Aaron Schock addresses Congress for the last time

U.S. Rep. Aaron Schock delivered his final speech in Congress Thursday, apologizing to those he had disappointed and vowing to "work tirelessly to make it up."



Schock's moment of contrition came late in his six-minute farewell, delivered five days before his March 31 resignation date. Schock spent most of the speech discussing his accomplishments since joining the U.S. House in 2009.



"I fought and opposed the billion-dollar stimulus bill, the government takeover of our health care and the massive new regulations put on small businesses. But more importantly, for the people of my district... I fought that their voice would be heard and respected among my colleagues," Schock said.



Watch Schock's full speech here, in which he discussed the Republican party and Abraham Lincoln's own time in Congress.







Despite his resignation and questions surrounding Schock's spending, the congressman has not been charged with any wrongdoing. But Illinois does not have any shortage of politicians who have been charged with corruption. Those politicians have served (and in some cases, still are serving) sentences as short as 30 months and as long nearly 20 years. Check out who is in the slammer for how long at Reboot Illinois.



NEXT ARTICLE: Best of the best: The top 10 hospitals in Illinois








from Chicago - The Huffington Post http://ift.tt/1CDICW3

via IFTTT

2015 Trans 100 Honors Positive Work By Transgender And Gender Non-Conforming People Nationwide

While much work is left to do, we've happily seen unprecedented growth for mainstream transgender visibility in the past several years. Now, it's time to once again honor those who are doing fighting to make this visibility possible.



The Trans 100 is an annual event that celebrates the excellence of 100 people working to advance transgender political and social rights. While so much of the typical media focus tends to be on negative stories surrounding transgender identity, The Trans 100 is an attempt to shift the coverage of transgender issues to what's working.



"It has been an amazing year for us at The Trans 100. Every year, the nomination list gets longer and the selection process harder," Crispin Torres, co-director of The Trans 100, said in a statement sent to The Huffington Post. "We are seeing the original vision of the trans 100 come to life: That if trans folks begin seeing more folks like themselves out in the world, not just surviving, but thriving, we can flip the script from trans survival to trans empowerment."



A press release for The 2015 Trans 100 notes:

The Trans 100 is not an award ceremony. It is not a list of the “Best” or the “Most Important” trans people. It is not a popularity contest and there are many individuals absent from the list who are doing excellent work. More are no longer with us.



To quote The Trans 100 Co-Founder Jen Richards, The Trans 100 “is an intentionally curated list of out trans people who are working on trans issues in the United States and having a positive impact.”

The Trans 100 2015 event, which took place in Chicago on Sunday night, was hosted by performance artist and educator Precious Davis and educator and activist Myles Brady. It included keynote speeches given by "The Matrix" and "Cloud Atlas" co-director Lana Wachowski and media advocate and strategist Tiq Milan, and featured performances by musician and Against Me! lead singer Laura Jane Grace and hip-hop rapper Rocco Katastrophe.



Head here for more info about the 3rd annual Trans 100 and here to download the full list of honorees.



from Chicago - The Huffington Post http://ift.tt/1EVaSAy

via IFTTT

8 Facts That'll Change How You View 'The Breakfast Club,' According To The Cast

In the same way that people are more than just a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess or a criminal, "The Breakfast Club" is more than just a movie. Released 30 years ago last month, John Hughes' classic film transcends generations and continues to reach new fans today. In fact, because of its popularity, it was recently rereleased in theaters and given a newly restored DVD and BluRay, providing the cast with an opportunity to reminisce about their time on set.



Though the movie has been around almost a third of a century now, there are still a lot of things about it that fans don't know. In honor of "The Breakfast Club's" 30th anniversary, HuffPost Entertainment talked to cast members Ally Sheedy, aka Allison Reynolds, and John Kapelos, aka janitor Carl Reed, about behind-the-scenes moments and stories that have never quite been told in full detail.



She's the basket case, he's the eyes and ears of the institution, and these are eight facts you might not know:



1. Judd Nelson wasn't almost fired JUST for picking on Molly Ringwald. He also couldn't stay in the shots.











By now you may have heard that Nelson, who played the volatile John Bender, was nearly let go from the film. Though his picking on Ringwald was a large part of that, Sheedy explained to HuffPost Entertainment that there was more to the story.



"Judd kind of does this very free-ranging thing with his body. You can see it in the movie," said Sheedy. "He’s not great at hitting marks, and he wanted to move around and stuff, and I think they were having trouble keeping him in shot."



The story goes that the cast went to Hughes and pleaded with him to keep Nelson on the project. They also talked to Nelson about how he could help himself out. "If I remember correctly, we all talked to him. The four of us. And I think my thing about it was just focus, just focus, just focus," said Sheedy.



2. The topless scene wasn't the only scandalous moment removed. There was also a risque scene involving "MILFs."






Image: Giphy





Sheedy confirmed that a topless scene involving a swimming teacher was cut out of the film, saying: "I think John [Hughes] didn’t want to have it in the movie. I think he thought it didn’t really work for him."



Kapelos later added to the story, telling HuffPost that there was more to the scandalous moment. "I think there was also a scene with a bunch of MILFs or middle-aged cougar women who were doing an aerobics class in the gym and were really letting it go. I think there was a lascivious moment there," he said. "But you know... it's like putting a bow on an elephant. It just doesn’t belong there."



3. Rick Moranis, who was originally cast as the janitor, didn't just play the part as a Russian. He was also doing something suggestive with his keys.







Moranis, who'd appeared in "Ghostbusters" the year before, was originally cast to play the janitor in "The Breakfast Club," and Sheedy even says she was "a little star struck" by him while filming. Things didn't work out, of course, and Moranis was soon replaced by Kapelos.



According to the script, the janitor is meant to be a former student of the high school, as indicated by his picture in the case at the beginning of the film. But when it came to Moranis' portrayal, Kapelos said the actor and producers didn't have "a meeting of the creative minds at that moment."





Kapelos pictured (middle) at the beginning of the film. (Image: MentalFloss)





"From what I was told," said Kapelos, "he wanted to play the character as a Russian with gold teeth and keys between his legs, playing with it provocatively... and so it’s like, it wasn’t organic, I guess is putting it politely and correctly."



4. No, Ally Sheedy did not really use her dandruff as an art project.





Image: MakeAGif/MTV





Though it's reported that many scenes in the film were improvised, the scene where Allison Reynolds draws in the library isn't one of them.



Sheedy explains the scene was always in the film, and though she doesn't know who actually drew the picture, she did set the record straight on one detail. The actress explained that dandruff she scratched out of her hair wasn't actually dandruff or even Parmesan cheese as previously thought. "I think it was potato flakes of some kind," Sheedy said.



5. There's a dark answer to Judd Nelson's question, "How does one become a janitor?"





Image: Giphy




A memorable moment happens when John Bender asks Kapelos' character "how one becomes a janitor." Though it's clear Bender is just doing it to irk him, it turns out there was an answer to the question after all.



"Really? You want to know?" laughed Kapelos when HuffPost Entertainment repeated Bender's question. The actor then went into his character's dark history, saying: "You have to have your heart broken by your teenage sweetheart in your third year of university when you’re doing a great football scholarship. Drop out. Lose her heart. Lose her affection. Make sure her father hates you even more and will never include you in his future plans. Even if you try to make up to her. And then you get a job at your old high school as a janitor, and you try to lick your wounds. That’s how you become a janitor. That’s Carl's pathetic backstory."



6. A cut scene shows that Allison wasn't smoking pot with the others because she was actually off somewhere singing.









A variety of scenes from the movie were cut from the final film, and Sheedy recalled one that was a big moment for her character.



"John [Hughes] let me shoot something with Allison alone in the audiovisual tiny room, singing a capella," she told HuffPost. "That was something I just came up with. Singing a little song to herself. And that was, for me, the emotional transition that was when they were smoking pot."



"She sang the song to herself and then she walked out of the room and just joined the group," Sheedy went on. "So that wasn’t in the script, and he actually let me shoot it. He shot it twice, and then afterwards said that everybody sort of thought it was a little bit too weird."



7. Principal Vernon's anger was totally real.





Image: BavaTuesdays





Hughes allowed a lot of improvisation in the movie, and one moment that made it into the film was the conversation between Carl and Paul Gleason's character, Principal Richard Vernon, after the janitor catches Vernon going through confidential files.



"John Hughes just told me before the take, 'Cut him off and ask him for 50 bucks.' So I did," said Kapelos. "And if you see the movie again, take a look at Paul's reaction, because it’s real. He was really [ticked off]. And after John Hughes yelled 'cut,' it got a little funky for a bit. He was like, 'Really?' He got annoyed. We got the take on that one."



8. Kapelos told Emilio Estevez that if he'd been present for Martin Sheen's 1977 heart attack, he would have just let it happen... not knowing that Sheen was Estevez's father.









Though he explained that no one has really told the story correctly, Kapelos says that one day on set he did call out Estevez and Nelson for goofing off while he was shooting a scene. He told HuffPost: "I'm on a movie set, and I'm scared, you know, shitless. I want to do well. They’re trying to make me crack up. They’re goofing off."



To get Estevez and Nelson to stop, Kapelos told them: "You guys would’ve been great if you were on the set of 'Apocalypse Now' with Martin Sheen, and he goes in front of you and starts having his heart attack, and you’re not believing he’s in trouble, and he’s just wincing and moaning in pain and ripping at his chest and you guys would just sit there and let him have his heart attack, right?"



"In other words," Kapelos told HuffPost, "I was saying, 'Hey, I'm up here struggling. I’m in pain, and you guys are just letting me wither on the vine.'"



That's not how Estevez took it, though. "All of a sudden Emilio's face goes white. Like, I'm telling you, expressionless and white. And everybody's looking at me like I just shot the pope." Hughes told Kapelos that Estevez was Sheen's son, and though Kapelos was "flummoxed" and apologetic, it was too late. Estevez never accepted an apology. "The garage door was going down," said Kapelos. "That’s all Emilio wrote."



Bonus trivia: Ally Sheedy doesn't actually eat breakfast.





Image: Giphy





She's a member of "The Breakfast Club," but Sheedy says breakfast isn't actually her thing. "I never, ever eat it. Ever," she told HuffPost. "I really just like to get that caffeine going in the morning and just have that buzz as long as possible."



Happy anniversary, "Breakfast Club." Here's to another 30 years!




Image: Giphy




from Chicago - The Huffington Post http://ift.tt/19webFr

via IFTTT

Michelle Obama Declares 'Black Girls Rock!'

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) -- Michelle Obama celebrated the beauty, power and tenacity of black women while spreading her own message of education for girls at Black Girls Rock!, an annual event honoring trailblazing women of color from all walks of life.



"No matter who you are, no matter where you come from, you are beautiful," Obama told the crowd, which included many young black girls.



"I am so proud of you. My husband, your president, is so proud of you," she added. "We have so much hope and dreams for you."



Obama was not among the honorees at Saturday night's festivities, held at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. That distinction went to actress Jada Pinkett Smith, singer Erykah Badu, actress Cicely Tyson, "Selma" director Ava DuVernay, educator Nadia Lopez and Dr. Helene D. Gayle, president and CEO of CARE USA, a humanitarian organization.



However, Obama was the most celebrated participant. Wearing a form-fitting white dress, she jammed to performances from the likes of Badu, Fantasia, Sheila E!, Estelle and others and applauded the honorees.



But Obama got among the night's loudest ovations as she came on stage and declared "Black girls rock!" - the slogan and name of the organization founded by Beverly Bond, which is designed to uplift young black girls, a group that often has difficulty finding positive and reaffirming images of themselves in the world.



Obama acknowledged as much in her speech to celebrate three young honorees.



"I know there are voices that you are not good enough," she said, acknowledging that she often lacked self-confidence growing up despite encouraging parents.



"Each of those doubts was like a test," she said, "that I either shrink away from or rise to meet. And I decided to rise."



Obama, who recently completed a trip to Japan and Cambodia as part of her worldwide push for better educational opportunities for girls, lauded the young honorees for excelling in their studies.



"There is nothing more important than being serious about your education," the Ivy League-educated Obama said. "That's why I am able to stand here tonight. ... I want every one of our black girls do to the same, and our black boys."



Obama's speech was just one of many highlights of the nearly four-hour event, which will be shown Saturday, April 5, on BET.



Will Smith gave an emotional tribute to his wife, Jada Pinkett, who received the Star Power award. Smith alluded to persistent rumors that the couple's marriage was in trouble.



He said when one rumor got out of control, he had a chance of reflection.



"In that brief moment my heart jumped for a second and I started to imagine what my life would have been like without that woman," he said as the couple's daughter, Willow, beamed from the audience.



When Pinkett Smith accepted the honor, she alluded to recent slights of black girls and women - including a college baseball player's slur against Little League pitcher Mo'ne Davis - as reasons why Black Girls Rock! is necessary.



She also implored black women to celebrate and be aware of their own strength.



"I need you to understand that we are the women who marched from cotton fields into fields of medicine ... politics ... entertainment," she said. "We have found a way to march into a White House."



Tyson also spoke to the resiliency of black women as she accepted her legacy award from hosts actresses Tracee Ellis Ross and Regina King.



"The moment anyone tries to demean or degrade you in any way, you have to know how great you are," Tyson said. "Nobody would bother to beat you down if you were not a threat."



DuVernay, whose civil rights drama "Selma" received an Academy Award nomination, making her the first black woman to notch such an achievement, name-checked a host of other black filmmakers in her speech as she accepted her Shot Caller award, and implored women to "figure out what you need to do to be the heroine of your own story."



The show peppered songs from entertainers like Jill Scott, Estelle and others with inspiring stories from the award winners. One of the members of the group Sister Sledge sang the song "We Are Family," with the refrain "I've got all my sisters with me," as the audience grooved along.



And sisterhood was the spirit of the evening, evident when Obama came on stage to close the show with all the honorees. When an embarrassed King flubbed a line, Obama gave her a hug and then jokingly rubbed her back.



The actress and director then shouted with glee, "I've got Mrs. Obama pumping me up!"



---





from Chicago - The Huffington Post http://ift.tt/1xLc5NS

via IFTTT

Charles Barkley Calls Indiana's New 'Religious Freedom' Law 'Unacceptable'

A new "religious freedom" law in Indiana has NCAA basketball analyst and NBA legend Charles Barkley calling foul -- and calling on officials to move next week's March Madness Final Four tournament out of the state.



"Discrimination in any form is unacceptable to me,” Barkley said in a statement Friday afternoon. “As long as anti-gay legislation exists in any state, I strongly believe big events such as the Final Four and Super Bowl should not be held in those states’ cities.”



The legislation, signed into law Thursday by Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R), does not explicitly mention discrimination against gays or anyone else. Rather, it "prohibits state or local governments from substantially burdening a person's ability to exercise their religion," according to The Indianapolis Star.



But critics say the bill could give businesses a legal foothold to refuse service to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals in the name of religious freedom.



Barkley's remarks echo the NCAA's own position, which President Mark Emmert voiced Thursday in a prepared statement.



"The NCAA national office and our members are deeply committed to providing an inclusive environment for all our events," said Emmert. "We are especially concerned about how this legislation could affect our student-athletes and employees. We will work diligently to assure student-athletes competing in, and visitors attending, next week’s Men’s Final Four in Indianapolis are not impacted negatively by this bill."



"Moving forward, we intend to closely examine the implications of this bill and how it might affect future events as well as our workforce," Emmert's statement continued.



Reggie Miller, a former NBA star who spent 18 years playing for the Indiana Pacers, also voiced concerns over the law, sending this message Friday to his 651,000 followers on Twitter:

http://ift.tt/1NkoFHl

— Reggie Miller (@ReggieMillerTNT) March 27, 2015

Many other prominent figures have spoken out against the law, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, likely 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who promptly canceled the company's planned events in the state following the bill's passage.



from Chicago - The Huffington Post http://ift.tt/1BFBYuD

via IFTTT

Fierce Backlash Mounts Over Indiana's 'Religious Freedom' Law

A new "religious freedom" law in Indiana touched off a firestorm of criticism across the country Friday, after opponents warned that it could lead to legal discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals in the state's business establishments.



The measure, which Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R) signed into law Thursday, allows any individual or corporation to cite religious beliefs as a defense when sued by a private party. The legislation has already prompted threats of boycott from public officials and celebrities. "Star Trek" actor and LGBT activist George Takei expressed his outrage on Twitter using the hashtag #BoycottIndiana. Jason Collins, the first openly gay NFL player, also took to Twitter to ask Pence whether it would "be legal for someone to discriminate against me." San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee (D) prohibited the use of taxpayer money to fund any city employees' trips to Indiana. And Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has canceled the company’s events in the state.



In some Indiana cities, stickers reading "This Business Serves Everyone" have been spotted in shop windows.



The National Collegiate Athletic Association, which will host the Final Four games of its men's basketball tournament in Indianapolis, said on Thursday that it was "especially concerned about how this legislation could affect our student-athletes and employees."



Other prominent names also weighed in by Friday. Apple CEO Tim Cook, who came out as gay last year, said he was "deeply disappointed" with the law. And likely 2016 presidential candidate and Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton also took to Twitter to denounce the measure. "Sad this new Indiana law can happen in America today. We shouldn't discriminate against ppl bc of who they love #LGBT," the former secretary of state wrote.



Pence, a potential 2016 presidential contender, has defended the law as a fair protection for those who "feel their religious liberty is under attack by government action.” Supporters of the law, which takes effect in July, maintain that it is being mischaracterized as something that specifically targets LGBT people, rather than something that defends religious freedom in general. They further note that similar measures were passed by 19 other states, and that discrimination against LGBT people hasn't automatically followed everywhere. The Associated Press reports that in Mississippi, for example, there haven't been "any high-profile instances of the law being used by businesses to deny goods or services to gays."



"It gives our courts guidance about evaluating government action and puts the highest standard -- it essentially says, if a government is going to compel you to act in a way that violates your religious beliefs, there has to be a compelling state interest," Pence said of the bill in a radio interview Thursday.



On Friday, the Arkansas state Senate passed a similar bill that drew criticism from one of the nation's largest retailers, Walmart. "We feel this legislation is counter to this core basic belief of respect for the individual and sends the wrong message about Arkansas, as well as the diverse environment which exists in the state," said a spokesman for the company.



from Chicago - The Huffington Post http://ift.tt/1EgJ2DV

via IFTTT

The TIF Illumination Project at Two Years

On February 12 of 2013, the night of the State of the Union, a town meeting was held at the Chopin Theater in Chicago's Near West Side. The subject was tax increment financing. Despite the complexity of the topic and the competition from President Obama, some 230 people packed the theater to hear a journalist, an academic and an activist discuss TIFS.



The TIF Town Meeting was the launch of the CivicLab's TIF Illumination Project.



The Tax Increment Financing (TIF) Illumination Project is an effort of a group of volunteers in Chicago to investigate and expose a decades-old municipal finance scheme that annually extracts almost 500 million dollars of local property taxes and places that money in a program controlled by the mayor. This program has dispensed billions of property tax dollars to major U.S. companies (Wal-mart, Target, Home Depot, UPS, Coca-Cola, United Airlines, Willis Insurance) to well-heeled developers of Loop office towers and to a collection of connected developers throughout the city.



This program has been a source of controversy here for years but is not readily understood by Chicagoans. It is decidedly not a public process and the rationale behind what projects are selected for subsidy in the name of "community development" is not apparent or available for any community to debate or participate in. Chicago has a notoriously corrupt and opaque government with numerous local councilmen having been sent to prison. The city was ruled with an iron hand for 43 years by the father and son Daleys, and the Democratic Machine had a firm lock on local government for almost one hundred years. This is a tough town for civic engagement, government transparency and grassroots urban policy planning.



A Tax Increment Finance district is created by the City's Department of Planning and Development. It is a tool to capture property taxes from all properties inside the district. A TIF is usually created to build some project in a "blighted" community that the free market won't support. The developer seeks a gift of cash and/or land to do their project because it is deemed to be a public good. A snapshot is taken of the value of the properties inside the district and how much property taxes they are paying. The TIF district captures all INCREMENT from all those properties for 23 years. The money captured by the TIF is effectively "off the books" from the annual public budgeting process.



Since TIFs first appeared in Chicago in 1986 they have captured over $6 billion in property taxes.







The TIF Program has taken on significant political and civic import because it diverts and disperses property taxes. In Chicago about 54 cents of every property tax dollar collected by the city is supposed to go to the Board of Education. Other units of government that rely on property taxes for significant parts of their budget include the public libraries, the public parks, the city colleges, the county government and the city, itself. So any entity that steps in and skims, so to speak, hundreds of millions of property tax dollars annually is a grave threat to the finances of local government. Currently Chicago has 154 TIF districts covering about 32 percent of the city. No other city in America has so many special taxing bodies.



About 32% of Chicago is in a TIF district!



The TIF Illumination Project is an exercise in civic imagination. It's about civic geography and civic mental map-mapping. We set out to answer the question of "What are TIFs doing to MY community?" If you ask a person, "How is life in the Kinzie Industrial TIF?" they will look at you blankly. But if you ask, "How is life in the 27th Ward?" then people can locate themselves and form a response based on their lived experience of that community. We are telling people what TIFs are doing to us a ward-by-ward basis.



Our volunteers have acquired eight different sets of data and using data mining, GIS coding, map making, investigatory journalism and crowd-sourced organizing, we have compiled an unprecedented picture of what TIFs are doing across the city.



We can tell you, on a ward-by-ward basis:

• How many TIFs are in the ward


• 
  


• How much money they extracted from within the ward last year


• 
  


• How much money was left in the TIF accounts at the start of this year


• 
  


• What projects were funded by TIFs inside the ward


• 
  


• How much money was transferred IN or OUT of the TIFs


• 
  


• How much money the Department of Planning and Development skimmed from those TIFs (in 2013 it was a total of7.6 million from ALL the TIFs)


• 
  


• Location of public schools that have closed by the Board of Education


• 
  


• Location of public schools that have received budget cuts for the current year

We produce a graphic poster showing all this against a map of the ward we are covering plus a general piece that explains what TIFs are. We do a 50-minute presentation that walks through the history and scope of the TIF program and then zooms in to reveal the details of the TIFs in the ward we are visiting.







At the TIF Town Meeting at the Chopin Theater on February 12, 2013, we asked the attendees if they found the information useful. There was a strong response from the audience that this information was a revelation. We then invited folks to return to their communities and organized public meetings -- or Illuminations -- as we call them.



People responded with enthusiasm. The first meeting was in the 6th Ward on March 9 and since then we've been to 31 meetings and have Illuminated 139 TIFs across 31 wards! Over 4,200 people have attended these meetings. All the presentations are available at our TIF Data Store.



Here is the graphic produced for the TIF Illumination of the 4th Ward (Hyde Park, home of the University of Chicago and President Obama) we did on May 13, 2013.



The piece is designed for ledger size, two-sided, full color. The fold is along the left. The front follows this pattern, with a call out to the residents of the ward we are visiting. We identify the major named neighborhoods inside the ward and produce the TIF district shapes as though they are the culprits on a wanted poster. The headline is derived from looking at one or more TIFs that are entirely inside or mostly inside the ward.



The back of the piece remains the same across all our Illuminations and will be updated for meetings in 2014 to incorporate the latest data. We endeavor to explain what TIFs are using text and graphics.



The piece was produced by Tom Tresser, designed by Carlyn So and based on the data research of Cory Mollet and Bill Drew. There are many others who helped and some would prefer to keep their participation private.



Our first poster went through seven iterations and was reviewed by one of America's most experienced academics in the TIF and local government finance arena. We are constantly testing this work. Is this the best way to explain TIFs? We've translated this part of the poster into Spanish and are working to turn the poster into a comic book and animation.



This section is immediately below the map and contains the final exclusive piece of news that the TIF Illumination Project delivers to communities. We use the same data analysis that got us the basic Illumination to determine how much money was left in the TIF accounts from the in-ward TIFs at the start of the year.



This number is shown in red and asks the provocative question: "What would you do to improve the ward" if you had this money available? In the case of the 4th Ward at the start of 2012, that number was $15.3 million.



The remainder of this section of the graphic explains what the TIF Illumination Project is about and also explains that it is a project of the CivicLab, a new co-working space in the West Loop dedicated to collaboration, education and innovation around civic engagement.



We have shown folks who has gotten paid via TIFs and revealed details hitherto kept secret -- including the startling fact that the TIF accounts held $1.7 billion on January 1, 2014.



This information challenges the notion that we are broke.



The net result is that people ask more questions than can be answered. They are angry. They wonder if the city is truly broke, as the mayor claims. They want to know who green-lighted the projects that received so much public dollars and why are essential city services being cut (including the closing of 49 public schools) at the same time?



We launched an online petition to put TIF data on the property tax bills that the county issues twice a year, and beginning in July of 2014, that will happen.



We launched a second online petition demanding that the mayor account for the $1.7 billion and release those funds to the units of government that SHOULD'VE gotten those funds in the first place. Over 3,700 people have signed so far. In an August 2, 2013 editorial headlined "Hand Over TIF Surplus Cast To Chicago Schools," the Chicago Sun-Times agreed with us!



We have placed all our presentations online for easy access and purchase at the TIF Data Store. You can also purchase a copy of our TIF Atlas that shows ALL the TIFs in the new ward maps PLUS locations and details of all TIF funded projects up through 2010 and much more!











In October of 2014 we launched our first crowdfunding campaign to raise funds to produce a TIF training video so we could Illuminate more people more efficiently. 80 donors gave over $3,300 and the 20 minute "TIF 101" video is now available for your viewing pleasure. Please do get Illuminated.



Our thanks to Professor Rachel Weber of the University of Illinois and Cook County Clerk David Orr for appearing in the video to share their knowledge and perspectives on Tax Increment Financing.



Now we are raising funds to produce our second video, "The TIF Hall of Shame," which will document the problems and scandals inside Chicago's TIF program. We hope to produce a total of five videos. Next up will be "TIFs and Schools," "Organizing Around TIFs," and "Alternatives to TIFs for Grassroots Community Development."







We are delighted that our Illuminations have shed new light on a major piece of Chicago's financial infrastructure and that our work is impacting public policy. Over 75 stories have been written on our work.



Candidates for mayor and alderman have worked with us to articulate their positions on TIFs and seven TIF Illuminations have been sponsored by candidates running for alderman.



An article in the Chicago Sun-Times and an editorial in the Chicago Tribune referenced $1.7 billion in TIF funds. The only way that the editors at the Chicago Tribune (as well as the rest of the public) knew that there was $1.7 billion sitting in TIF accounts was because the volunteers of the TIF Illumination Project has been opening up all the annual reports from the TIF districts when they are released in July and manually adding up the balances! We've been doing that since 2009 (although the TIF Illumination Project formally launched in February of 2013, this work has been going on for quite a while). See our analysis for all of Chicago's TIFs for 2013 at our TIF Reports web site.



We are thrilled to see civic indignation evolve into civic imagination as our neighbors are now looking past the corrupt and broken TIF Program toward some new ways of imagining local economic development. We will report on these developments in 2015.



More information on the TIF Illumination Project, including all public presentations made to date, is online at http://ift.tt/14r5Mds. All our presentations, as well as our 50 Ward TIF Atlas can be purchased at our TIF Data Store.



More information on the CivicLab and our co-working program is at http://www.civiclab.us. If you'd like to bring the TIF Illumination Project to YOUR community, please reach out to info@civiclab.us.







from Chicago - The Huffington Post http://ift.tt/1BQGPrJ

via IFTTT