Welcome back. Petition season for municipal elections started Tuesday, a month earlier than last cycle. The 2027 election is no longer on its way — it's HERE. It’s gathering signatures outside Jewel (or Cermak… but not Save a Lot). Are you ready?

This week in Chicago Politics: the fight for the parking meters continues, Chicago’s deportation machine turns to bureaucracy, and Silicon Valley PACs are coming for Illinois.

Plus, I talked to Department of Housing Head Ugo Okere about how the department makes good videos about what matters in government.

Let's get into it.

Sun-Times: An investment firm called Stonepeak has bid $2.5 billion to buy the remaining 57 years of the parking meter deal, and Budget Chair Jason Ervin (28th) has an ordinance to create a nine-member public infrastructure trust that would pool pension and city money to buy our the meters back. Council has until September 30 to accept or reject Stonepeak's offer. Among Stonepeak’s holdings is Omni Air International — the charter airline that flies ICE's deportation flights.

Some alders, luckily, have a problem with this: the Committee on Immigrant and Refugee Rights held a hearing on Omni Air on July 17, and opponents are invoking Article 17 of the concession agreement, a clause which lets the city evaluate a buyer's background and reputation before allowing the transfer.

The good news is that fighting the deal is working: a big part of why this didn't sail through in July is because of organized pressure at the June and July hearings that helped push the decision window to September 30.

Why It Matters: Every time you feed a parking meter in this city, the money leaves Chicago. If this sale goes through, it goes to the firm that owns ICE's deportation airline for 57 years. City Council has nine weeks to answer whether Chicago can get this revenue back for the public, or AT LEAST not sell this busted deal to ICE's airline.

A call to action: your alder decides the meter sale by September 30, and right now they're out counting petition signatures, which means for the next twelve weeks they REALLY need you more than you need them. Check out this toolkit for more.

WBEZ: Since May, the immigration court at 55 E. Monroe has been running "mega master" hearings: miss your hearing, and you get deported in absentia automatically.

This has meant calling 100 to 185 cases at a time in a single courtroom, creating two-hundred-person lines in the hallway. Sometimes up to 70 people are in one single session with no lawyer. One judge, Elizabeth Treacy, resigned after running three of these mass hearings. In June, more people were marked absent than present, over 58% of 10,370 cases.

Why It Matters: People are missing these hearings in part because the median notice before a hearing went from 229 days in May to 34 days in June, with no accounting for misfiling, changing addresses, or anything else that could go wrong in this bureaucratic nightmare. Among the marked-absent already was a 13-year-old, who was flagged for removal without his parents. The harm is arguably the same as the Bovino spectacle of Midway Blitz, just with a quieter, different kind of PR strategy.

Want to take action? Join the Chicago Committee on Immigrant and Refugee Rights for a virtual information session on the recent increase in ICE activity, what to expect, and how to prepare.

WTTW: Petition gathering for the February 2027 city elections opened Tuesday, which is a full month earlier than the 2023 cycle, and will include the race for Mayor, all 50 alders, clerk, treasurer, and 66 Police District Council seats.

Mayoral candidates need 12,500 signatures, and filing closes October 26. The election is February 23, and any runoff on April 6.

Brandon Johnson let supporters start circulating petitions Tuesday while insisting he hasn't decided whether he's running — "I just want to hold on to the city of Chicago a little bit longer."

Johnson’s campaign has about $631,000 on hand. Alexi Giannoulias, expected to enter, is sitting on nearly $22 million. Also circulating: Susana Mendoza, who skipped her comptroller reelection to run and make her weird videos . Others in the mayoral field so far include: Rep. Mike Quigley, Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas, entrepreneur Joe Holberg, and Weiner’s Circle owner Matt Brewer.

Why It Matters: Every vote Council takes between now and February, and every issue that the Mayor faces, including renter protections, any potential meter buyback, and the budget, will be fodder for challenger candidates. And in City Council, everything is driven by what happens when 50 alders are first looking at their petition numbers.

Also, just to be clear, with these numbers already out of control: we need ranked choice voting.

Ugo Okere (he/him) is the Director of Public Affairs at the Chicago Department of Housing — and he’s been making a change to how the department communicates, making videos to explain housing programs and junk fee bans.

Before DOH, he worked in the mayor's office and as policy director at Raise the Floor Alliance, a labor rights organization. We talked this week about making Mamdani style videos, why people sometimes tune out on local issues, and why landlords are lining up to make videos about the pro-renter PRO Ordinance.

312: You've been at DOH since May, and you're making videos unlike anything else in Chicago city government.

Ugo: I think governments are conditioned to communicate in very neutral, inoffensive, nondescript language. It makes sense — you want to be received well by the broadest swath of people. But government is not neutral: governments pass and advocate for laws, and their aim should be to work for working people across the city of Chicago. It can’t do that if it cannot communicate in a language that interests the people it serves.

Communication doesn't have to be boring. It doesn't have to be sterile. In fact, boring and sterile does residents a disservice — that's information they will not stop and read, will not watch. They won't understand what government needs from them, or what government can do for them. So I wanted to put out content engaging enough to make someone stop, watch, and care. And the way you do that is by talking about things that mean something to working people."

The full interview — including further intel on the orange suit and the Protecting Renters Ordinance in plain English — is coming soon.

NPR: "Leading the Future" — the AI industry super PAC funded by Andreessen Horowitz and OpenAI's president — has raised $75+ million and is spending through a network of front PACs in dozens of races, including Illinois. Its mission: kill "policies that stifle innovation," which translated from PAC means no state AI regulation — national rules or nothing, and preferably nothing. Remember last week's subject line: 63% of us want to pause the data centers. This is part of why no one in office will say it back — the money that builds the server farms is pre-buying the legislators who'd regulate them.

In 2015, Margaret Killjoy published a short story in Vice called "One Star" — a passenger trapped in a self-driving taxi that decides to drive them to jail. A few weeks ago in San Mateo, a Waymo decided its two 15-year-old passengers were misbehaving, contacted police, drove itself to a parking lot, and shut off until officers arrived.

Killjoy's new essay on this weird prediction, and the "Torment Nexus" phenomenon, is one of my favorite things I read this week. She describes one of the biggest incongruities of climate hell in the US, and, as she says: nobody wants this.

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Speaking of Save A Lot: the Mayor just announced that older Chicagoans can now get free rides to grocery stores after store closures.

And if you haven't taken it already: the 312 Reader Census is still open. It’s only seven questions, and it shapes what this newsletter becomes. Fill it out and you're entered to win that $75 Loaves and Witches gift card.

See you soon,

-H

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