This Week: A $9 billion megaproject on the South Side says its data center is gone. The parking meter clock is down to six weeks. And half the school board field signed a pledge to keep AI out of CPS classrooms.

Southside Together packed a town hall Saturday at Arnold Mireles Academy, 9000 S. Exchange, about the $9 billion Quantum Shore development on the old U.S. Steel South Works site. Mayor Johnson came to hear the concerns, and pointed at his August 11 executive order and his call for a Council moratorium on new data centers. He got booed off the stage.

The room asked to revoke the permits, withhold future ones, kill the tax rebate the Council approved for businesses on the site.

A one-gigawatt data center was announced for the north end of Quantum Shore. Developers now tell Block Club the quantum park on the south portion won't include one. Ask about the rest of the site and the answers stop — City Bureau couldn't get a yes or no, and a spokesperson declined to answer for the Reader. IQMP's CEO wrote the mayor a letter saying the quantum park is not a data center, and the letter says nothing about the north end. However, after the adminstration’s executive order last week, there is movement when it comes to data centers and making sure that this EO has actual implementation power behind it.

Why It Matters: Every part of this conversation — the executive order, the moratorium, all of it — hangs on the phrase data center. Nobody has defined it. 71% of Americans don't want one near them, so the phrase is easy to say, but the 128 acres of lead- and oil-contaminated lakefront steel mill is still 128 acres. U of C researchers called it "extremely toxic" and warned that flooding could push contaminants into Lake Michigan. Giving up the words is not giving up the site.

Still, Southside Together isn't calling Saturday a loss. Monday they said they "appreciate Mayor Johnson's reassertion of his values,” and "We will continue to organize until this harmful development is fully stopped." If you want to learn more, the Illinois Environmental Council is running Building Community Power During the Rise of Data Centers — relational organizing basics for the hyperscale siting fight — Thursday, Aug. 27, noon, on Zoom. act.ilenviro.org

City Council has until September 30 to accept or reject Stonepeak Partners' $2.53 billion purchase of the 57 years left on Daley's meter lease. That's the second extension. The first was July 24, when Finance Chair Pat Dowell postponed a vote she was going to lose.

Fifteen Alders signed a June 11 letter demanding answers about Stonepeak's ownership and legal history, including its ownership of Omni Air International, which flies ICE deportation charters. Budget Chair Jason Ervin has an ordinance to build a nine-member public infrastructure trust — pension money plus municipal bonds — to match Stonepeak's bid. Anthony Beale shunted it to Rules Committee to slow it down. And the mayor, who called this the worst municipal deal in the history of municipalities about once a week for two months, now says "the authority rests solely with the City Council."

Tal Rosenberg went looking for a way regular people could beat the deal, and found a Northwest Sider who stopped feeding meters entirely and just pays the tickets — ticket money goes to the city, meter money goes to the leaseholder. I loved this story, if only for the incredible pictures. But it doesn’t scale — UChicago law professor Julie Roin points out that if the leaseholder decides enforcement isn't pushing enough people to pay, it can bill the city for the revenue it expected.

Why It Matters: Every version of "undo the parking meter deal" for eighteen years has been the city borrows money it doesn't have. Ervin's version is the pension funds buy the asset and the returns pay down the pension debt — turning the thing that's bleeding Chicago into the thing that funds Chicago. I have no idea if the math works, and neither does anyone else, because Ervin won't name the financial advisers looking at it. But it's the first proposal in this fight that treats this entire fight as one that Chicago can actually win. Council's next meeting is September 23, one week before the deadline.

Per Axios, Illinois Families for Public Schools is asking every Board of Education candidate to sign a "Human-Centered Education Pledge": a three-year moratorium on generative AI in CPS, a dedicated chief privacy officer, screen-time limits including no 1:1 devices before third grade, and a ban on collecting student biometric data except where disability access law requires it.

IFPS executive director Cassie Creswell says "CPS is on the verge of putting an AI chatbot onto every high school student's Chromebook that can do their homework for them," and that kindergarteners are already using an AI literacy tutor that records their speech.

Why It Matters: This is a real test of what an elected board is for, one we haven’t always seen with this new (elected) school board, and it’s exciting to see a parent group with no money get real power and public promises out of a school board field that has more than $2.2 million spent already.

Want in: The pledge and its signers are public at ilfps.org — check whether the candidate in your district is on it, and the Board of Education meets Thursday, Aug. 27, 10:30 a.m. at 42 W. Madison.

The mayor's race started this month. You may have noticed! One thing I’m thinking about as it gears up is the difference between WHAT and HOW in this Mayoral race.

This is a major tension for this Mayor’s race: who can do what, and how? If candidates promise the same thing, what stands in the way of them getting that thing done and who can actually do it?

Giannoulias, who is running as progressive, calls himself a coalition builder and says Johnson "has not met the moment." On Monday, he also called for a $22 minimum wage. His platform also has a 3% tax on income over $1 million.

Those are not the same kind of promise.

The minimum wage is home rule — a mayor and 26 alders can do it without asking anyone. The Council phased out the subminimum tipped wage on its own, and when it tried to freeze the phase-out this March, Johnson vetoed it and the override failed.

And the millionaire tax runs through Springfield, where Pritzker has already said the graduated income tax isn't a priority. And Springfield is where Chicago often loses. Johnson went down in May and asked for a bigger cut of the state income tax — one point is $80 million to us — plus the power to tax digital ads, deliveries, and big payrolls. Pritzker's office said the budget already "holds local governments harmless." — ie, no.

But the two biggest things Chicago has won out of Springfield this decade were not won by a mayor who got along with Pritzker. CTU spent most of a decade on the elected school board and got it over Lori Lightfoot's objections — she was still arguing against it in Springfield days before the final vote.

And a $1.5 billion transit package passed at four in the morning on October 31, after earlier versions had already died, because a labor and rider coalition kept coming back.

If you’re not sure about Illinois, look at New York. Mamdani didn't beat Hochul by governing better. He made no more expensive than yes by floating property tax hikes and a raid on city reserves until state money was her cheapest way out. He let outside groups run the tax-the-rich fight he couldn't run himself, and yes, he gave things up on purpose: the millionaire tax never happened, and neither did free buses, which barely reached the table.

A real question I have come back to over and over again, is what theory of change actually applies in this current moment for Illinois: does it really matter which candidate has better relationships in Springfield when it comes to getting things done? Because the precedent for progressive policy seems to be making government do things that work for real people, beyond business as usual.

By the way: Pritzker is on the ballot in November. That's the most leverage a Chicago mayor will have over a sitting governor for four years.

So the question for everyone running, and for the man already in the office: as a Mayor, what are you willing to make Pritzker's problem?

Paul Krugman's third "Against Oligarchy" post is about how the tax code turned against labor after the 1970s. The part that stopped me is something I don’t see discussed enough when we talk about how much wealth is changing everything: in 1979 to 2000, inequality was a story about paychecks, but since 2000 it's a different story. The share of national income going to workers at all is falling, and workers, as a category, people with any kind of job, are getting a smaller slice. Krugman says AI will speed this up, because AI needs very few people and enormous amounts of capital — chips, software, power supply.

Amazon announced Thursday that it's expanding drone delivery to nearly 500 U.S. cities by the end of the year, Chicago metro included. Each launch site sits at an Amazon warehouse and covers about 175 square miles. Amazon already holds FAA certification and waivers to fly beyond its pilots' line of sight, and the federal rule that would open that up more broadly is still pending.

See you next Thursday,

-H

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