Let’s see, Arlington Heights is to Ford Heights as Germany is to France? Chicago Metropolis 2020 recently won the American Planning Association’s Daniel Burnham award for its Chicago-area plan combining land use and transportation under a regional authority. Ruth Eckdish Knack writes in the April issue of Planning magazine that the group’s executive director, Frank Beal, compares the arrangement to the European Union. “Here are nations that have fought each other in the past but are now giving up a measure of sovereignty,” he tells her. “Why? Because they recognize that their economies will suffer if they don’t. We are making a similar point.”
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Tale of two reforms. In 1988 the Illinois legislature gave power to elected local school councils in Chicago; in 1995 the legislature gave some of that power back to the mayor and the Chicago Public Schools central office. How much? According to Elizabeth Duffrin in Catalyst Chicago (March), “local control of principal selection has eroded, primarily in low-income communities. Today, the School Board holds the authority either to select or to remove and replace the principal in about 115 of 602 schools.”
“If a weekend receptionist is ordered to hand over her employer’s computer equipment to FBI agents” under the USA Patriot Act’s notorious section 215, writes Chicago attorney William Zieske in the Illinois Bar Journal (February), “the law strictly prohibits her from telling her boss on Monday where the computer went while it was under her custody. If she is charged with the theft, it’s questionable whether she could even tell her attorney what happened. Because of the secrecy attending these orders [issued by a secret court], it is unlikely the public would learn whether this scenario ever occurs…. Section 215 of the Act is scheduled to sunset at the end of 2005 unless extended.”
