Welcome to Chicago 312: 3 Headlines. 1 Big Question. 2 Red Flags. Subscribe here.

Welcome back. Hope you survived your family/Midway.

Quick update: the big, long, narrative-heavy 312s are shifting to once a month so I can think about them (and hopefully get good feedback from the people who request them). The weekly issues will stay focused on tight power analysis + links about Chicago this week, and once a month you’ll get a big “send to the group chat” essay. ICYMI, here’s one of the narrative ones on why organizers should be making video.

This week: police “reform,” data centers chewing through megawatts, moss doing better investigative work than half our institutions, and whether liberal media’s “big year” actually moves power.

3 Headlines:

1. City Hall budget drags on

Sun-Times: Two weeks ago, the City Council Finance Committee rejected Johnson’s revenue package 25–10 and followed it with dueling letters: one slamming the head tax, and another demanding “efficiencies” (a word that means everything and nothing).

And now the moderates + conservatives have their own budget. The Council bloc — O’Shea, Lee, Nugent, Waguespack, Martin, Dowell, plus every Civic Federation/Civic Committee alum on LinkedIn — have a counter-budget they unveiled this week.

After all of the righteousness about bad math and fake numbers, their own proposal left a little to be desired!

The Council bloc’s plan:

• Ditches the head tax on corporations to… charge everyone else in the city for getting Amazon packages (plus garbage fees and a liquor tax),

• Finds “shared sacrifice” (ie, screws with city employee health insurance) + weird consolidation of management structures as suggested by a consulting firm,

• Magically closes a $1.2B gap,

• And has a whole section on ‘sponsored augmented reality content’ on city property that makes me really mad just on principle. Apparently this could raise over $26 million.

Who knew completely made up things could be so lucrative? It’s a weird set of numbers, tenuously based, for a group of Alders who spent most of the last few weeks talking about how taxes on corporations like the payroll tax, or the social media tax, were burdensome to working people because of how it would scare companies into fleeing Chicago.

Why It Matters: Tbh, even knowing this is mostly a political front to stop the head tax (and take #StrongStance against the Mayor for clout, I don't understand this counterproposal at all. Instead of a progressive measures taxing corporations they're going with... garbage fees? For the same people burning their property tax bills the last few weeks? A liquor tax? Charging consumers for using Amazon? Interesting! Didn’t see these coming.

You do you, Common Sense Caucus.

The next 18 days will decide the FY26 budget — but even when this ends, we’ll have every budget after for the rest of time until Chicago falls deep into a giant rat hole of some kind.

With budgets like the ones these alders have proposed, we are resigning ourselves to every process being worse, every year, with bigger pension obligations, slower revenue growth, deeper gaps, and a federal landscape built to punish cities.

Chicago can’t austerity its way out of a structural deficit. No matter how you feel about the rest of this — the only sustainable options for the future are recurring progressive revenue.

2. Chicago’s Police Consent Decree Is Still Miles From the Finish Line

WTTW: WTTW has a very sober explainer on the CPD consent decree — the binding court order that was supposed to overhaul a department caught, on camera, executing Laquan McDonald and regularly violating Black and Latino Chicagoans’ constitutional rights. A Quick version of how it’s supposed to work: the decree requires CPD to rewrite policy on training, supervision, and discipline, then an independent monitoring team tracks progress and reports to a federal judge.

The original plan was to be done by end of 2024 with 552 paragraphs. Instead, the decree has now ballooned to 714 paragraphs, had to be expanded three times to cover new scandals, and has been extended to at least 2027 because CPD still hasn’t gotten there. Next up: it’s expanding again to cover traffic stops. Police union leaders say the decree is “too bureaucratic” and makes it hard to do their jobs. Reform advocates say the opposite: CPD drags its feet, the city doesn’t exert enough pressure on brass, and the “no U-turns on the road to reform” promise from the Rahm era has devolved into “we’re technically on the road but mostly idling.”

Why it Matters: Chicago keeps getting baited into “is it reform or is it crime?” arguments. The consent decree reveals the actual question: Can this city force its police department to comply with even the modest rules it agreed to on paper? Can any big institutions can be forced to change when their leadership doesn’t want to?

3. A Data Center in the South Loop – and Almost No Debate

Block Club: Construction is about to start on a 76,000-square-foot data center at 2538 S. Wabash Ave. in the South Loop. HydraVault is converting a two-story building into what will be Chicago’s 95th data center, with a 20-megawatt power supply and up to 200 kilowatts per rack using a hybrid liquid-and-air cooling.

The owner originally floated an esports stadium for the site; that fell through. Now it’s racks and cooling and massive power draws, marketed to “researchers and government agencies” among others. Gensler, Terra Engineering, Power Construction, and Thornton Tomasetti are on the build.

Big picture: Chicago already has 95+ data centers in the city and 184 across Illinois. Each facility sucks up energy, water, and often public infrastructure upgrades — but most public discussion is limited to “jobs” and “innovation.”

Economic growth isn’t necessarily a guarantee, either: these centers create some short-term construction work, maybe a few permanent jobs, but a long-term claim on grid capacity that we’re going to need for literally everything else (transit electrification, housing, climate adaptation). More Perfect Union has been tracking how data centers quietly reshape local economies — soaking up subsidies, stressing grids, and inflating industrial land prices.

Why It Matters: In a city with structural budget gaps, and neighborhoods still waiting on basic public investment, it’s wild how fast we can move for things like this. A 76,000-square-foot energy hog slides through with barely a peep, while bus-only lanes, public housing repairs, or storefront stabilization can drag for years.

If we’re going to be the server farm of the Midwest, residents deserve a real conversation about what data centers owe the grid and the neighborhoods around them, and how we capture some of that value for public goods instead of just profit margins.

1 Big Question:

Kyle Tharp: Kyle Tharp has a vital breakdown of “liberal media’s big year online” in his newsletter Chaotic Era. It’s basically a tour through every new or suddenly-massive left-of-center media project, from MeidasTouch and Crooked to More Perfect Union, The Lever, Courier, Zeteo, Mutuals, NewWorld, and an entire mini-industry of creator networks and matchmaking operations like Chorus, AND Media, Resonate, and more.

• Boomer-facing outrage factories like MeidasTouch are minting cash and subscribers.

• More substantive brands like Crooked Media and The Bulwark are having banner years with sold-out conferences and huge paid newsletter bases.

• Social-first operations like COURIER and NowThis are dominating TikTok and IG feeds for younger audiences.

• Accountability outlets like More Perfect Union, The Lever, and Popular Information have built real investigative muscles.

• A whole ecosystem of creator pipelines — Chorus, Vocal Media, Good Influence, etc. — promises to move Democratic messaging through influencers instead of legacy.

So on paper, the “liberal media problem” is getting solved: more shows, more clips, more newsletters, more pipelines. But Tharp’s piece makes one thing very clear: even after a catastrophic election loss, right-wing media still has the structural advantage — especially on YouTube and in the podcast space. Liberal media is growing, sure, but often by copying the same incentives, with fewer resources and structures.

What is the real conversion from “content” to “power”?

2 Red Flags Stressing Me Out Today: 

🚨 Kash Patel’s FBI is collapsing

The Guardian: A leaked 115-page assessment from a coalition of retired and active FBI personnel describes the bureau under Director Kash Patel as a “rudderless ship” led by someone “in over his head,” with managers “internally paralyzed by fear” and terrified of being fired if they move without explicit instruction. Multiple sources say Patel doesn’t understand the FBI’s core investigative and intelligence programs. The report details tantrums over raid jackets and social media optics, a climate of retaliation (including ordering polygraphs to find internal critics), and a deputy director, Dan Bongino, described as “something of a clown.” The White House is publicly insisting this is actually the most competent administration of all time and everything’s fine.

The right has spent years screaming about “weaponized law enforcement,” and the end result is… a weaponized, incompetent law enforcement hierarchy.

🚨Uranium Miners Got a Win Inside a Bill Designed to Hurt Them

In These Times: Workday Magazine has an essential piece by Sarah Lazare following Navajo uranium miners and families still living in the fallout of America’s nuclear weapons and energy programs. After organizing for years, miners finally helped win an expansion of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) in Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” so post-1971 miners in more states would qualify for payments. As one organizer puts it, the demand is simple: no new mines, no new weapons until the legacy mess is actually cleaned up to community standards.

That’s It This Week!

Which Chicago winter moment are you emotionally right now?

• ❄️ Waiting 24 minutes for a bus the tracker swears is “2 minutes away”

• 🧊 The gray slush island in the crosswalk

• 🌫️ A Lakefront wind gust that makes you reconsider every life decision

• 🕯️ Your space heater, trying its best

Reply with your choice, send this to someone who needs a sad lamp, and I’ll see you next week.

Bonus: here’s a story about moss based forensic research from WTTW.