the diversity of the communities we serve make us unique to begin with. So does the diversity of the Cook County Land Bank Board. We've also created a governance structure which, by ordinance, guarantees that the varied needs and voices of the disparate communities will be heard and that the land bank's actions are in alignment with community plans while garnering the expertise needed to be effective. The 13-member Board represents Cook County, Chicago and suburban governments, financial institutions, as well as those representing concerns with real estate open space, industrial and commercial interests. The south suburbs already have a land bank in place and we will work closely to coordinate our work. We have already collaboratively received seed funding from the Searle Funds of The Chicago Community Trust to cover start-up expenses for the Cook County Land Bank Authority.

Gainer: We are one of the few land banks in the country that have been established using only our municipal home-rule authority instead of seeking statewide enabling legislation. We knew that if we were going to be impactful and keep this region healthy we needed a local solution that could not only be established quickly, but transparently. While we've drawn from other successful land banks, this is the first response in this region that has a clarity of purpose and laser focus on fighting vacancy and foreclosure.

Community Progress: Prior to introducing the land bank ordinance you had introduced and passed a Vacant Property Registration Ordinance? How do the two relate?

Gainer: In 2011 I read an article in the New York Times, that noted that the Chicago/Cook County region had the nation's largest inventory of foreclosed homes, because it was harder here -- more so than anywhere else in the Country -- to unload troubled properties. We also knew that the Circuit Court was experiencing unprecedented levels of foreclosure filings, and as a result, it was taking upwards of 600 days to complete a foreclosure case, which Woodstock Institute found 90 percent of the time, ended in default judgments. This left an explosion of vacant homes for which no one was responsible. These vacant homes coupled with the years it was taking to complete foreclosures created another set of victims -- the neighbors next door or on the block who were trying to do all the right things. We needed to address basic stabilization for the community -- secure the building, cut the grass and register the property, creating a clear line of accountability. That became the Vacant Building Ordinance. If you think about these elements as a spectrum, you can see that the foreclosure mediation program, the Vacant Building Ordinance and the land bank all work together.

Preckwinkle: The Ordinance, which became effective in February 2012, is part of a complete package of tools for the County and its municipalities. Modeled after one passed by the City of Chicago in 2011, the Ordinance requires that property in unincorporated Cook County be registered. However, we are reaching out to municipalities, inviting them to join our efforts at registering vacant and abandoned property. So far, Oak Lawn has partnered with us and we are continuing these efforts in 2013. The Vacant Building Ordinance has a focus on vacant buildings, rather than vacant parcels, but the efforts are closely aligned at bringing economic vitality to communities within Cook County.

Community Progress: There are many land banks around the nation, but most of them are authorized through State legislation. Why did you choose to make this a County-created entity?

Preckwinkle: Legislation introduced in Springfield in the last session of the General Assembly making it easier to create land banks went nowhere. We started at the County level because we needed to "get the ball rolling." Commissioner Gainer had also been working hard on the land bank issue. Given the magnitude of the problem, I felt the time to act was now.

Gainer: All of the functions required of a land bank were enumerated in the County's home rule authority; we didn't need to go to the State for any additional powers.

Community Progress: What were the greatest challenges in conceiving of and passing the ordinance?

Gainer: Making sure we brought all stakeholders to the table. We spent the last 18 months reaching out to anyone who not only would have a role in the land bank, but also might have been in opposition. Because everyone -- realtors, developers, affordable housing advocates, suburban mayors, etc. -- had a seat at the table and their input was integrated into the land bank ordinance and there were no surprises and we received a unanimous vote of approval.

Preckwinkle: Time was a big factor. The Cook County Land Bank Resolution creating the Land Bank Advisory Council (LBAC) gave us 60 days to produce final recommendations for the Ordinance. However, the Advisory Committee worked very hard, and gave me a set of well thought out recommendations that had unanimous support.

Community Progress: In many places there has been stiff opposition to the creation of land banks. Did you find opposition here? And if so, how did you overcome it?

Preckwinkle: Many people immediately understood the need for a land bank due to the number of vacant properties and foreclosures. Our Land Bank Advisory Committee (LBAC) however, really made a critical difference. For example, at the outset, realtors were not convinced that a land bank made sense. However the LBAC and several meetings with my staff were enough to persuade them that a land bank could make a material difference in improving our neighborhoods.

Community Progress: When do you foresee the land bank becoming operational?

Preckwinkle: All thirteen members of the Land Bank Board of Directors have been nominated by me and approved by the Cook County Board of Commissioners. Once they convene, they will search for an Executive Director and staff. We are working as hard as we can to get these pieces in place as soon as possible.

  • For Center for Community Progress "Features" website, click here.

2012 Property Tax Exemptions

The Cook County Assessor's Office has released property tax exemption applications for the 2012 tax bill. Senior Citizen and the Senior Freeze Exemption applications must be submitted to the Assessor's Office by Wednesday, February 20th 2013. All eligible exemptions you apply for will result in a deduction on your second-installment property tax bill to be issued this summer 2013. 

Have questions or need additional assistance? 
  • please contact my office at 312-603-4210 or email Info@BridgetGainer.com.
  • Visiting the "Property Taxes" page by clicking here.

2012 First Installment Property Tax Bill due March 1, 2013

The Cook County Treasurer's Office has mailed out the first installment of the 2012 property tax bill. Payment of the first installment is due by March 1, 2013.

Have questions or need additional assistance?

  • Please contact my office at 312-603-4210 or email Info@BridgetGainer.com.
  • Visit the "Property Taxes" page by clicking here.

Cook County Unsung Heroine 2013 Nominations

Dear Friends & Neighbors, 

In recognition of Women's History Month, the Cook County Commission on Women's Issues will be sponsoring a breakfast on March 12, 2012 at which 17 women will be recognized as the County's "Unsung Heroines." A heroine will be selected from each of the seventeen Cook County districts to ensure that women from each area of the County are recognized for their extraordinary and unrecognized contributions to their communities. 

Nominees must be a resident of the County Board District from which they are nominated, in this case the Tenth District. They should also be women who, either in a professional or a volunteer capacity, have made significant contributions to the well-being of their community for which they have not received widespread recognition. Elected officials are not eligible for consideration. 

If you know someone in our community who should be nominated for this honor, please submit the nomination form below to our office by email, mail or fax by January 29, 2013. 

Sincerely, 

Bridget Gainer 
Cook County Commissioner - 10th District

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