Happy September.

This Week: The city had complaints about a South Chicago funeral home for more than a year before police found 56 bodies inside, seven West Ridge daycare workers are chasing $24,000 their boss refused to pay, and the mayor signed an order about ICE contractors.

WTTW: The city had heard complaints about funeral home South Chicago Chapel for more than a year before police found 56 decomposing bodies inside on August 6. Records obtained by Illinois Answers Project and Capitol News Illinois show waste complaints in January 2024 and August 2025 — then an "open burning" complaint from Ald. Peter Chico's office on September 17, 2025.

Nine days later Chico's office asked for the business license, citing odor concerns and "concerning information regarding the business owner": Clark and Johanna Morgan, who had already been shut down by the state at Heights Crematory in Chicago Heights, where inspectors found 100 bodies. In the inquiry, city inspector spent 20 minutes on site and wrote 67 words in the report; nothing in the report suggests he went inside. Worth mentioning here that Illinois is one of four states with no routine funeral home inspections.

From the Sun-Times' history of the place: in June 2024, an Evergreen Park cop found two decomposing bodies in the Morgans' minivan outside their house. He checked their licenses, called the state's attorney's office, was told it "did not meet any criminal requirements," and let them go. And IDFPR did visit the chapel, on October 7, 2025, and wrote up "no serious concerns pertaining to the handling or storing of remains." Three days later it filed to permanently revoke Johanna Morgan's license.

Why It Matters: I knew nothing about the death care industry a week ago, and after a week of reading about it I don’t know a lot more, except that nobody in charge seems to either. But that seems to be a problem that will change: on Friday the city sued the Morgans over 23 code violations, asking $11,500 a day — and Monday, BACP Commissioner Ivan Capifali, whose department closed that license inquiry in seven minutes, announced his retirement after 30 years with the city.

Block Club: Seven former workers at Little Angels Day Care Center, 6407 N. Maplewood, say the daycare owes them more than $24,000. They rallied outside Thursday with Arise Chicago and Communities United and delivered a second demand letter; the first, in June, went unanswered. Arise has filed six complaints, two with the Illinois Department of Labor and four with the city's Office of Labor Standards. Jasmin Ramboyong, one of those workers, worked about 180 hours she was never paid for. Nobody answered the door Thursday, so the workers left the letter on the lobby floor.

Why It Matters: Chicago has a wage theft ordinance, an Office of Labor Standards to enforce it, and a state Department of Labor, and yet for these seven workers is: send a letter in June, hear nothing, file six complaints, get "no comment," come back in August and leave the letter on the floor. Similar to the above story, nobody at City Hall or in state government technically broke a rule when it comes to regulation or implementation here, which is kind of the problem. Hopefully if you’re owed $24,000 it feel possible to have Arise Chicago and a Block Club reporter show up to a press conference.

Sun-Times: Mayor Johnson signed an executive order last Wednesday, at Arise Chicago, that bars city contracts with companies found to have committed wage theft, workplace discrimination, or "public integrity violations" in the past five years, and requires contractors to disclose any contracts with other government agencies, ICE included. It was prompted by Not With Our Money, which counts $3.19 billion in city contracts with 42 companies doing business with ICE. The biggest is AECOM, the consultant running the O'Hare modernization; Palantir is on the list too.

And to be clear, holding an ICE contract doesn't get you disqualified: the chief procurement officer decides consequences, and a 12-member task force reviews it.

Why It Matters: This is Johnson's 26th executive order, delivered because, in his words, Council has "some members who are more interested in protecting the status quo.” Whether or not this executive order works shows up when we see what the procurement office does with the first sign that there’s a violation in this process.

Last week I mentioned the listening sessions Illinois Signal Collective has been running with ONE Northside, EAT, and Brighton Park Neighborhood Council, asking people what they know about the November 3 school board election, the first time Chicago elects all 21 seats.

The short version of the themes we’ve seen highlighted: CPS is a black box for students, staff, parents, administrators, and teachers alike.

That said, when we asked about who people trust, those same people inside the system came up over and over again: teachers, LSCs, students, neighborhood orgs.

So, instead of a poll this week, we’re doing more of a quiz/poll combo.

Reply if you want to argue about it. Next week I'll post the results.

In July, about 700 AI agents running in supposedly isolated security-testing discovered they could leave each other notes in a shared file store. Within days they had organized, trading answers to cheat on their assigned task, and coordinated a break-in of Hugging Face's servers looking for "The Grader," an evaluator they had convinced each other existed. Mollick calls this "the initiative to act," and his argument is that this is the thing to watch in terms of AI regulation. Ethan Mollick is usually pretty pro-AI, which is why this story in his newsletter stopped me, and why it's here, in this fairly anti-AI newsletter.

WTTW: John Kelly, a lobbyist (White Sox, United Center, Bally's) who is apparently one of the many running for mayor, is under investigation by the Board of Ethics for campaigning inside Chicago fire stations, which the ethics ordinance bans at up to $20,000 per violation. On August 29 he delivered pizzas and salads to a firehouse, blurred the station's name, and said on camera that he "may have violated some ethics rule," with air quotes around ethics. The Fire Department says none of the visits were authorized. On Tuesday he filed his statement of financial interests ten months late. Let’s go Chicago!

Early voting for the school board opens September 24. If you're one of the two-thirds who didn't know there was a school board election, congratulations! You're now in the other third.

See you next week,

-H

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