At the urging of Mayor Tiffany Henyard, the Village of Dolton paid a west suburban construction company — linked to multiple corruption cases — more than $200,000 in no-bid, no-contract work to replace senior homeowners’ roofs and windows.

Now, federal investigators are seeking records from Dolton officials concerning the construction project undertaken by Summit-based O.A.K.K. Construction Co., owned by Alex Nitchoff. His family ran a restaurant in town, and his father once engaged in an apparent scheme to attempt to clear hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid taxes from properties the family owned in the village.

Alex Nitchoff, O.A.K.K.’s president, is awaiting sentencing after he pleaded guilty in January to bribing a Cook County assessor’s official for property tax breaks. His late father, Boris, was implicated in a home renovation bribery scheme involving former Chicago Ald. Carrie Austin (34th). O.A.K.K. construction was subpoenaed as part of the federal investigation of Austin, the Sun-Times reported in 2019. An attorney for Alex Nitchoff declined to comment. Austin has denied any wrongdoing.

Federal subpoenas were issued this spring to the Village of Dolton and Thornton Township, where Henyard is the supervisor, and records show O.A.K.K. was named in the Dolton subpoena. They are part of an ongoing and intensifying federal investigation into Henyard, the self-styled “supermayor,” whose controversial governing style and decisions have generated national and international news coverage.

Dozens of businesses, government employees, political figures and members of Henyard’s inner-circle are named in the wide-ranging subpoenas, which also seek spending records from multiple trips, including a October 2022 trip that Henyard and supporters of her cancer nonprofit foundation took to Springfield to promote a breast cancer bill. The bill, though, had not been filed, and the State Legislature wasn’t in session, as first reported by the Illinois Answers Project and Fox 32 Chicago.

Other people or organizations named in the subpoenas include:

• Henyard’s nonprofit that claims to help cancer victims, “The Tiffany Henyard Cares Foundation,” which she financed using township money. The Illinois Attorney General’s Office is investigating the foundation, which is barred from fundraising after failing to submit required documentation.

• Jose Aldaco, a businessman from Bensenville, who billed the township $17,000 for 1,000 T-shirts and sweatshirts ahead of the journey that Henyard and members of her foundation took to Springfield. The federal subpoena asked for records related to that specific T-shirt invoice submitted by Aldaco’s company. The invoice came one day after the paperwork creating Henyard’s foundation was submitted to the state. Messages left for Aldaco were not returned.

• Kamal Woods, who is identified in divorce records as Henyard’s boyfriend, works under Henyard at the township and is a director of her foundation. Woods earns a “highly lucrative salary — in excess of $100,0000 per year” working at the township in addition to his side gig providing private security for local government, according to his divorce case. Woods hung up when reached for comment.
• Keith Freeman, the initial registered agent for Henyard’s foundation, who is also the village manager and Henyard’s paid senior advisor at the township. Freeman is charged with bankruptcy fraud after allegedly shielding income he made from the Village of Robbins, the Village of Dolton, Thornton Township and a Northfield-based company that leases vehicles to poor municipalities at high rates. Freeman has pleaded not guilty and did not return emails and phone messages seeking comment.

• Michael Kasper, the election attorney for former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, who helped Henyard defeat a recall effort in 2022. Messages left for Kasper were not returned.

• Former Calumet City Mayor Jerry Genova, who was sentenced to five years in prison on corruption charges in 2002, worked on a campaign for Henyard’s slate of candidates in 2023. Genova said in a statement that he has worked as a marketing and economic development consultant for 30 years and that he “works for a private firm that provides consulting services to Thornton Township and other governmental and corporate clients throughout the Southland and Chicago area.”

As for the Nitchoffs, they are a longtime fixture in Dolton, having owned and operated Olivia’s Restaurant — a well known diner in town that has since been turned over to new ownership.

They are also absentee landowners. A Chicago Sun-Times investigation showed that the Nitchoffs attempted to evade several hundred thousand dollars in unpaid property taxes on Dolton properties by letting their taxes become delinquent and then rebuying the properties through shell companies for a fraction of the debt through Cook County scavenger or tax sales.

All the while, Nitchoff’s businesses were active in Dolton political affairs, contributing more than $8,600 over seven years to former Mayor Riley Rogers. In February 2022, they contributed $2,000 to Henyard’s campaign and another $5,000 four months later. The latter contribution occurred days after O.A.K.K. first billed the village for the no-bid, no-contract residential construction at several dozen homes that totaled $205,000, money that the village paid out of federal COVID-19 grant money.

Having never authorized the work, the Dolton village board initially refused to pay the bills. O.A.K.K. responded by sending letters to the senior homeowners, threatening to put liens against their homes.

“I am really confused right now,” resident Rose Rice wrote in an email to village officials. “First of all, I didn’t sign any papers or an agreement with this company, so why is this lien against my property and why is my name on this document … This is asinine.”

John Bodendorfer, O.A.K.K.’s construction manager, apologized during a December 2022 village board meeting and said the letters should have been mailed to the mayor and village board instead. He said he was “seeking payment for the work that we completed for the homeowners.”

At the same meeting, village trustees, a majority of whom oppose Henyard, criticized the process and asked Henyard how she picked the contractor.

“If you don’t get a (bid), you get contractors who donate to her campaign fund,” said then-village trustee Edward Steave. “That’s reality. Because the mayor should not have all the power to pick the contractors, pick who she wants, and then she goes to them for campaign donations.”

Henyard said she announced at an earlier board meeting that they needed contractors to do the work and O.A.K.K. signed up.

“I don’t go pick people,” Henyard said. “People come to the village, they apply and they want to do it and they do the work. I could care less who does it as long as the resident gets the service.”

Because the cost of each job did not exceed $5,000, Henyard said the village was not required to seek other proposals to comply with the requirements of the federal grant money the village used to pay for the project.

“I’m asking again for the board to make them whole, pay them what’s owed to them so they can complete the process …” Henyard said.

After Village Trustee Jason House asked for a copy of O.A.K.K.’s contract and its customers, Henyard made it clear that none existed: “For the record there is no contract. No one has a contract.”

Bodendorfer declined to comment for this story. He pleaded not guilty to federal charges that he gave jewelry, meals, sports tickets and home improvement materials to Lavdim Memisovski, a commercial group leader at the Cook County assessor’s office, for tax breaks on the Nitchoff family properties that exceeded a half-million dollars. His boss, Alex Nitchoff, pleaded guilty to bribery charges in January.

Nitchoff’s late father, Boris, was implicated in the federal corruption case against Austin, the former alderperson, after he allegedly provided her with sump pumps and kitchen cabinets in her home as he sought business from the City of Chicago.

Records show the Village of Dolton also paid O.A.K.K. Construction $14,500 to build a fence around the property that became a publicly-owned ice rink that was used for one of Henyard’s campaign events without her campaign paying for it, in an apparent violation of state election law.

Freeman, the village manager, said at the December 2022 trustee meeting that the critics were ignorant of the federal grant reporting rules and accused them of “gaslighting.”

“It’s like you want to start a fight,” he said.

Freeman was indicted in April for bankruptcy fraud after allegedly underreporting income for multiple years in a bankruptcy filing earlier this year.

Freeman is accused of falsely reporting that his 2023 income was $99,647 when it was approximately $195,000. He also allegedly failed to report that Village of Robbins, where he formerly worked as village manager, had a claim against him because he received about $90,396 “in excess of his authorized salary.”

The indictment also alleged that a Northfield company that uses high-interest loans to sell firefighting vehicles and other municipal equipment paid him $24,500 in consulting fees from December 2021 through January 2022 — income he also did not list on his bankruptcy filing.

The subpoenas issued to Thornton Township and the Village of Dolton sought records related to First Government Lease, of Northfield, and its president Paul Graver. Records show that the Securities and Exchange Commission fined Graver $50,000 in 1992 after he took part in “three schemes to fraudulently induce the purchase or sale of securities.”

Records show the Village of Dolton leased a 2023 Chevrolet Tahoe from the company for five years for $149,000 in all — with nearly $56,000 of overall price tag coming from loan and interest costs.

Village Trustee Kiana Belcher, who criticized the lease agreements in a September 2023 board meeting, said that Dolton leases multiple vehicles from the company.

Graver did not return messages for comment.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Capitol News Illinois. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

It was on L.J.’s 11th birthday, in December 2022, that child welfare workers finally took him away. They arrived at his central Illinois home to investigate an abuse allegation and decided on the spot to remove the boy along with his baby brother and sister — the “Irish twins,” as their parents called them.

His mother begged to keep the children while her boyfriend told child welfare workers and the police called to the scene that they could take L.J.: “You wanna take someone? Take that little motherf—– down there or wherever the f— he is at. I’ve been trying to get him out of here for a long time.”

By that time, L.J. told authorities he hadn’t been in a classroom for years, according to police records. First came COVID-19. Then, in August 2021 when he was going to have to repeat the third grade, his mother and her boyfriend decided that L.J. would be homeschooled and that they would be his teachers. In an instant, his world shrank to the confines of a one-bedroom apartment in the small Illinois college town of Charleston — no teachers, counselors or classmates.

In that apartment, L.J. would later tell police, he was beaten and denied food: Getting leftovers from the refrigerator was punishable by a whipping with a belt; sass was met with a slap in the face.

L.J. told police he got no lessons or schoolwork at home. Asked if he had learned much, L.J. replied, “Not really.”

Reporters are using the first and middle initials of the boy, who is now 12 and remains in state custody, to protect his identity.

While each state has different regulations for homeschooling — and most of them are relatively weak — Illinois is among a small minority that places virtually no rules on parents who homeschool their children: The parents aren’t required to register with any governmental agency, and no tests are required. Under Illinois law, they must provide an education equivalent to what is offered in public schools, covering core subjects like math, language arts, science and health. But parents don’t have to have a high school diploma or GED, and state authorities cannot compel them to demonstrate their teaching methods or prove attendance, curriculum or testing outcomes.

The Illinois State Board of Education said in a statement that regional education offices are empowered by Illinois law to request evidence that a family that homeschools is providing an adequate course of instruction. But, the spokesperson said, their “ability to intervene can be limited.”

Educational officials say this lack of regulation allows parents to pull vulnerable children like L.J. from public schools then not provide any education for them. They call them “no schoolers.”

No oversight also means children schooled at home lose the protections schools provide, including teachers, counselors, coaches and bus drivers — school personnel legally bound to report suspected child abuse and neglect. Under Illinois law, parents may homeschool even if they would be disqualified from working with youth in any other setting; this includes parents with violent criminal records or pending child abuse investigations, or those found to have abused children in the past.

The number of students from preschool to 12th grade enrolled in the state’s public schools has dropped by about 127,000 since the pandemic began. Enrollment losses have outpaced declines in population, according to a report by Advance Illinois, a nonprofit education policy and advocacy organization. And, despite conventional wisdom, the drop was also not the result of wealthier families moving their children to private schools: After the pandemic, private school enrollment declined too, according to the same report.

In the face of this historic exodus from public schools, Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica set out to examine the lack of oversight by education and child welfare systems when some of those children disappear into families later accused of no-schooling and, sometimes, abuse and neglect.

Reporters found no centralized system for investigating homeschooling concerns. Educational officials said they were ill equipped to handle cases where parents are accused of neglecting their children’s education. They also said the state’s laws made it all but impossible to intervene in cases where parents claim they are homeschooling. Reporters also found that under the current structure, concerns about homeschooling bounce between child welfare and education authorities, with no entity fully prepared to step in.

“Although we have parents that do a great job of homeschooling, we have many ‘no schoolers’” said Angie Zarvell, superintendent of a regional education office about 100 miles southwest of Chicago that covers three counties and 23 school districts. “The damage this is doing to small rural areas is great. These children will not have the basic skills needed to be contributing members of society.”

Regional education offices, like the one Zarvell oversees, are required by law to identify children who are truant and try to help get them back into school.

But once parents claim they are homeschooling, “our hands are tied,” said Superintendent Michelle Mueller, whose regional office is located about 60 miles north of St. Louis.

Even the state’s child welfare agency can do little: Reports to its child abuse hotline alleging that parents are depriving their children of an education have multiplied, but the Department of Children and Family Services doesn’t investigate schooling matters. Instead, it passes reports to regional education offices.

Todd Vilardo, who since 2017 has been superintendent of the school district where L.J. was enrolled, said he is seeing more and more children outside of school during the day. He wonders, “‘Aren’t they supposed to be in school?’ But I’m reminded that maybe they’re homeschooled,” said Vilardo, who has worked in the Charleston school district for 33 years. “Then I’m reminded that there are very few effective checks and balances on home schools.”

“A Huge Crack in Our System”

There’s no way to determine the precise number of children who are homeschooled. In 2022, 4,493 children were recorded as withdrawn to homeschool, a number that is likely much higher because Illinois doesn’t require parents to register homeschooled children. That is a little more than double the number a decade before.

In late fall of 2020, L.J. was one of the kids who slipped out of school. After a roughly five-month hiatus from the classroom during the pandemic, L.J.’s school resumed in-person classes. The third grader, however, was frequently absent.

At home, tensions ran high. In the 640-square-foot apartment, L.J.’s mother, Ashley White, and her boyfriend, Brian Anderson, juggled the demands of three children including two born just about 10 months apart.

White, now 31, worked at a local fast-food restaurant. Anderson, now 51, who uses a wheelchair, had applied for disability payments. Anderson doesn’t have a valid driver’s license. The family lived in a subsidized housing complex for low-income seniors and people with disabilities.

In an interview with reporters in late February, 14 months after L.J. had been taken into custody by the state, the couple offered a range of explanations for why he hadn’t been in school. L.J. had been suspended and barred from returning, they said, though school records show no expulsion. They also said they had tried to put L.J. in an alternative school for children with special needs, but he didn’t have a diagnosis that qualified him to attend.

The couple made clear they believed that L.J. was a problem child who could get them in trouble; they said they thought he could get them sued. In the interview, Anderson called L.J. a pathological liar, a thief and a bad kid.

“I have 11 kids, never had a problem with any of them, never,” Anderson said. “I’ve never had a problem like this,” he said of L.J. The boy, he said, lacked discipline and continued to get “worse and worse and worse every year” he’d known him.

To support the idea that L.J. was combative, White provided a copy of a screenshot taken from a school chat forum in which the boy cursed at his schoolmates.

At the end of the school year, in spring 2021, the principal told White and Anderson that the boy would have to repeat the third grade. Rather than have L.J. held back, the couple pulled him out of school to homeschool. They didn’t have to fill out any paperwork or give a reason.

On any given day in Illinois, a parent can make that same decision. That’s due to a series of court and legislative decisions that strengthened parents’ rights against state interference in how they educate their children.

In 1950, the Illinois Supreme Court heard a case involving college-educated parents who kept their 7-year-old daughter at home. Those parents, Seventh-day Adventists, argued that a public school education produced a “pugnacious character” and believed the mother was the best teacher and nature was the best textbook. The judges ruled in their favor, finding that, in many respects under the law, homeschools are essentially like private schools: not required to register kids with the state and not subject to testing or curriculum mandates.

In 1989, the legislature voted to change how educational neglect cases are handled. Before the vote, DCFS was allowed to investigate parents who failed to ensure their child’s education just as it does other types of neglect. In a bipartisan vote, the General Assembly changed that, in part to reduce caseloads on DCFS — which has been overburdened and inadequately staffed for decades — and also in response to concerns about state interference from families who homeschool.

Since then, DCFS has referred complaints about schooling that come in to its child abuse hotline over to regional offices of education. The letter accompanying the educational neglect referral form ends with: “This notice is for your information and pursuit only. No response to this office is required.”

Tierney Stutz, executive deputy director at DCFS, said that regional education officials are welcome to report back findings, but that “DCFS does not have statutory authority to act on this information.”

“Unfortunately, this is a huge crack in our system,” said Amber Quirk, regional superintendent of the office of education that covers densely populated DuPage County in the Chicago suburbs.

To see how this system is working, reporters obtained more than 450 of these educational neglect reports, representing over a third of the more than 1,200 forwarded by DCFS over three years ending in 2023. About 10% of them specifically cited substandard homeschooling claims. But officials said that in many of the other reported cases of kids out of school, they found that families also claimed they were homeschooling.

Faced with cases of truancy or educational neglect, county prosecutors can press charges against parents. But if they do, parents can lean on Illinois’ parental protections when they defend themselves in court from a truancy charge.

That’s been the experience of Dirk Muffler, who oversees truancy intervention at a regional office of education covering five counties in west-central Illinois. “We’ve gone through an entire truancy process, literally standing on the courthouse steps getting ready to walk in to screen a kid into court and the parents say, ‘We are homeschooling.’ I have to just walk away then.”

More recently, the ISBE made one more decision to loosen the monitoring of parents who homeschool: For years, school districts and regional offices distributed voluntary registration forms to families who homeschool, some of whom returned them. Then last year, the state agency told those regional offices that they no longer had to send those forms to ISBE.

“The homeschool registration form was being misinterpreted in some instances that ISBE was reviewing or approving homeschool programs, which it does not have statutory authority to do,” an ISBE spokesperson told the news organizations.

Over the years, the legislature has taken up proposals to strengthen the state’s oversight of homeschooling. In 2011, lawmakers considered requiring parents to notify their local school districts of their intent to homeschool, and in 2019 they considered calling for DCFS to inspect all homeschools and have ISBE approve their curriculum.

Each time, however, the state’s strong homeschooling lobby, mostly made up of religious-based organizations, stepped in.

This March, under sponsorship of the Illinois Christian Home Educators, homeschoolers massed at the state Capitol as they have for decades for Cherry Pie Day, bringing pies to each of the state’s 177 lawmakers.

Kirk Smith, the organization’s executive director and former public school teacher, summed up his group’s appeal to lawmakers: “All we want is to be left alone. And Illinois has been so good. We have probably the best state in the nation to homeschool.”

“Nobody Knows. He’s Not in School.”

Just days after child protection workers took 11-year-old L.J. into protective custody on his birthday, a 9-year-old homeschooled boy, 240 miles away, disappeared and was missing for months before police went looking for him.

Though the case of Zion Staples was covered in the media, it has not been previously reported that his homeschooling status delayed the discovery of his death.

Zion had been living in Rock Island, in the northwest part of the state, with his mother, Sushi Staples. The family had a long history of abuse and neglect investigations by DCFS, and Staples had lost two kids to foster care in Illinois nearly two decades before because she mistreated them; the children were not returned to her. The most recent investigation by DCFS was in 2021. The department did not find enough evidence to find mistreatment and the case was closed.

Despite her past involvement with child welfare services, no Illinois laws restricted her from homeschooling the children who remained in her care, including Zion and five others who were then ages 8 to 14.

When reporters asked DCFS for his schooling status, the agency’s responses revealed considerable confusion about where he was being educated. DCFS originally told the news organizations that Zion was enrolled in an online school program, but the company that DCFS said had been providing his schooling told reporters that Zion had never been enrolled. DCFS later clarified that his mother said he was leaving public school in August 2021 to attend an online program, but no one was required to verify this information.

On a December morning in 2022, Staples told police she returned home from running errands and found Zion dead. A coroner would later find that he died from an accidental, self-inflicted shot fired from a gun the children found in the house. His mother hid the body and later confided to her friend, Laterrica Wilson, that she did it because she did not want to risk losing her other children.

“She said: ‘Nobody knows. He’s not in school. He’s homeschooled. I’ve got this figured out,’” Wilson recalled in an interview with a reporter about a conversation she had with Staples a few months after the child had died. “She said she had too much to lose.”

Wilson, who lives in Florida, said it was one of several calls she had with Staples over the course of months as she tried to figure out what had happened and what to do about it. Police records indicate that in July, in response to a call from Wilson, they visited the home. Staples denied the child even existed. Later, when police executed a search warrant, officers found Zion’s body in a metal trash can in the garage; he was still wearing his Spiderman pajama bottoms. He’d been dead for seven months, an autopsy revealed.

Staples was charged with concealing a death, failure to report the death of a child within 24 hours and obstructing justice. Staples pleaded guilty to felony endangering the health of a child in February and was sentenced to two years in prison in April.

Staples did not respond to a letter sent to her in prison seeking comment on this case.

DCFS and its university partners study all sorts of risks to children involved with the child welfare system, but they’ve never examined homeschooling and do not track the number of children the agency comes in contact with who are homeschooled. While the agency’s inspector general is required to file reports on every child who dies in foster care or whose family the agency had investigated within the preceding year of the child’s death, the children’s schooling status is rarely noted in them.

For L.J., homeschooling rules also blinded school officials to abuse he suffered, although their administrative office is within sight of his apartment complex. About five months passed from when he was withdrawn to homeschool in the summer of 2021 before the first signs of help arrived. Following a call to its hotline in January 2022, DCFS found White and Anderson neglectful, citing inadequate supervision, but that did not result in L.J. returning to school. DCFS offered services, but Anderson and White declined.

DCFS received more calls to its hotline in June 2022 and again that September, alleging that Anderson and White had mistreated L.J. In both of those cases, DCFS investigators did not find enough evidence to support those allegations and closed the cases.

The caller in September told DCFS the boy appeared malnourished. L.J. hadn’t been in school since 2019, the caller reported. But DCFS said they did not pursue an investigation into his schooling matters because it wasn’t in their policies to do so.

It did send an educational neglect report to Kyle Thompson, the superintendent of schools overseeing the regional office of education in Charleston. The form didn’t mention physical abuse, but it did say that L.J. had begged for food from neighbors, that doctors were concerned about his weight and that a DCFS caseworker had recently visited the home but no one had answered the door.

Thompson was in his office when the educational neglect report ended up on his desk on an October afternoon. Alarmed when he read the allegations, Thompson went to the apartment that same day. White and Anderson came to the door, Thompson recalled, and eventually agreed to meet with school officials.

“I really feel like we may have saved that kid’s life that day,” Thompson said.

But Anderson and White continued to keep L.J. at home.

In November, a grocery store manager found L.J. in the parking lot begging for quarters and called police, who took L.J. home and later issued a ticket to White and Anderson for violating a city truancy ordinance. L.J. hadn’t been to school the whole year — 70 days.

Anderson said he didn’t know why he was cited, since he was homeschooling. “Apparently, it wasn’t good enough for the school system,” he told reporters.

A few days later, police and child welfare services again visited the home and found welts and bruises on L.J.’s back. L.J. said Anderson had beaten him with a belt as punishment for eating leftover Salisbury steak and potatoes without permission. The boy also told child welfare workers he had not showered for two weeks.

Anderson and White would later tell reporters L.J. was on a diet of fruits and vegetables because he was too fat and prediabetic, but L.J. told police he ate mostly cereal. Though DCFS found credible evidence of both neglect and abuse in its November and December investigations, the couple said they did not abuse L.J. or deny him an education. They are still trying to get the two younger children back, but they say they don’t want L.J. In an April court custody hearing, a judge in their child welfare case admonished them for not accepting responsibility for their treatment of L.J., including keeping him from school.

For its part, the state did ultimately take responsibility for L.J.’s schooling: Caseworkers took the children into custody on a Friday. The following Monday, L.J. returned to public school.

Mollie Simon of ProPublica contributed research. Andrew Adams of Capitol News Illinois contributed data reporting. Have a news tip regarding homeschooling, chronic truancy or educational neglect? Email them to Molly Parker or Beth Hundsdorfer at investigations@capitolnewsillinois.com.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s proposal to borrow $1.25 billion to sustain an array of housing and economic programs earned praise from some financial watchdogs ahead of its narrow passage out of the City Council last week. But some experts and alderpeople alike are kicking up doubt over a promise underlying the administration’s plan to pay the money back.

The City Council voted 32 to 17 on Friday to approve the spending measure after fending off multiple attempts from alderpeople to reduce the borrowing or tighten the City Council’s oversight of spending.

The massive 37-year borrowing plan relies on winding down the city’s dependency on the controversial tax-increment financing (TIF) program, which has long been criticized as a patchwork and politically based system for funding construction projects around the city.

During a hearing on the bond plan last month, Chicago Chief Financial Officer Jill Jaworski added her name to the list of TIF critics.

“TIF has funded many projects, but it’s a flawed instrument because of its geographic limitations,” Jaworski said at the hearing on March 22. She added that the special districts, which build up local economic development funds by collecting year-over-year growth in property tax revenues, are piddling in the neighborhoods that need the most government support, while wealthier districts close to downtown drum up “huge surpluses.”

TIF districts are enabled by state law to breathe new life into “blighted” areas and sunset 23 years after they’ve been created. But municipalities can add 12 years onto each district’s life if they get state lawmaker approval.

When a TIF district expires, the tax revenues it holds are released back to the city, school system and other local governments that levy property taxes in the area.

Letting dozens of districts dissolve when their expiration dates come due over the next several years and releasing the money back into the city’s general fund is the foundation of the administration’s plan to bankroll the projected $2.4 billion cost of repaying the bond.

“This is exactly what ratings agencies say we need: recurring revenues, not one-shots,” Jaworski said.

But wary financial analysts, TIF experts and even some alderpeople have warned that the city will get access to those recurring revenues only if city officials let the districts expire on schedule — which would be a sharp departure from the city’s past practice.

An Illinois Answers Project analysis of TIF districts shows that between 2019 and 2023, city leaders approved extensions for 26 districts, most for 12 years, while allowing 22 districts to expire. 

As part of the bond proposal, city planning officials released criteria they’d use to decide whether to propose 12-year extensions for TIF districts. They include areas with low median incomes, high poverty and large concentrations of city-owned vacant lots.

However, the City Council has generally extended the lives of wealthier, more lucrative districts while letting districts in poorer neighborhoods sunset. The districts that were extended between 2019 and 2023 pulled in $426 million when adding up revenues from the year that the City Council voted on their extensions. Meanwhile, the districts that were allowed to expire during the same period pulled in less than $83 million during the final years of each of their existences.

Now, officials in the Johnson administration say they’ll stop extending the deadlines for TIF expirations. But not right away.

The planning department’s bond repayment model assumes that the City Council will stretch out another eight districts in 2024 and 2025, waiting until 2026 before switching to a policy of letting every remaining district sunset on schedule.

Peter Strazzabosco, a spokesperson for the Chicago Department of Planning and Development, wrote in a statement that the department could propose more TIF extensions after 2025 “subject to demographic and financial analysis by DPD to determine potential impact to the bond model presented to council.”

Any change in the analysis will have to be shared with the City Council, Strazzabosco said. Still, the strategy has made some analysts wary.

“Were I a ratings agency, I would just assume that none of those expirations are actually going to happen … and allow for an upside if all that actually happens,” said Matt Fabian, lead analyst at the Massachusetts-based research firm Municipal Market Analytics, which advises investors on municipal bonds.

“If this were … a government with a history of conservative planning and fiscal practice, then you could take these numbers more at face value,” Fabian said. “But it being Chicago, [it has] a history of pushing things into the future and using very sophisticated cloaking of what it’s actually doing.”

Strazzabosco said ratings agencies should be assured that city officials will not authorize any bond sales unless they can point to specific revenues to back them up.

“Bonds will not be sold until funds are actually needed, which ensures the city will understand projections prior to the sale,” Strazzabosco said. “If returning TIF revenues are less than anticipated, the city would issue less than $1.25 billion in bond funds.”

The City Council this year has already approved a three-year extension for the Fullerton/Milwaukee TIF district, which was set to expire in December. Planning department officials have declined to confirm which districts they’ll propose to extend. But the economic model they drew up for the bond plan includes what they’ve called a “stress test” that assumes 12-year extensions for five more districts this year — including the high-grossing Central West TIF on the Near West Side — while letting 14 districts lapse.

The planning department’s bond repayment model factors in extensions for an additional three districts in 2025 — including two on the city’s North Side — and assumes another eight will dissolve on schedule next year.

Letting any TIF expire carries political risks. City planning officials face formidable pressure from alderpeople who want to sustain TIF districts that raise money for local projects in their own wards.

Late last year, city officials secured a state law authorizing the extension of the Division/Homan TIF district in the Humboldt Park neighborhood. Ald. Jessie Fuentes (26th), whose ward includes most of the district, supported the bond plan but said she is a staunch advocate of extending the life on Division/Homan TIF, which is set to expire next year.

“We have a couple of schools that are in that TIF that are in need of infrastructure,” Fuentes said. “While I believe in … at some point transitioning out of TIF, right now we’re still in need of it for investments in the 26th Ward.”

The same state law that paved the way for the Division/Homan extension also greenlit another 12 years for the Lawrence/Kedzie TIF district, which siphoned off more than $12 million in local property taxes last year, records show.

A staffer for Ald. Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez (33rd) advocated for the extension in an email obtained by Illinois Answers Project.

“I wanted to know how much is currently in the Lawrence/Kedzie TIF and whether anyone has formally requested an extension to the TIF?” Rebecca Rios, director of development for Rodriguez-Sanchez, wrote in a Nov. 7, 2023, email to Chicago Department of Planning and Development deputy commissioner Tim Jeffries. “If not, please let me know what the process is to request an extension.”

The law authorizing the extension passed the Illinois General Assembly days later.

Illinois Answers spoke with alderpeople representing 13 of the 19 TIF districts that are scheduled to expire at the end of 2024. Nearly all said they’re asking city planning officials for extensions.

Ald. Peter Chico (10th) said he wants the Lake Calumet Area Industrial TIF to stay so it can be tapped to pay for work on a soccer field. Ald. Silvana Tabares (23rd) and Ald. Marty Quinn (13th) are backing an extension for the 63rd/Pulaski district so it can pay for an annex at Hubbard High School. 

The Greater Southwest Industrial TIF district in the city’s 18th Ward is set to end this year after having raised more than $15 million through 2022. Ald. Derrick Curtis (18th) said he supports the mayor’s push to end the city’s reliance on TIF for project funding — but not at the expense of the existing TIF districts in his ward. 

“I would be one that would be selfish with my TIF,” Curtis said. “They’re very useful. I use TIFs for infrastructure, curbs and gutters that I can’t afford with my menu money.”

Each City Council member’s incentive to sustain TIF districts in their own ward can be powerful enough to transcend the elected official’s overall political views, said Rachel Weber, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs who has studied TIF for more than two decades.

“To them, it just looks like an ATM that’s potentially spitting out money that they have some power over,” Weber said. “They want to negotiate with the developer that’s interested in building something in their ward, and TIF is seen as a very critical negotiating chip that allows them to horse trade.

“They don’t want to give that up when there isn’t a … replacement funding source,” she added.

Ald. Matt Martin (47th) said critics should be reassured by a recent amendment to the bond ordinance requiring city finance officials to come back with annual updates on the city’s repayment plan.

“Those reports will be an important tool to make sure we’re not saddling ourselves with debt that we’re not in a position to pay back,” said Martin, who supported the bond plan and said he does not plan to resist a pair of upcoming TIF district expirations in his North Side ward. “Collectively, it’ll be our responsibility to continue to make sure those safeguards are in place.”

Ald. Gilbert Villegas (36th) voted against the bond proposal. He told Illinois Answers that he was skeptical in part because it lacked something TIF districts guarantee: a marker of how much money he can expect to go to his ward.

“I have to be able to point my community toward where [the money] is going,” Villegas said. “And if it’s not a specific building or project, I’d like to see if there can be corridors created.” 

City housing and planning officials bowed to alderpeople by guaranteeing council approval for bond-funded projects costing more than $5 million, and by beefing up transparency requirements in the ordinance. But they’ve balked at demands to show where in the city bond-funded projects will be built, maintaining that the point of the citywide bond is to break out of geographic boundaries.

Other alderpeople, like Ald. Brendan Reilly (42nd), have asked city planning officials to cement a list of the TIF districts they want to extend so the council can be certain the others will expire.

Planning Department Commissioner Ciere Boatright said during a hearing on April 11 that officials had a “draft list” of planned extensions but no public commitments.

The bond plan would be undermined if city officials are not exercising their power to extend TIF districts “very judiciously, very cautiously,” Weber said.

“You’ve got to wonder: if you’ve got to keep on extending a TIF district, then what’s going on there?” she said. “Twenty-three years is a long time already. TIFs were not meant to be used in perpetuity.”

Strazzabosco said city finance officials will “monitor TIF expirations each year and issue debt based on available revenue from this source. If the TIF expiration schedule changes, our debt issuance plans will change accordingly.

“DPD believes the bonds will offer greater opportunities than most TIF districts and that alders recognize this as well,” Strazzabosco said.

More than 100 residents of Chicago’s Austin neighborhood called 311 in August  2023 to report flooding in their basements or on the streets after a storm dumped nearly 4 inches of rain on their neighborhood, city records show.

Hura Hillman was not one of them.

With a first floor that’s a few feet higher than the neighbors, the one-and-a-half-story bungalow where Hillman lives with his 80-year-old mother, Bernice, had one advantage over their neighbors.

But Hillman’s home got another boost from a special type of alley the city had installed a year earlier behind the house.

A “green alley.”

When it rains, the green alley behind the home in the 5400 block of Race Street acts like a sponge and a runway for rainwater, letting some water seep into the ground while the rest gathers into a grooved channel and streams into a manhole that connects to local sewers. Its underground trench system can absorb thousands of gallons of rainwater every hour.

The special infrastructure does have its limits.

A month before the August 2023 storm, when a far worse deluge dropped more than 7 inches of rain over a single day on the West Side last summer, sewage water seeped into the basement of the Hillman household.

“It flooded bad,” said Hillman, 55. “The hardest part was trying to keep the water away from the furnace.”

The new pavement behind Race is one of the roughly 400 green alleys city workers have built around Chicago since 2001 to help neighborhoods handle storm water runoff better and prevent surrounding basements from flooding.

Wherever they are implemented, the green alleys have proven popular, welcomed by neighbors like Hillman who had grown tired of the crumbling pavement the projects typically replace. Experts say the permeable alleys and other forms of “green infrastructure” that break up pavement to let rainwater soak into the earth are becoming increasingly needed as climate change makes storms more erratic and damaging.

But more than two decades after the first green alley was installed, an Illinois Answers Project analysis of their locations shows they’ve been heavily concentrated in some of the Chicago neighborhoods least prone to flooding. Neighborhoods like Austin are left to wait in line amid a city construction process that prioritizes ward map boundaries before residents’ needs.

Green alleys are expensive — converting one block of an alley can cost up to $500,000 — and the city funds the construction of only several dozen a year, with the end result being denser, more affluent wards receiving more benefit from the program than poorer wards that are more spread out.

A solution in search of funding

It was the early 2000s when the Chicago Department of the Environment began turning its attention in earnest to climate change and its risks to the city, according to Suzanne Malec-McKenna, who began working for the department in 1993.

The department funded a pilot program that paid for four alley replacements between 2001 and 2006, leading to the publication of a “Green Alley Handbook” in 2010 that showed how the permeable surfaces could be used with other green fixtures, like rain gardens and green roofs, to sop up rainwater and take pressure off the city’s sewer system. 

By that time, the program had shown its value, said Malec-McKenna, who led the department as commissioner from 2007 until Mayor Rahm Emanuel took office in 2011 and moved to dissolve the agency.

“We were looking for any opportunity for permeable surfaces to start gathering our rainwater,” Malec-McKenna said. She noted that Chicago has nearly 2,000 miles of alleys, more than any other U.S. city. But unlike Chicago’s streets, most alleys have no sewer drains.

“The green alleys were really part of [the city’s plan for] how we manage stormwater at the residential level,” she said.

The program soon ran into a problem: each green alley project’s deep landscaping work and coordination with nearby sewer mains made it far more expensive than a typical repavement job.

By the time Mayor Rahm Emanuel dismantled the Department of the Environment in 2012, green alley construction had no dedicated funding source. Increasingly, the only way neighbors could see one built was by asking their alderperson to dip into their annual “menu” fund for infrastructure. 

Relying on those menu funds for the green alleys puts each council member in a bind, according to Far North Side Ald. Andre Vasquez (40th). Each alderperson is allocated $1.5 million in menu funds per year and must balance special projects against bread-and-butter infrastructure needs like street resurfacing and sidewalk repairs.

“Doing the green alleys really does help when you have that permeated pavement,” Vasquez said, adding that a long list of his residents have asked for them. “The challenge is, it costs anywhere from $250,000 to half a million dollars for one block, so we have to tell our neighbors that, at best, we can do two or three a year.”

Each green alley takes at least three weeks to build, according to Erica Schroeder, a spokesperson for the Chicago Department of Transportation. Construction involves excavating 7 feet beneath the surface and installing a 5-by-4-foot trench filled with “porous stones and a perforated pipe” to channel the water, Schroeder said. 

In 2021, city leaders set aside a portion of the Chicago Works capital plan to boost green alley construction. Since then, the Chicago Department of Transportation has invited each of the city’s 50 alderpeople to select one green alley project per year, not including any projects they fund through the menu program.

Thanks to the new policy, the city averaged nearly 30 new green alleys each year between 2021 and 2023, up from an average of 24 per year between 2007 and 2020, according to transportation department records. The department has fallen short of 50 new alleys per year because of “variables throughout the design, engineering, utility coordination, and construction processes,” Schroeder said.

It’s not nearly enough to meet the need, Vasquez said.

“We definitely need more money for green alleys, whether it’s state, federal — whatever it means for infrastructure to get that done,” he said. “Because it’s clear we don’t have many solutions for [flood control in] alleys. And this is one that’s effective.”

A typical city-installed green alley can divert more than 3,700 gallons of rainwater from the sewers every hour, Schroeder said.

Similar green alleys built by the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District are built to hold at least 30,000 gallons of rainwater each — approximately 1 inch’s worth of rainfall in a typical location, officials from that agency said.

Most green alleys on the North, Northwest sides

Amid the overwhelming demand for green infrastructure, Vasquez said he was surprised to hear that as of December 2023, his ward had the second-most green alleys of any ward in the city, with 23. 

Green alley construction has skewed heavily toward the city’s North and Northwest Side. Out of the 10 Chicago wards that have the most green alleys, nine either border the downtown area or are on the North Side, like Vasquez’s 40th Ward.

Fewer than one-third of the roughly 400 green alleys built through 2023 were sited in one of Chicago’s South or West side wards, city records show. Those same wards accounted for nearly three out of every five flood-related 311 complaints filed with the city last year.

Ald. Monique Scott’s 24th Ward, which includes most of the North Lawndale neighborhood on the city’s West Side, was among the hardest hit by last year’s storms. As of last December, the 24th Ward had just five green alleys.

“I’m in a community where we get a lot of flooding,” Scott said in an interview last month. “I wish we could have [green alleys] in all of my 49 miles of alleyways.”

Scott has more urgent infrastructure needs for her ward than many of her colleagues do, she said — not only because of the 24th Ward’s geographic size, but also because of its historic lack of public and private investment. That means her ward is being left behind by the city’s policy of allocating the same amount of infrastructure money — and the same single new green alley per year — to each of the city’s 50 wards.

During a City Council committee hearing held to discuss flooding issues last October, Scott called on city officials to look for funding sources for the green alley program outside of menu dollars. In response, transportation department engineer Anne Zhang pointed to the capital plan that pays for each ward to add one new alley per year but said the department “can explore other sources of funding to expand the program.”

The department has not since identified any other funding sources, a spokesperson said.

The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago funds its own green alley program, but its spending is targeted to suburban Cook County. Out of 33 green alley projects undertaken by the district through 2023, just one has been in Chicago, according to a district spokesperson.

‘There’s nothing strategic about it’

The aldermanic menu program, which has funded most of Chicago’s green alleys to date, has been widely criticized as inequitable by design.

A 2017 audit of the menu program by the Chicago inspector general found that the flat annual sum allocated to each ward “bears no relationship to the actual infrastructure needs of each ward,” resulting in “significant ward-to-ward funding disparities.”

Those disparities help explain why relatively few green alleys have been built in the neighborhoods that need them most, said Joe Ferguson, who served as the city’s inspector general from 2009 to 2021.

“Menu goes a lot further in a number of the affluent wards because … they’re geographically smaller, which means they have less residential street surface,” said Ferguson, who is now president of the nonpartisan Civic Federation. “They also have fewer alleys. So it absolutely makes sense as a matter of simple math that we would see more green alleys in those higher-density wards, which tend to be the more affluent wards.”

City leaders rebuffed the 2017 audit and have since defended Chicago’s practice of giving each ward an equal amount of resources. 

“We’re very happy with those investments,” Chicago Department of Transportation Commissioner Tom Carney told Illinois Answers about the green alley program last month. “The change that it has [brought] for the residents is amazing, and it’ll last 40 years. It’s the right way to address flooding in an alley.”

Carney acknowledged that a “need exists citywide” for more green alleys but said allocating an equal number to each ward is how the department can ensure they’re built “all over.”

Read More in This Series:

For Many Illinoisans in Flood-Prone Areas, Buyouts are the Only Way Out

Flooding is Illinois’ Most Threatening Natural Disaster. Are We Prepared?

Malec-McKenna, the last commissioner of the Chicago Department of the Environment, disagrees.

“There’s nothing strategic about it,” Malec-McKenna said. “In areas where there’s particular flooding — that’s where a lot of our green infrastructure should be absolutely prioritized.”

During the original implementation of the green alley program 20 years ago, the Department of the Environment was responsible for coordinating across city agencies to decide where green alleys and other anti-flooding infrastructure should be built, Malec-McKenna said.

The Chicago Department of Water Management analyzes 311 complaints to decide how to prioritize sewer main replacements, according to a senior department official. But the water department does not coordinate on the placement of green alleys, which is exclusively overseen by the transportation department.

“The DOE was never a massive organization,” Malec-McKenna said. “But what we were able to do was to help bring together the research, look at the best infrastructure, work collaboratively with the departments, help get pilots going, look at the economic impact … and try to integrate it into the infrastructure of the departments.”

Ald. Maria Hadden (49th), who chairs the City Council Committee on Environmental Protection and Energy, described Chicago’s green alley siting process as “a little bit of a shot-in-the-dark implementation strategy.”

“If the goal of the green alley program is to give better alley infrastructure options to each ward, then it’s probably a fine implementation strategy,” Hadden said. “However, if green alleys are supposed to be more of a tool to help with flood mitigation and other water management issues, then I think we’d probably do better in having a different approach in how the locations for those alleys are selected.”

Angela Tovar, Chicago’s chief sustainability officer and commissioner of the newly reconstituted Chicago Department of the Environment, wrote in an emailed statement that the Department of the Environment will “collaborate [with] and advise” other city agencies on flood-related policies as it continues to staff up, and that her team is working with the mayor’s office on “outlining a strategic direction for water policy issues in the city.”

Around the corner from Hillman and his mother’s home on Race Street, many of their neighbors were not as fortunate during last year’s storms.

Steve Richard, who lives on the 5300 block of West Ferdinand Street, had to pay to repair his water heater and replace a refrigerator and washer-dryer system after nearly a foot of sewage water gushed into his basement in July.

The green alley that was built up the street from him caught his attention, he said, noting that his driveway often turns into a pond during periods of heavy rain.

“I would love for my alley here to be replaced like that,” he said.

Contributing: Cam Rodriguez

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Editor’s note: This story was republished from Cicero Independiente and MuckRock.

In mid-January, at a non-descript YMCA in Berwyn, a secret meeting was held by the publicly-traded chemicals company Koppers and a group of seven elected officials and employees of the nearby Village of Stickney, the location of the company’s plant.

A catered lunch was provided. Stickney’s longtime mayor was in attendance. The stated purpose of this invite-only meeting: to educate local leaders about how Koppers is a good community partner, and has been for more than a century, and how it aims to be “good stewards” of the environment.

But no member of the public — none of the nearly 150,000 residents of Stickney, Cicero and Berwyn — nor any representative of a news organization, major community organization or state legislator’s office whose district includes the Koppers plant were invited or made aware of the meeting.

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In fact, the only reason that news organizations, along with legislators, community groups and the public, found out about the meetings of the Koppers Community Advisory Panel are through repeated Illinois Freedom of Information Act requests.

This winter, a series of news articles published by the Cicero Independiente and MuckRock explored air pollution near one of Koppers’ most profitable plants — a 36-acre coal tar facility built in 1922 outside Chicago, situated between two densely-populated communities, Cicero and Stickney. It laid bare several unflattering environmental and public-health issues, with Koppers at the center of it.

Due partially to air pollution from more than a dozen industrial facilities, Cicero has some of the worst air quality in Cook County, which already is one of the most polluted urban areas in the United States. Some of the area’s census tracts have among the highest excess cancer rates from exposure to industrial air pollution in the country.

The January meeting, along with one held in mid-November and another planned for April 11, represent Koppers’ behind-the-scenes effort to shape the opinions of regional decision-makers, mostly behind closed doors.

For most of the January meeting, Koppers and some of the community panelists in attendance blasted the MuckRock and Independiente article, meeting minutes show, most of whom were unnamed. 

One attendee called the article an “injustice to Koppers.”

One said the article was “biased.” 

And one said it was an “unfair shake,” representing “one person’s view.”‘

The Koppers community panel doubles as a legitimate, quasi-governmental body. In reality, it’s a corporate lobbying effort, walled off from the larger community, stacked with friendly faces and separated from the disclosure and access requirements of official public government bodies.

After MuckRock and the Independiente sent a list of questions to the village of Stickney, Koppers and the company’s public-relations consultant, the village’s outside attorney, Jessica R. Fese of Del Gado Law Group, said that, “in the best interests of the Village,” public employees would no longer attend company-sponsored meetings.

“Village officials understood the luncheons to be informational in nature, and after review of the matter, the Village will not be participating in any future sessions of this type hosted by Koppers,” Fese said in the statement.

In a separate statement, the village’s clerk, Audrey McAdams, defended the practice of officials attending the Koppers meetings. “When a person is an elected official, they are ambassadors to the community,” she wrote. 

She also said that “all the people representing Koppers at the meetings are cordial and sincere.  I personally was seated next to Kevin Washington [Koppers vice president of external relations] at the November meeting. I appreciated his passion to disseminate Kopper’s importance to the world in general. Did you know that one of their recycling products actually makes the IV bags you will use at some time in your life?”

While it’s true that Koppers recycles some of its chemicals for medical uses, such as coal tar concentrations for the treatment of skin rashes and psoriasis, the company’s biggest and most profitable products, by far, are treated lumber for homes, utility poles and wooden railroad “crossties” along with the chemical used to treat and preserve the wood — creosote, which is processed from coal tar at the Stickney plant. In the company’s most recent annual report, Koppers claims to be the “largest global supplier of creosote to the North American railroad industry.”

In response to this story, Koppers didn’t address specific questions and concerns raised by community groups and elected officials but, in response, said in a statement that its Stickney plant has “engaged in community outreach over many years, interacting with a range of community members and organizations. While the global pandemic interrupted our efforts, we purposely restarted renewing neighbor relationships in early 2023, as facility leadership and other company representatives welcome these opportunities.”

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‘Are alarm bells going off?’

Koppers has a spotty environmental record with the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency, dating back 50 years, and new alleged violations of environmental laws that have made their way to the state attorney general’s office

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To manage the fallout and answer community concerns about the story’s findings, Koppers hired a public-relations firm, Mary Ann Green Communications of West Virginia. That PR firm’s stated goal, gleaned from emails obtained through an Illinois Freedom of Information Act request, was simple: Leverage Koppers’ decades of good will among a group of local leaders and create a new, hand-selected community board.

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The bylaws of the Koppers Community Advisory Panel state that, among its objectives, is to “provide feedback and input from the community and plant operations and concerns” and to “provide information to the community from the plant,” along with addressing “related community/industry issues.” 

It pledges that the makeup of the panel will “represent a cross section of the community” and says that “all meetings are open to the public.” But that includes a substantial caveat: Guests have to be identified to Green no later than 36 hours before the start of a meeting and any meeting can go into “executive session” at any time, which expressly excludes visitors. “Either all or part of a CAP meeting may be held in executive session,” the bylaws read.

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This runs counter to how executive sessions are employed in Illinois public meetings.

While the Koppers Community Advisory Panel’s comments about the news investigation failed to question any of the underlying reporting, data or analysis, the lightly-transcribed minutes show the group made several false, inaccurate and misleading statements with clear policy and public health implications. 

In the process of reporting and fact-checking that story, MuckRock and the Independiente requested comment from Koppers in late November, providing its vice president of external relations, Kevin Washington, with 12 bulleted findings and six numbered questions in advance of publication. In response, the company provided a 254-word generally-worded statement about its operations that largely avoided direct comment on any of the six questions.

In the report, MuckRock and Independiente directly quoted 84 words of their statement, and provided the entire statement as an embedded element via DocumentCloud. Despite this, Washington inaccurately and misleadingly characterized the report as having used “very little of what Koppers shared as its statement, he explained.”

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Many of the comments bulleted in the meeting minutes are unnamed. One is not: Village Trustee Lea Torres is quoted as saying that “there has been such an improvement at the plant. She noted safety and controls are much better. She said that fact (sic} that the article went back so far in history was wrong. Lea explained that she follows Koppers and feels confident in its safety in how the plant is run now.” In reality, the investigation focused primarily on Illinois EPA violations since 2020, including the 2022 to 2023 period. 

When MuckRock and Independiente reached out to Torres for further clarification and comment for a forthcoming article, she declined further comment.

Conversely, other comments expressed genuine concern about the environmental and public health findings from some of the panelists:

“Does this really go on?” 

“Are alarm bells going off?” 

“We have interest in this stuff and the health impact from pollutants.” 

“How did Koppers address the violation?”

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The responses underscore the lack of visible and clear public access to the Koppers meetings and is a clear departure from the spirit of the Illinois Freedom of Information Act and the Open Meetings Act, whose purpose is to promote “free and open communication between government and citizens,” experts say.

But legal experts also largely agree that a loophole in state law regarding company-created meetings exists: the state General Assembly and Illinois courts have made it difficult to apply the Open Meetings Act to private entities with significant representation by public officials, even when they are discussing matters of public concern, said Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney and partner at Loevy & Loevy. 

“Typically, unless a private entity is controlled on a day-to-day basis by the government, [the Open Meetings Act] generally does not apply,” he said.

‘Who are they hiding it from?’

Several community organizations and elected officials in the region have said they would have attended the meeting if alerted to its very existence. These officials and organizations include the offices of the districts where Koppers is located, state Rep. Abdelnasser Rashid and state Sen. Javier Cervantes, Deputy Majority Leader Elizabeth “Lisa” Hernandez; and Corazón Community Services, a community nonprofit formed in 2003 to serve “the Latinx community and others in the Cicero/Berwyn area by means of effective, life-improving programs.” 

That’s especially problematic for Cicero, community members say, as the town of about 85,000 is 88% Hispanic.

“Any community meeting impacting thousands of residents that are poorly outreached is a failure of the entities,” said Esteban Rodriguez, Corazón’s executive director. “My reaction is like many: Upset, anger, frustrated that these types of meetings are held under the radar. Makes me think what are they hiding? Who are they hiding it from?”

Instead, the unusual nature of a company-sponsored community panel — with a hand-selected group of friendly, and indebted, v

illage officials and, separately, organizations primarily working outside of the Cicero and Stickney communities — reflect a profound disconnect between the very idea of a “community panel” and the communities which it endeavors to serve, community members say.

The few panelists that attended the meetings were recruited through word-of-mouth referrals and the only regular, non-village or Koppers members are a retired Berwyn principal and two staffers from the Academy for Global Citizenship and Cultivate Collective, which are linked financially together, and describes itself on its website as a “Chicago Public School incubator of educational innovation, and teacher training institute.” 

It’s unclear what, if any, connection a public charter school on the Southwest Side of Chicago has to the Cook County communities of Cicero, Stickney and Berwyn, which are outside Chicago city limits.

Other potential Koppers Community Advisory Panel members were invited to the meetings but ultimately chose not to participate, largely because they didn’t know what the meetings were about or didn’t trust the non-governmental organizer. They include Cook County’s Emergency Management Regional Security agency; the University of Illinois’ Extension program in Cook County, and Morton College, which is located near the Koppers plant. 

John Daniel, regional coordinator for Cook County’s Emergency Management Regional Security agency, said by email that when he “saw [the meeting invitation] was from a private entity,” he chose not to participate. “My job is working with police, fire chiefs, public works and sometimes elected officials. So, as such, I chose not to attend.”

Gina Torres, a career services coordinator at Morton College, which is located next to the plant, said she was invited to the meetings and met virtually with the Koppers public relations consultant, Mary Green. The consultant told Torres that Koppers “was looking to connect with the community and its local organizations.” But when asked by the consultant about whether she knew what Koppers was, Torres said no, and ended up not attending the meetings.

Stickney Township’s public health department was invited but its director said the community panel was the first time he had heard from the Koppers plant. “I have no relationship with Koppers. This is the first time they have contacted us,” said Christopher Grunow, Stickney’s top public health official. He confirmed he attended one meeting.

State legislators say they are working to learn more about Koppers. Cervantes, the state senator whose district includes the Koppers plant, has sent the company a letter following the Independiente and MuckRock investigation, requesting details on operational safeguards.

“Local residents must have the peace of mind that they are safe from dangerous chemicals,” he wrote.

Rashid said his office is reviewing the Illinois EPA findings and he is committed to “ensure that public health is protected and bad corporate actors are held accountable,” he said in a statement. “I will continue to prioritize the health and safety of our community.” 

Hernandez, the Illinois House deputy majority leader, said “these panel discussions do not change the fact that I continue to be open to genuine concerns about pressing public health frustrations.”

She added: “While our legislative process continues to take shape, companies that disregard the basic health and wellbeing of vulnerable communities absolutely need to be addressed.”

Village of Stickney officials have repeatedly made their close connections to Koppers clear, in emails obtained through Illinois FOIA requests. 

MuckRock filed its first FOIA request regarding Koppers with the Stickney village clerk’s office in late November, requesting a range of most publicly-available records, including meeting minutes, violation notices and any results of a previous FOIA request filed by a different requestor.

This request appears to have triggered a flag by the Village of Stickney to Koppers. In its January meeting, Washington of Koppers “explained the company’s awareness of the story started with the FOIA to the Village Clerk. He said he appreciated her letting him know about the request.” 

It’s unclear why McAdams alerted Koppers, other than to share information with a company that McAdams describes, in that very same meeting, as “integrated and part of Stickney.”

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In a November response to Koppers’ business luncheon invitation, Village Clerk Audrey McAdams wrote to Stickney Mayor Jeff Walik: “If I am able, I plan on going (to the meeting). Koppers does a lot to support Stickney. I don’t want to snub them. If you are not going, do you have anything I should or shouldn’t share?”

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Later, at a January village council meeting, McAdams remarked how “Stickney has had an exceptionally long relationship with Koppers, and it is a good rapport for us to have this level of input.”

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Edited by Luis Velazquez, April Alonso and Derek Kravitz

Editor’s note: Attorney Matt Topic, quote in the story above, represents the Better Government Association, which publishes the Illinois Answers Project.

From the seat of his wheelchair, Rick Guardino has crowd surfed at Lollapalooza, cheered on his Cubs at Wrigley Field and closed down attacking lanes for his wheelchair rugby team, the Bears.

“I’m so independent, I live on my own, I do everything on my own,” Guardino said. “My mom raised an independent man that has cerebral palsy. I think the reason I am in this chair is because I’m strong enough to handle it. Nothing gets me down.”

But what makes the 45-year-old Lakeview resident worry for his safety are the curbs and sidewalks that go unshoveled after a winter storm. He has toppled over backwards trying to scale ice-packed curbs with his wheelchair and been forced into the street with car traffic to bypass snowed-covered sidewalks.

“It’s kind of scary,” Guardino said. “But I’m used to it. I’ve been doing it pretty much my whole life. I’ve been hit a couple times. There was one time where someone hit me on Grand (Avenue) and didn’t even bother to look if I was OK.”

For Guardino and many others, help may be on the way if the Chicago City Council approves a pilot program to plow some city sidewalks. Last summer, the City Council commissioned a group to study options for a pilot program. It is scheduled to report back in the spring with a plan for potential approval. If all goes smoothly, snow plowing could begin as soon as next winter.

For now, the responsibility for clearing sidewalk snow falls on property owners. But critics say that it often fails to work because it relies on people who may be unwilling or unable to do the job.

Details of the pilot program, including the cost, are unknown, but the pilot aims to focus on clearing sidewalks in areas with public transit, high populations of people who are elderly or disabled, and areas that have typically been starved of resources. Hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans — young parents with strollers, the elderly, disabled people — can be stuck at home if their sidewalks are not shoveled, according to city officials.

If enacted, Chicago would join other cities that provide sidewalk snow clearance where residents enjoy the service, but it doesn’t come cheap. On the East Coast, Syracuse, New York, plows some of its sidewalks, while Toronto clears all of its sidewalks for a small fraction of what Chicago spends, for instance, on police overtime each year.

“Frankly, this is incredibly bread-and-butter government service in so many ways,” said Michael Podgers, a policy lead at Better Streets Chicago, a transit advocacy group supporting the plan.

“For a lot of people, it’s going to be a wonderful benefit that they won’t have to get up in the morning and shovel their sidewalks again.”

‘My mom fell, broke her arm and needed stitches’

In the past five years, Chicagoans have made more than 22,000 complaints to 311 for unshoveled sidewalks, city records show.

These complaints describe negligent landlords failing to clean up their walkways, snow and ice accumulations on sidewalks next to empty lots as well as slip-and-fall hazards for the elderly.

“I’m a disabled veteran with hip problems,” a Lakeview resident reported in November 2019. “I walk a large service dog and I have already slipped on this street three times since the last snowfall.”

“This owner did not clear their sidewalk or ice and snow,” a Little Village resident wrote in January 2022. “My mom fell, broke her arm and needed stitches. They need to be fined.”

“PERSON IN WHEELCHAIR CAN NOT SHOVEL AND SNOW IS SO BAD THAT HE IS BLOCKED IN AND CAN NOT LEAVE HIS HOUSE,” an Englewood resident wrote in February 2021.

Residents are supposed to call 311 to get the city to address the unshoveled sidewalks but that often fails to work.

City employees are almost just as likely to leave a flier at the offending property reminding the landowner  — if one is around— to shovel the sidewalk as they were to report that the offender was in “compliance” and the snow was removed, which can occur several days after the complaint is made.

While not singling out sidewalk shoveling, City Inspector General Deborah Witzburg took aim at the “complaint-based” approach to providing services in an advisory opinion issued earlier this year. She called the city’s ask-and-you-may-receive approach a “reactive strategy that can increase long-term costs, prevent the optimal provision of public services and neglect people and communities less likely to register complaints.”

“By relying on complaints to allocate resources, the city delivers less comprehensive services to fewer Chicagoans,” Witzburg wrote.

To punish offenders, Chicago issued more than 3,200 tickets for unshoveled sidewalks in the past decade, totaling about $1 million. City data shows that only a small portion of these tickets were issued between the time a 311 complaint for unshoveled snow was opened and closed, suggesting the tickets were issued for reasons other than the 311 complaints.

According to city records, the biggest offender is a resident of south suburban New Lenox, who bought a lot in the Englewood neighborhood for $12,500 from the city six years ago. The lot was developed into a tire store, now defunct, and the city has fined the landowner nearly $20,000 for failing to keep the sidewalk clear of snow. He could not be reached for comment.

Altogether, these fines are a pittance in the City of Chicago’s $16.7 billion annual budget, and the tickets do not ensure that the snow is removed.

Laura Saltzman, a senior policy analyst with disability rights group Access Living, put the problem bluntly.

“Fines don’t shovel sidewalks,” Saltzman said.

As Chicago ponders plan, Canadians enjoy clear sidewalks

As Chicago considers its own response to city-funded sidewalk snow clearance, they may look to Toronto for inspiration.

Last year, the home of Drake and the Maple Leafs spent the equivalent of $26.5 million — or about 11% of what Chicago police spent on overtime in 2023 — to plow about 4,900 miles of sidewalk.

“We’ve been clearing the snow off of sidewalks for years,” said Vincent Sferrazza, director of operations and maintenance, transportation services for the City of Toronto. “Once you start it, you’re never going to lose it.”

Sferrazza said the program started in 1998 after the Canadian government incorporated many of the city’s suburbs into the Toronto city limits, boosting the city’s population from 600,000 to 2.4 million. Right now, about 3 million people live in Toronto, making it the fourth largest city in North America — just above Chicago.

Toronto deploys sidewalk plows after about 2 centimeters of snow falls, Sferrazza said. There are two crews that do the work: a crew of contractors who sweep through the formerly suburban portions of the city with sidewalk-sized plows and a crew of City of Toronto employees who use smaller equipment to fit the tinier walkways of old Toronto. It takes about 12 hours to finish one round of clearance with about 80% of the work being completed by the contractors.

Sferrazza warned that the process isn’t perfect. Sidewalks rarely get as clear as a salted street, as passing cars activate the salt in cold temperatures, and occasionally, crews damage personal property.

“You’re going to hit somebody’s fence,” he said. “I don’t care how good of a driver you are. I don’t care how experienced you are. Remember, you are doing these operations at 3 a.m., you can’t see a thing, it’s your first round and all you see is white.”

Chicago is not an exact equivalent to Toronto. Chicago has more poverty than Toronto, and Toronto gets more snow than Chicago. But transit advocates say that the cities have comparable density, population and sidewalk mileage.

Stateside, Chicago could take some pointers from Syracuse, New York. The upstate college town has provided plowing for a portion of its sidewalks intermittently since 2019.

Corey Driscoll Dunham, the chief operations officer for the Syracuse mayor’s office, said they plow 156 miles of sidewalk, with a budgeted cost of $322,000. The city uses a contractor — the only one to submit a bid for the work — after about 3 inches of snow accumulates, and the process of clearing the sidewalks takes six to eight hours.

Syracuse has assessed snow-clearance fees on homes and businesses to pay for the program, which does not include salting. Annual fees will top out at $100 for residential properties and $300 for businesses, and they fund the city’s sidewalk budget, which also pays for sidewalk repair.

Cherlnell Lane, who lives in the Washington Park neighborhood, says that whatever Chicago has to pay to keep the sidewalks clear will be worth it.

Lane lives in housing for people with disabilities and has used an electric wheelchair for 12 years due to complications from an auto-immune disorder and arthritis.

After a heavy snowfall, Lane says she has had to choose between staying at home or driving her electric wheelchair into traffic on Michigan Avenue to travel six blocks to her local library branch. Snow accumulates next door on the sidewalk in front of a city-owned lot that makes it impassable.

“I believe that politicians in office should be looking after their constituents,” said Lane, 41. “They should be looking after all of us, not just some of us. Just like we find the money for everything else, like flowers downtown, we should be able to get things together to make this program happen.”

There’s not an important receipt that Nina Collier didn’t keep – especially when it came to her rent. The 50-year-old proudly maintained a system she called foolproof: She kept every invoice and record of payment tucked in a Bible at her apartment in Englewood, she said. If there was ever a question about whether she’d paid on time, Collier says she was ready to prove she did.

“That’s something I don’t play about: My rent and my car note,” she told the Illinois Answers Project in an interview. “I was never behind.”

Not even through the COVID-19 pandemic when Collier lost her full-time job and worked sparingly as a maid. She was approved for government rental assistance that covered more than two years worth of her $900 monthly rent, records show. And she said she maintained the same system – keeping every email, every invoice and every receipt.

So she was stunned when she faced eviction for allegedly being thousands of dollars behind. She found herself tearfully begging her landlord for relief in a court hearing over Zoom — hoping she’d be given a few extra days before getting kicked out. She was not.

“It turned my whole life upside down,” said Collier, who wound up living on the street.

Starting in the summer of 2022, about eight months after the state’s moratorium on evictions ended, Collier and six other tenants at 1150-1158 W 64th St. were all served eviction notices by Legacy Red, the company acting as manager of the building. Four were eventually evicted. 

In interviews with Illinois Answers at the 10-unit apartment building in Englewood, the neighbors all said they were surprised that they were dragged into court over allegations of unpaid rent because they’d collectively been approved for their rent payments, totalling tens of thousands of dollars, in assistance from the state, paid directly to their landlord. Under the program’s rules, tenants receiving those grants weren’t supposed to face eviction. What’s more, tenants complained they were subject to harassment or intimidation to get them to leave. 

Advocates for renters warn that what happened to these tenants has been part of a disturbing pattern of how, they say, many tenants were treated during the pandemic: Even after going through the complicated  process of applying for rental assistance – at times having to do interviews and take classes to qualify – tenants were left without a home, often at the whim of landlords, who put them out on the street. 

While federal and state programs received praise from some advocates for quickly delivering rental assistance, that speed came at the cost of little oversight and enforcement, critics say. 

Nicole Capretta, an attorney with Legal Aid Chicago, said she’s had several clients – two in the last month – facing issues similar to Collier and the tenants on 64th Street. According to Capretta, in these cases landlords often credit administrative error or mix-ups with housing subsidies to explain away disparities between rental assistance received and what’s claimed in eviction court. 

“That was really hot last summer,” Capretta said. “If I could wave my magic wand and propose a solution that would make things better all around, it would be that plaintiffs in a non-payment case should be required to file a rent ledger showing how and why money is owed.”  

Bob Glaves, executive director of the Chicago Bar Foundation, which handles Cook County’s Early Resolution Program that mediates eviction disputes between landlords and tenants, told Illinois Answers that “the rules of these programs make it clear that the money is to be used solely to cover the rent of tenants in need. But with thousands of tenants in need, agencies like [the Illinois Housing Development Authority] and the [city’s] housing department don’t have the capacity to follow up on whether landlords are playing fair.”

Conditions at the Englewood building have only gotten worse, according to city attorneys at court hearings, with the building going through the winter with little to no heat for tenants, and the city citing it so often that it has raised the threat of putting it into receivership.  

The landlord, Hosanna Mahaley, took over the building in the summer of 2020, signing a deal in the middle of a global pandemic to assume ownership of the property, according to a lawsuit she filed against the previous owner. 

The deed transfer could not be legally recorded because of a lien against the property for an unpaid water bill, according to court records. Who owns the building is still being litigated in court.

Since assuming control of the property, Mahaley has represented herself as the owner of the building and received over $50,000 in grants from the state to cover rent at the apartment building from January 2021 to March 2022, records show. Even after those grants were received, Mahaley contended in court at times that she hadn’t been paid, records show. 

Illinois Answers spoke with Mahaley’s current and previous tenants who say she encouraged them to apply for multiple sources of rental assistance as soon as a month after she said she took ownership of the building. Residents received multiple grants of up to $10,000 from IHDA during the time period Mahaley claimed they didn’t pay rent.

In interviews, Collier and her former neighbors said they wonder what their rental assistance was used for, saying such problems as rodent infestation, shoddy plumbing, leaky roofs and broken windows and doors were never fixed.

In a statement, Andrew Field, a spokesperson for IHDA, acknowledged that while the rules prohibit landlords from evicting tenants after receiving rental assistance, the state “does not track” whether that actually happens.

In a brief phone call with Illinois Answers, Mahaley said that she believed she had the right to evict her tenants even after receiving the assistance. “They don’t have the full story,” she said of her tenants. Mahaley said she needed to gather more records to answer questions from Illinois Answers but then never returned three phone messages. Neither Mahaley nor her attorney responded to a detailed list of questions from Illinois Answers. Mahaley has ties to Chicago, where she once worked as the chief of staff to Arne Duncan when he was the CEO of Chicago Public Schools.

‘Very aggressive’

When Dominique Henderson, 32, moved into the building five years ago, to take care of his ailing father who lived there, his rent was less than $1,000 a month. With his job at a nearby elementary school, Henderson said he could cover the rent and his father’s medical expenses. 

But as work slowed during the pandemic, and Mahaley raised rents, those payments became more difficult. Henderson told Illinois Answers that it was Mahaley’s idea to apply for rental assistance. 

IHDA records show that Henderson was approved for two rounds of assistance from the department, one in August 2021, the other in April 2022. In total, IHDA covered 10 months of rent totaling $8,075 paid directly to Mahaley.

But in December of 2021, Legacy Red sent Henderson a five-day notice demanding full payment of back rent totaling more than $4,000. If Henderson didn’t pay the full amount at the end of the five days, his lease would be terminated, the letter threatened.

Henderson says what followed was weeks of strangers knocking on his door at all hours, demanding Henderson pay up or be kicked out.

“It was very aggressive,” Henderson said. 

The tactics described by Henderson — something several other Legacy Red tenants said they experienced — are symptoms of a wider phenomenon of illegal or improper eviction attempts throughout the city – which were particularly prominent through the pandemic when state and federal moratoriums paused legal evictions.

Emily Metz, program director at the University of Chicago’s Inclusive Economy Lab, says despite these bans, residents like Henderson were still facing efforts to force a tenant out of a rental property through intimidation, harassment or other methods, at “somewhat surprisingly high rates.” 

The lab surveyed a quarter of nearly 75,000 Chicago residents who received rental assistance through the city housing department’s rental assistance program between 2020 and late 2021. 

In all, 7.9% of interviewees reported a forced move, lockout or paid move between March 2020 and November 2021, which overlapped with eviction moratorium. And while between 60% and 70% of housing applicants reported paying full rent during the month most recent to their response, the majority of respondents said they were still worried about eviction.

While Metz said that programs like the $185 million program run by the state were undoubtedly “helpful” throughout the pandemic, there’s more to be done. “It’s one-time cash assistance,” she said. “But it’s not solving chronic housing affordability issues.”

Another resident of the 64th Street apartments, Deesty Neal, 40, said initially that she wasn’t worried about being evicted. “I paid everything on time,” she told Illinois Answers. 

But she said that, after receiving a number of texts and emails suggesting the application was mandatory, she “felt forced” by Mahaley to apply for rental assistance and falsely state that she was behind on rent.

IHDA records show that Mahaley and Neal were approved for two rounds of the department’s Emergency Rental Assistance program in 2020 and 2021. Department records do not specify the dollar amount, but, according to an IHDA spokesperson, the fund typically paid out a flat grant of $5,000. 

According to court records, when Mahaley filed for eviction on June 3, 2022, she claimed Neal had gone an entire year without paying her $800 monthly rent. Neal told the judge that it was impossible for her to owe the $12,000 Mahaley was seeking because of the rental assistance.

“I was scared, I can’t lie,” Neal said. 

Like Henderson, the single mom recalled men showing up at her home, banging on the door, demanding rent. She said she received text messages that threatened to evict Neal and her children if she didn’t abide by what they’d asked. 

Rules of the state’s programs required landlords to return any money that exceeded the amount owed for rent back to the agency. Serving an eviction notice after receiving funds from the agency is considered a violation of the agreement made between landlords, tenants and the program. 

But housing advocates say that the immediate need of tens of thousands of Illinois residents didn’t allow programs to build the infrastructure for oversight. 

‘We’re living on broken promises’

Michelle Cooper moved into the building over a decade ago, and has had four landlords since.  When she first signed her lease, her rent was $650, and despite being promised a newly renovated unit, she moved in on the understanding that the landlord would continue to fix a number of problems. At the top of the list were a cardboard door in her bedroom, a closet door brought up from the basement to temporarily enclose the bathroom, and missing window screens. 

Still, Cooper and her family were excited about the move-in. She and her husband had owned a home in Englewood but lost it during the 2008 housing crisis. 

When Mahaley’s company Legacy Red began managing the building, Cooper’s rent was $670, she said. She told Illinois Answers that Mahaley told her that her rent would increase to $900. But Mahaley promised to fix the apartment, said Cooper, who was having nightmares about the continued worsening conditions her family was living in. 

In three years, nothing improved, Cooper said.

In the winter, broken radiators required the family to wear sweatsuits and blankets at all times. And when it rains, a hole in the roof from a storm years prior continues to leak. 

“We’re living on broken promises,” Cooper said.  

Jacqueline Hodges, who’s lived in the building since 2009, said that workers have come through the apartment building changing locks, shutting off the gas and leaving notices threatening eviction if she and her neighbors didn’t pay Mahaley sums of money they say they do not owe. 

Since November, residents have repeatedly called and filed reports with the police and fire departments and the city’s Buildings Department to report heat shut-offs. Even last month, as temperatures dipped as low as 12 degrees below zero, residents say they use space heaters or double up on blankets to stay warm. 

Hodges said this winter has been the worst she’s seen in her 22 years at the property. She uses pots of boiling water and a small space heater in her bedroom to keep the most important parts of her apartment warm. And sheets of plastic tarp cover windows and doorways to keep out cold air.  

“It’s been bad ever since they [Legacy Red] came on board,” Hodges told Illinois Answers as she prepared for another cold night without heat at the building, with temperatures dropping as low as 8 degrees. 

As recently as Jan. 9, city inspectors cited the building for not providing adequate heat for the fifth time since October. Despite the inspections, heat had not been restored to the building.

Illinois Answers asked the Buildings Department why the city has not intervened to get heat returned to tenants’ units. The department declined to comment, citing the city’s litigation involving building, as did the city’s Law Department. 

In a Jan. 23 court hearing, assistant corporation counsel Steven McKenzie chastised Mahaley and her attorney for the number of complaints the city received during January’s freeze, describing it as a “hot-button issue.” 

The city agreed to give Mahaley a sixth opportunity to prove to city inspectors that the heating issues at the building are being repaired, but warned that receivership would be the next step if the problem isn’t fixed.

Mahaley assured the courtroom that the problem would be resolved. “We welcome the inspection,” she told McKenzie. 

On the day of inspection, radiators were still cold in the units of tenants at home during the time city officials walked through the building.

Hodges says that she’s trying to find alternative housing nearby. But until she finds a viable option or the heating issues are fixed, she says she’ll keep bundling up near the space heater in her bedroom. “I’m just hanging in there. For now, that’s all I can do.”

Legal recourse for tenants

Four of the tenants who were served eviction notices by Mahaley, ultimately left the property. 

But in Neal’s case, Cook County’s Early Resolution Program allowed her to stay in her apartment while she struck a deal with the landlord. 

The program, launched in 2020 with the help of federal COVID relief grant money, connected Neal to a legal aid attorney who then negotiated an agreement with Mahaley’s attorney. Because Neal raised the question of her vanishing rental assistance, Mahaley agreed that if Neal paid a fraction of the $12,000 she initially claimed she was entitled to, the eviction would not happen. 

Glaves, of the Chicago Bar Foundation, said that a critical determinant in the future expansion of the program will be finding a new source of funding, as it was initially launched through a $1 million allocation from federal CARES Act money that will run out “in a few years for sure.”

“It’s a matter of investing in this as part of the homelessness prevention and as part of improving access to justice, generally. Things that are state, city, and county,” Glaves told Illinois Answers.

In June, IHDA became the administrator of the city Housing Department’s court-based rental assistance program. Unlike the assistance that Mahaley’s tenants applied for through 2022, this program requires that an eviction actually be filed before a tenant can qualify for the assistance. 

Michelle Gilbert, of the Law Center for Better Housing, one of the city’s partners in providing free counsel to tenants facing eviction, says that programs like the county’s Early Resolution Program and the Right to Counsel Pilot Program, recently renewed by Mayor Brandon Johnson, are so critical because IHDA does not have any formal way of making sure that evictions are thrown out once a landlord receives rental assistance. 

Gilbert, who represented a client last spring in eviction court after their landlord did not honor their rental assistance agreement, said that there are no safeguards for tenants before they get to eviction court. “If there isn’t an attorney present to make sure that it happens, there isn’t another mechanism to make sure that the case gets dismissed,” she said.  

Another onetime tenant, Collier, is now living in her car and scrambling to piece together the life she’d so proudly built and relied on. But she’s still maintaining her system — pulling together emails and text messages from her former landlord in hopes that she can rebuild her life. 

For now, she’s in and out of city-funded shelters and working cleaning jobs to pay for food and gas. 

“I have a friend that panhandles on 75th,” she told Illinois Answers. “I’m scared to do it because I’m terrified that someone will see me.”

Reporting on equity issues by the BGA is supported by Joel M. Friedman, president of the Alvin H. Baum Family Fund.

This story was originally published as part of “The Air We Breathe” project by two nonprofit newsrooms, the Cicero Independiente and MuckRock.

For years, the Koppers coal tar plant in Cicero has been the town’s biggest source of industrial air pollution. In the neighborhoods near the 36-acre facility, some residents say they have always noticed white smoke billowing from its smokestacks, rotten smells and poor air quality.

They say it’s worse in the summer, causing headaches and nausea, and is often so bad that they have to stay indoors and close their windows — even if many residents don’t know what Koppers is or what they make. 

Now, an investigation by two nonprofit newsrooms, the Cicero Independiente and MuckRock, shows how the 101-year-old Koppers plant is not only one of the single largest polluters of toxic and cancer-linked chemicals in the U.S. It has also routinely been found in violation of both state and federal environmental laws dating back 50 years — from the late 1970s until this past summer. 

Among the findings, which rely on Illinois and federal Environmental Protection Agency pollution data, interviews with Cicero residents, environmental and medical experts and a review of local, state and federal regulatory records obtained through open-records requests and the Freedom of Information Act:

• This October, the Illinois EPA sent Koppers a set of 25 alleged violations of state and federal environmental laws and is awaiting a response from the company. The notice, obtained through an open-records request to the Illinois EPA, shows the plant released excess “volatile organic material” — gases that can cause short-term and chronic health problems — unchecked into the atmosphere over an entire year, between the summer of 2022 and the summer of 2023. 
• Koppers pollutes more of two types of these volatile organic materials — benzene and naphthalene — than any other polluter in Cook County, according to a MuckRock and Independiente analysis of emissions inventory data obtained through an open-records request to Illinois EPA.
• Nationally, Koppers ranks in the top 15% of facilities that emit benzene and top 3% of those that release naphthalene, out of more than 1,000 facilities that report these emissions in the federal EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory. EPA risk modeling based on emissions data places several census tracts in Cicero at a higher risk of cancer from naphthalene than in almost anywhere else in the country.
• Any exposure to cancer-causing chemicals raises the risk of contracting cancer and the amount of pollution spewing from Koppers could have already been enough to put some members of the community at risk, especially children and other vulnerable groups, experts say. An elementary school, an early childhood center, a community park and hundreds of homes are situated within a half of a mile of the plant. 
• The new violations suggest that the plant was polluting over what it was allowed to and are just the latest of three other violation notices from the Illinois EPA in recent years. The plant also received one in 2020 and two in 2021.

Both the number and scope of the most recent alleged Koppers violations are rare, said Dr. Peter Orris, chief of occupational and environmental medicine at the University of Illinois Hospital. “This is a plant that would cause me considerable concern and you want to see what they do to clean it up,” Orris said in an interview.

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The Illinois EPA said in a statement that it will review a formal response from Koppers before taking any possible action, which could include fines and a civil suit. The agency said it doesn’t comment on pending compliance or enforcement actions. The Illinois Attorney General’s Office, which handles both civil and criminal litigation of environmental crimes, said that before the October violations, it had already received two referrals regarding Koppers from the state EPA but declined to comment further.

Koppers sits on the south side of Pershing Road, on the border between the 85,000-resident town of Cicero and the 7,500-person village of Stickney. Stickney’s mayor, Jeff Walk, said in a statement that it would defer to county, state and federal agencies for enforcement of environmental regulations. But he said the village would encourage those agencies to “be vigilant in their protection of the environment, the residents of Stickney and the region.”

The superintendent of Cicero School District 99, Aldo Calderin, said in a statement that district leaders are aware of the alleged pollution violations by Koppers, calling the plant part of a “necessary” industry. “We are confident that the Illinois EPA will continue to effectively perform its job responsibilities to ensure that our community remains safe,” he said.

Elected officials in the town of Cicero, some of whom took an active role in regulatory hearings about the Koppers plant in the 1980s, declined to comment. In an internal email obtained by the Independiente and MuckRock, Cicero town spokesperson Ray Hanania wrote, “i’m not going to respond to them .., if s [sic] major media does pick up the story i will point out we have no legal authority over koppers which is in stickney.”

In response to the Illinois EPA violations and this investigation, Koppers released a statement, saying it is “committed to making — and keeping — our surrounding communities safe places to live and work.”

The company, a subsidiary of a larger publicly-traded parent company, Koppers Holdings Inc., based in Pittsburgh and originally headquartered in Chicago, called its environmental safety efforts “robust;” pointed to performance investments of more than $200 million to its Stickney plant; and several projects “to further prevent incidents and enhance our environmental performance.” 

Koppers reported more than $1 billion in revenue in 2022, according to its most recent earnings reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Koppers’ Stickney plant is the company’s single largest greenhouse gas emissions source, it has said in its annual reports, and it ranks as a global leader in producing several toxic chemicals used for producing tars and oils. At various points, the plant has produced as much as 17% of the American market for phthalic anhydride, 28% of its carbon pitch and 30% of its creosote.

“Our goal remains to prevent incidents, and when they happen, we self-report to the IEPA when we are required to do so under their regulations,” the statement reads. “We want our neighbors in and around Stickney to know that we have strong systems and safeguards in place that have been proven to be effective in reducing the impact on the resources we share.” 

But community leaders say Koppers hasn’t done enough to address local concerns.

Delia Barajas, a member of the Cicero Community Farm, an environmental justice group, and a resident of Cicero for 32 years, said she first learned about Koppers in 2017 when she started doing research on her own. Barajas and other residents say they’re concerned that, unless they hound local and state regulators, they won’t know what’s being polluted in their community.

“They won’t inform you unless you start asking questions,” Barajas said. “It’s not like they knock on your door to tell you.”

‘I woke up one night trying to gasp for the air that was missing from my lungs’

Maria Esparza has lived in Cicero since 1987 and said she noticed the foul smells as soon as she moved into her home right off of 38th Street. Esparza and her neighbors live in a block of homes situated just a few hundred feet from Koppers and the other permitted industrial facilities lining Pershing Road. After a decade living there, she developed respiratory problems. The first time Esparza went to see a lung specialist, the doctor seemed surprised she didn’t smoke cigarettes or work in a factory. 

“When the doctor looked at my lungs, he asked me if I worked in a pesticide factory,” Esparza said.

Naphthalene, one of the chemicals that Koppers emits the most of, is often used in pesticides. Of several hazardous pollutants that Koppers emits a steady stream of, naphthalene and another cancer-linked chemical, benzene, stand out from the others. Koppers emits more of these two pollutants than any other facility in Cook County.

Nationally, Koppers’ annual naphthalene emissions rank 19th out of more than 1,500 facilities, according to our analysis of the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory data. The polluters ahead of Koppers on this list include sugar manufacturing companies in Florida, aluminum processing plants outside of small towns in Kentucky and petrochemical plants in Texas and Louisiana. Koppers’ Stickney plant is now its sole North American refinery for naphthalene, following the closure and sale of its West Virginia plant, but it has been emitting the chemical since at least 1987, according to EPA records.

After seeking treatment for six months, Esparza said she seemed to be in the clear. She tried to take precautions, like keeping her windows and doors sealed shut to avoid chemicals from entering her home. But when her symptoms returned in 2018, Esparza said she experienced coughing fits that left her feeling like she was suffocating. Her daughter and primary caregiver, Connie Guzman, said it felt like a medical mystery.

“I woke up one night trying to gasp for the air that was missing from my lungs,” Esparza said.

Esparza’s respiratory problems can’t be traced back to any one form of pollution or polluter. For any resident of Cicero, sources of industrial pollution like Koppers mingle with the risks of breathing in soot and exhaust from cars and trucks, or even smoke from wildfires like the ones that blanketed the Midwest last summer. 

Yanina Espinoza moved to Cicero in 1995 with her family, in a home just a few hundred yards from the Pershing Road factories. Her mother, Guillermina Ortega Sandoval de Espinoza, always stayed at home, never smoked and had never worked outside. But when she was diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension, pneumonia and cardiac insufficiency, which led to heart failure, her family said, a doctor described her lungs as resembling a ‘smoker’s lungs.’”

The Espinoza family said they considered moving from Cicero but decided against it. They were wary of Koppers and other plants nearby, but assumed it was safe enough to live there. But her mother’s symptoms worsened, her family said, and Guillermina Espinoza died in August at the age of 78. 

“I know it’s highly unlikely that these companies will move somewhere else, so I hope that they at least take responsibility for their” [pollution], her daughter said.

Environmental health experts say that the mix of Koppers’ chemicals with other types of pollution, a process often called “cumulative impact,” is concerning. And when polluters go beyond what they’re allowed to release, as in the case of Koppers’ alleged violations, it’s hard to know just how much more dangerous the air is.

Several census tracts near Koppers have modeled cancer risks from the pollutant naphthalene that are about five times higher than the national average, according to an EPA assessment.

One census tract, reaching behind the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal into central Stickney, is the highest in the country. Even here, the associated cancer risk would not be considered “high risk” on its own, said Jun Wu, professor of environmental and occupational health at the University of California, Irvine.

Still, the level Koppers is allowed to pollute presents some risk. And if Koppers is polluting more than they self-report, as the state violations allege, the risk may be even higher still, according to Susan Buchanan, an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s School of Public Health.

“Having a violation is really bad. You can assume the levels that the Illinois EPA sets are not protective of everybody in the community — especially children and pregnant people and people with asthma and COPD,” Buchanan said. 

Naphthalene is a chemical contained in fuels like petroleum and coal. It is released when things like wood, tobacco or fossil fuels burn and can be found in cigarette smoke, car exhaust and smoke from forest fires. When inhaled as a gas, naphthalene enters the body where it is broken down to other chemicals that react with cells and damage tissues. This toxicity kills insects, which is why it’s used in pesticides like mothballs.

The EPA categorizes naphthalene as a chemical that possibly causes cancer. However, the state of California has classified naphthalene as a substance known to cause cancer since 2002.

Benzene, on the other hand, is one of the most widely used and dangerous carcinogens in the U.S. Many people are exposed to benzene through gasoline fumes and car exhaust. Recognizable by its sweet scent at gas stations, benzene is extensively researched, with links to leukemia and other blood cancers.

Some of the other pollutants that Koppers releases, like phthalic and maleic anhydride or sulfur and nitrogen oxides, are not carcinogens. These chemicals irritate humans’ airways and can trigger or worsen respiratory diseases like asthma. Koppers is one of a handful of Cook County’s leading polluters for each of these chemicals. 

For phthalic and maleic anhydride, Koppers ranks second out of more than 100 facilities in the country that report these emissions to the EPA. The only facility that releases more is a chemical plant in Joliet. That company, Stepan Co., settled with the state for $360,725 last year after the attorney general’s office filed a complaint related to the release of the dangerous chemical ethylene oxide. The case was based on a referral from the Illinois EPA. 

When Esparza returned to the doctor in 2018, it took multiple X-rays and several pulmonologists to try and figure out what made her respiratory issues return 20 years later.

They eventually concluded that Esparza’s symptoms aligned with interstitial lung disease, an autoimmune disease in which lung tissue becomes scarred, typically as a result of long-term exposure to toxins. 

Esparza’s scarring has since spread over most of her lungs. There is no treatment for the condition, only preventative medicine to deter the spreading. Because she cannot move out of Cicero, she said she is continuing to take her medication and praying the situation gets better. 

‘You’re health is safeguarded!’

Koppers and neighboring residents have battled over the air here for close to 50 years.

The Stickney plant, which is located next to one of the largest sewage treatment facilities in the nation, converts crude tar waste from steel production and petroleum refining into refined tars, chemical oils and creosote — a sticky, yellow liquid which is oftentimes used as a preservative to treat wood against termites, fungi and other pests. 

When the coal plant opened a century ago, in 1922, the surrounding area had a few homes but was mostly prairie and grassland. Koppers marketed its coal products under the “Koppers Chicago Coke” brand and, in full-page newspaper advertisements, claimed that its heating coal was “clean,” even though its dangers had been known for centuries.

“Your Health is Safeguarded!” one ad from 1925 reads.

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Starting in the 1960s, residents and nearby workers began complaining about the odors and health hazards of Koppers. In 1964, after the superintendent of the neighboring sanitation sewage facility said his employees were beginning to feel the effects of Koppers’ tar emissions, Stickney village leaders instructed their police chief to routinely check on the plant.

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In 1969, Koppers expanded its plant to include facilities to process phthalic anhydride — used in glass fiber, plastics and paints — and became the sole or principal supplier for nearly a dozen companies in Illinois. But Cicero town officials were caught off-guard by the expansion, according to press accounts at the time, and Koppers assured local leaders that it would include air pollution measures.

“Though this plant will be in Stickney, we definitely want to see that all air pollution control systems will be of the best grade, so that this plant will not create a nuisance,” Michael Longo, the chief investigator of Cicero’s air pollution committee at the time, told the Berwyn Life newspaper.

But problems continued. In the fall of 1977, after solid flakes of phthalic anhydride were found on vehicles parked at nearby truck terminals, damaging their paint finishes, the state EPA accused Koppers of violating environmental pollution laws. (Koppers did not admit wrongdoing but did not refute the allegations; it later spent at least $1.3 million installing new safeguards.)

In 1985, a Ukrainian-born chemist named Peter Arendovich, who had struggled with bad and irritating odors from Koppers for years, began a quixotic, five-year campaign to stem the plant’s pollution. He and another resident, Patricia Listermann, lodged complaints with county and state regulators, convened a series of public meetings at nearby Morton College and the Koppers facility, sent out 18,000 health surveys to neighborhood residents and led two public hearings at Cicero Town Hall in 1989.

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In 1990, the Illinois Pollution Control Board, an independent agency created two decades earlier to adjudicate non-criminal violations of the state’s main environmental law, initially ruled in the Cicero residents’ favor, by a narrow 4-to-3 vote. It found that Koppers had violated a core section of the law, which defines air pollution as anything that would “unreasonably interfere with the enjoyment of life or property,” and ordered them to prepare detailed plans to control the odors. Despite Koppers’ “significant social and economic value” to the community — at the time, millions of dollars a year in wages for some 200 employees, materials and local taxes and $6 million in annual profit — the plant had caused “continuing distress … to its citizen neighbors.”

Koppers appealed, saying its location was critical to the region’s economy, with access to the Sanitary and Ship Canal, the railway system and the interstate highway system — all vital in the transportation of raw materials and finished products. Months later, the state pollution board reversed its decision, finding that Koppers had spent $600,000 to implement air pollution and odor control measures. Still, it noted that the board’s order “does not preclude other enforcement actions being brought against Koppers if the violations continue.”

In response to questions for this story, the Illinois Pollution Control Board said it has no pending complaints about the Koppers plant and declined to comment on the facility’s environmental history.

Arendovich, the chemist, moved to Cicero in 1983. Shortly after his fight with Koppers ended, he moved away, to the village of Lemont. Now 86, he still owns two rental properties in Cicero near the plant.

In a phone interview, Arendovich described his yearslong regulatory battle with Koppers as a cat-and-mouse game: Neighbors would see smoke rise from its tanks and experience nausea and headaches. They would complain and Koppers would “always, kind of, blame someone else — ‘Oh, the smell is coming from the sewage facility.’ But once the sewage facility cleaned itself up, the odor was still there.”

After the Illinois pollution board’s ruling in 1990, Arendovich said residents largely forgot about Koppers’ legacy of industrial pollution. Because of a lack of air quality monitoring or information about the links of certain chemicals to respiratory issues and cancers, “no one thought about the health issues.”

“It was sort of taboo to talk about. This is a mostly blue-collar area, they are more tolerant to things,” he said. “They would say, ‘It’s just a smell.’ We thought the problem had been solved.”

After he moved away from Cicero, Arendovich said his constant asthma, which he attributed to ragweed or pets, dramatically improved. “I barely have that anymore,” he said.

The public fight did achieve some impact for residents and environmentalists. In 1990, the village of Stickney denied a permit for Koppers to build a one-story concrete-and-steel boiler to burn wastes, after significant community opposition. But there were more issues.

In 1993, a 22-year-old worker from Mokena, Robert Aftanas, died, and five others were hospitalized, when hydrogen sulfide gas was released during a routine maintenance operation. In 1995, 17,000 gallons of tar spilled from the facility into the shipping canal, resulting in a complicated cleanup. Koppers and the Illinois Attorney General’s Office settled both cases as part of a lawsuit filed by the agency, with the company paying a $40,000 fine. In 1998, the EPA fined the plant more than $335,000 for violations of the federal Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. 

In more recent years, Koppers has run afoul of several state and federal environmental laws. In 2006, the federal EPA mandated a $138,000 cleanup program for the hazardous chemical, ortho-xylene, and levied an $80,000 fine. A fire in 2020 partially shut down the plant and resulted in another, three-year environmental monitoring plan.

All the while, the Stickney plant results in huge profits for Koppers. Thirty-five years ago, in 1988, Koppers disclosed to the Illinois Pollution Control Board that the plant’s operations resulted in a net profit of $6 million that year, roughly $15.6 million in today’s dollars. In 2022, Koppers’ coal tar and chemical manufacturing segment, of which the Stickney plant is the only U.S. facility and one of just four worldwide, accounted for $612 million in revenue, up nearly 60% from two years earlier, according to SEC filings. The increase has mainly been driven by demand for plastics and vinyl in the housing construction and automotive industries.

Since 2014, Koppers has touted its commitment to the environment, as part of its “Zero Harm” initiative. In 2020, the company partnered with Argonne National Laboratory for a remediation project, using willows and grasses to improve the soil at a barge and rail shipping terminal at the Stickney Plant it leases. Koppers has also promoted its close community ties, including partnerships with Cicero’s elementary school system and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. (Cicero’s District 99 said it doesn’t have a record of any community partnership with Koppers and the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

The company’s SEC filings paint a much bleaker environmental picture; At the end of 2022, the company reported substantial expenses related to cleaning up already-contaminated sites, including nearly $11 million in reserves for what it calls “environmental remediation” and $16 million in annual operating costs to control existing pollution. “Contamination has been identified and is being investigated and remediated at many of our sites by us or other parties,” Koppers’ latest annual report reads.

Koppers, along with a number of other companies, is also embroiled in two class-action lawsuits, in Pennsylvania and Tennessee, by dozens of people who said they suffered illnesses, including cancer, as a result of Koppers-made coal tar pitch. One plaintiff is seeking $15 million in damages. The company has also been named in an ongoing case involving the release of hazardous waste at the Portland Harbor Superfund site, at the Willamette River in Oregon.

Meanwhile, the coal tar that Koppers produces to coat driveways and parking lots has been found to contribute to a number of severe and life-altering illnesses, researchers have repeatedly found.

After a peer-reviewed study published in 2013 in the Environmental Science and Technology journal found that exposure to coal tar-contaminated dust during the first six years of life significantly increased the risk of developing cancer, Koppers went on the defensive. During an industry conference that year, a company health and safety official urged contractors in attendance to steer clear of the health impacts of their products and talk about their contributions to local economies, according to a Chicago Tribune investigation.

“To eliminate a useful product and put the businesses and jobs of real people at risk … hurts more people than it helps,” said the Koppers official, Mike Juba.

Cicero’s priorities: ‘Its businesses or its residents?’

For those that live in Cicero and similar fence-line communities, activists and lawmakers have been pushing a series of environmental justice reforms that would give communities more of a say about which industries can operate in their backyards.

In some important ways, Cicero resembles Southwest Chicago, which has been the focus of pitched battles over air pollution, said Brian Urbaszewski, the director of environmental health programs for the Respiratory Health Association. Chicago neighborhoods directly next to the eastern part of Cicero, where the Koppers plant is located, and to the south of the facility, rank among the worst for the city’s environmental justice index scale. 

In Illinois last year, an environmental justice bill was introduced in the state legislature, which, among other things, would have allowed for community involvement in zoning and permitting for industrial facilities. For example, the bill would have given residents greater standing to challenge permitting decisions by the Illinois EPA. Despite having 17 co-sponsors, it failed in the Illinois House on a narrow 57-to-43 vote, with 60 votes needed to pass. Legislators blamed procedural errors for its demise.

“Passing state legislation would go a long way towards giving nearby residents power over the air they breathe going forward,” Urbaszewski said. “Full disclosure and transparency and letting people have a voice on huge sources of toxic emissions put right next to their homes and schools should not be controversial.”

City, state and federal regulators are also being asked to consider a company’s environmental record when considering whether to extend existing operating permits, said Kim Wasserman, executive director of Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, which successfully pushed to have the Crawford Power Plant closed in neighboring Little Village in 2012.

“For many frontline low-income communities of color, this is the reality, every day, in dealing with polluters,” said Wasserman, who called the Koppers violations a “disaster” for those living here.

In the short-term, Cicero’s residents are forced to navigate living in a densely-packed industrial corridor, with a busy railway, two Amazon warehouses and a dozen industrial polluters. The pollutants emitted from Koppers combine with other everyday pollutants, such as exhaust from cars and delivery trucks and tobacco smoke. 

In most cases, it’s impossible to trace a single cancer diagnosis, or any chronic health condition, back to any one source. 

“No level is protective against getting cancer,” said Buchanan of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s School of Public Health. “But you can say with confidence that people shouldn’t be exposed to more air carcinogens than people in another area, simply because of where they live.”

Koppers’ location on the border of two relatively small municipalities complicates the regulatory picture. But boundary lines aside, the plant is closer to, and one of the most prominent features of, Cicero, said Jojo Galva Mora, a curator at the Chicago History Museum who lived in Cicero and is now pursuing a doctorate in history at Northwestern University. And those who live and work here will likely have to reckon with a host of questions, he said.

“An ever-growing amount of warehouses outlines the northern end of town. The town’s western edge is bound mainly by the industrial corridor on Cicero Avenue,” Mora said. “What kind of message does that send to prospective residents, visitors, and those who pass through? Where are the town’s priorities? Its businesses or its residents?”

Support for this project came from the Data-Driven Reporting Project, which is funded by the Google News Initiative in partnership with Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism; the Rita Allen Foundation; the Reva and David Logan Foundation; the Healthy Communities Foundation; and the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri.

Reporting and writing for “The Air We Breathe” by Dillon Bergin and Derek Kravitz of MuckRock, Stephana Ocneanu and Glendalys Valdes of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and Richie Requena for the Cicero Independiente. Data analysis by Dillon Bergin of MuckRock. Graphics and illustrations by Brian Herrera for the Cicero Independiente and MuckRock and Kelly Kauffman of MuckRock. Drone footage by Jesus J. Montero for the Cicero Independiente and editing by Kelly Kauffman of MuckRock. Editing by Derek Kravitz of MuckRock and April Alonso, Irene Romulo and Luis Velazquez of the Cicero Independiente. Sensor installation by Sanjin Ibrahimovic of MuckRock.

In its latest legal salvo, the City of Chicago is seeking to consolidate thousands of debts it says are held by a north suburban woman and real estate companies tied to her, dubbing them “extreme scofflaws” for amassing millions of dollars in unpaid rat-related tickets.

The city is asking a judge to combine all of the debts into one so that all the judgments can be “pursued together in the most efficient manner possible,” according to court records.

The filings allege altogether that the woman, Northbrook resident Suzie B. Wilson, and her 27 companies owe the city more than $9.3 million from about 5,140 judgments issued for violations occurring across more than 600 properties in the city since January 2018.

This comes after the Illinois Answers Project and Block Club Chicago revealed earlier this year that Wilson had managed companies that accumulated more than $15 million worth of tickets written for violations on mostly vacant properties in the South and West sides of Chicago as far back as 2010.

Wilson and the companies, according to the city’s court filings, “rarely, if ever, do anything at all to maintain these properties.”

“They are a blight on the communities that must suffer their presence and subject the residents of those communities to dangerous and unhealthy conditions,” the filing states.

The investigation explained why the city of Chicago was losing the war on rats, leaving residents in the lurch, and how it infrequently went after property owners even after they were ticketed for rat-related offenses. The companies that the city ties to Wilson had amassed the largest debt, according to an Illinois Answers analysis. 

“The Judgment Debtor has failed to pay any of those Judgments and has done nothing to fix the significant underlying problems that cause so much harm to the City and its residents,” the filing states.

Wilson had been listed as the agent manager for all of the companies until Illinois Answers and Block Club reported her name in connection with the companies and the debts. Less than a week later, Wilson’s name was removed as manager from the companies’ corporate filings, and the managers are now limited liability companies based in South Dakota, a state with records laws that do not require companies to list which individuals manage the companies. An attorney whom Wilson tapped in an unrelated lawsuit is now the agent for the companies. He declined to comment.

Illinois Answers and Block Club reported last month that the city had jumped into the legal battle between Wilson and the Chicago Transit Authority, which needs eight properties that the real estate empire owns that are in the path of the $3.6 billion Red Line Extension Project. The CTA wants to extend the train line 5.6 miles south to 130th street and needs the land as part of its plan, but the two sides can’t agree on a price.

Previously, one of Wilson’s companies sued the city, claiming that it was unconstitutional for the city to fine the company for failing to cut its weeds, but a federal judge dismissed the case.

Messages left for Wilson and her attorneys were not returned.

Charles Randle, once an inmate at Stateville Correctional Center, recalled waking up one morning in that prison with a roach inside his ear.

Billy Johnson, who lost his hearing at 2-years-old due to an illness, said he can’t earn his GED at the Danville Correctional Center because prison officials won’t provide a sign language interpreter.

Aaron Fillmore, locked up for 25 years in solitary confinement at a handful of Illinois prisons, says he doubts he is mentally fit to share a cell.

All three men have been plaintiffs in federal lawsuits filed against the State of Illinois, alleging that their constitutional rights were violated by the Illinois Department of Corrections, which houses about 30,000 people in the state’s prisons. Over the years, judges have taken the unusual step of certifying these complaints as class actions and, in some cases, have ordered the state to improve conditions for inmates who are deaf, mentally or physically ill, held in solitary confinement or housed at Stateville Correctional Center, which inmates say is dilapidated and filled with vermin.

Progress has been slow as the bill to taxpayers keeps rising. Court-ordered audits show the IDOC continues to fail to provide basic care to inmates — a point underscored by the Illinois Answers Project in interviews with more than a dozen people who are incarcerated. The state has paid more than $13 million in legal fees and fines so far as part of the settlements and faces an ultimate tab of hundreds of millions of dollars to fulfill settlement requirements. Separately, a report published earlier this year estimates the state has a multibillion dollar backlog in maintenance expenses to repair its dilapidated prisons, some of which date to the 19th century.

David Muhammad, who was federal monitor of the Illinois parole system, said that there’s “no question” Illinois could have avoided the extra costs inherent in the settlement agreements if the IDOC operated a better system.

“The state could have just not treated inmates horribly,” said Muhammad, who is now the executive director of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform.  

The IDOC denied the claims made by the plaintiffs in the lawsuits but declined to comment further in detail, citing the active litigation.

‘There’s no treatment occurring’

A federal lawsuit filed in 2007 alleged that mentally ill people in Illinois prisons were “subjected to brutality instead of compassion, and housed in conditions that beggar imagination,” spurring numerous reforms over the years.

Even as the quality of care remains in question 16 years later, a federal judge ruled in October to end the lawsuit for procedural reasons.

Attorneys who represent the inmates say they plan to appeal the ruling, which cuts off any future reimbursement of legal fees. U.S. District Court Judge Michael Mihm’s decision to end the case disappointed them, they said, because of the treatment gaps that still exist despite the sweeping changes to inmate mental health care that the lawsuit ushered into the state’s prison system.

Chief among those changes is the construction of a new mental health facility — the Joliet Treatment Center — and an in-patient treatment facility at the Joliet campus. State records show that in the past five years, the state has spent $213 million for these facilities and other lawsuit-related mental health improvements. Attorneys contend the in-patient facility, which has 200 beds, is barely used despite a significant demand.

A court monitor appointed to oversee the settlement said in an August 2022 report that more work remains. The IDOC was still noncompliant with broad swaths of the settlement agreement including evaluations and referrals, use of physical restraints, as well as use of force and discipline for “seriously mentally ill offenders.”

Muhammad, the former court monitor, said that settlement agreements such as the one for the IDOC’s mentally ill inmates can be effective “blunt instruments.”

“The challenge is sometimes they stick around way too long, sometimes some of the conditions are wonky and don’t make real practical sense,” he said. “But there’s a ton of reform that has occurred from them.”

The IDOC issued a statement that said the changes made as a result of the mental health care lawsuit “remain engrained in its policies and procedures.” 

“The IDOC will continue to provide comprehensive mental health services for its residents in custody,” the statement said.

Patrice Daniels was the leading plaintiff in the lawsuit. He is serving a life sentence at the Joliet Treatment Center, a facility with single occupancy cells for inmates who have serious mental illness. He says he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and bears scars from self-inflicted cuts.

“There’s no treatment occurring,” said Daniels, who pleaded guilty to a 1994 murder in Grant Park in exchange for a sentence of life in prison instead of the death penalty, which was abolished in Illinois in 2011. “It’s only a treatment facility in name. Nobody is getting better in that sense.”

People in the prison, he said, are sent to the segregation unit if they act out as a result of their mental illness, which makes it worse.

“There are guys where, as a consequence of their severe mental illness, voices sometimes tell them to be violent towards other people,” Daniels said. “I present very well, but most people who aren’t clinicians don’t understand the challenge that it takes for me daily not to (self-harm).”

A 2016 survey of state and federal prisoners showed 41% of inmates reporting a history of mental illness.

Attorney Alan Mills of the Uptown People’s Law Center represents Daniels and other inmates in reform-minded lawsuits. He acknowledged the snail’s pace of progress but said that when the lawsuit began, mental health care in Illinois prisons consisted of monthly appointments where some people received medication and everyone else was placed into solitary confinement. Through several changes made in a 2016 legal agreement, people with diagnosed mental illness receive monthly check-ins with mental health staff or a mental health group, and everyone has a treatment plan.

“The quality of the treatment plan remains in question,” Mills said. “The problem is that getting a consent decree is, as hard as it may be, the easy part. Actually getting changes in the system is the harder part.”

Small steps in solitary confinement reform

A federal lawsuit filed in 2016 alleged that people in Illinois prisons were getting thrown into solitary confinement for long periods of time for “even the most minor prison infractions,” and “minimal processes” existed for people to prove their innocence.

The lawsuit said that people in solitary confinement live in “tiny, often windowless cages” that are smaller than the 50-square-feet prison cells that the Illinois Legislature requires for new construction of prison dorms, and likened the practice of using solitary confinement as punishment to torture.

Mills said that in response to the lawsuit IDOC officials rewrote their rules for solitary confinement to shorten sentences and provide a way for inmates to work themselves out of segregation.

Still, about 4% of the inmate population has remained in solitary confinement, a number that has remained mostly unchanged since 2017, court filings show. More than 5,400 inmates have spent at least one year in solitary confinement during the past dozen years. Eleven people have spent a dozen or more years in solitary confinement during that time.

Aaron Fillmore, 48, was first placed in solitary confinement after he was accused of having a role in a February 1997 scalding oil attack on a warden, his assistant and a guard, who visited him in his cell at Menard Correctional Center, court records show. He was later released from solitary but then returned to the segregation unit after he stabbed a Will County correctional officer, which he pleaded guilty to in 1999 in exchange for an additional 20-year sentence. He was transferred to Tamms Correctional Center, a maximum security prison in southern Illinois where most inmates spent 23 or 24 hours alone in their cells “without social interaction, human contact, or sensory stimulation,” according to one report. After Tamms’ closure 11 years ago, Fillmore spent time in solitary confinement at prisons in Pontiac and Lawrence before he was transferred in June to a New Mexico prison.

In correspondence with Illinois Answers written earlier this year, Fillmore described being locked inside his cell “basically 24/7.”

“Being in isolation, chained and shackled every place I go, forced to exercise in a small dog cage has taken a toll on my body and mind,“ wrote Fillmore, who was given a 75-year sentence connected to the 1994 murder of a Plano woman. “I have gum problems because I would brush my teeth so much out of just being bored.”

‘I been dealing with so much pain’

Research shows that prison conditions and the bare-bones health care offered behind bars can take years off a person’s life.

The dismal state of prison health care and outcomes for inmates is no different in Illinois, where the widely criticized private prison health care company Wexford has operated the state’s prison health care system since 2011 in exchange for more than $1 billion in taxpayer money.

A court monitor reported last year that the IDOC’s clinical care remains poor, record-keeping for vaccinations is non-existent, and there is no data to show that screenings for the two leading causes of cancer deaths within the prison system — liver and lung cancer — are being performed.

The monitoring was ordered through a settlement in the lawsuit that inmate Donald Lippert filed in 2010, alleging the IDOC denied him access to health care and refused to provide him with the food he needed to manage his diabetes. 

In a phone interview, Lippert said he still gets meals of pasta and potatoes three times daily, which makes his blood sugar spike.

“It makes me feel tired, miserable,” said Lippert, who is serving a 140-year prison sentence in connection with multiple murders. “It takes a big toll on my organs, my blood vessels, my eyes.”

To date, the state has spent more than $5.5 million on costs related to the case.

According to interviews with attorneys and reform advocates, the overall bill for Illinois taxpayers — more than $13 million stemming from a handful of protracted lawsuits — is low compared with California, which generates millions of dollars in legal fees each year from similar cases. Inmates in Arizona, Georgia and Massachusetts have also used class action lawsuits to successfully challenge what they allege are civil rights violations.

Illinois’ latest prison health care monitor’s report said the patient care for inmates who are elderly, disabled or infirm is “consistent with neglect and abuse,” and that inmates with dementia signed “do not resuscitate” documents or wills when they “clearly were not of sound mind and could not willfully and voluntarily do so,” according to the report.

As of June, there were more than 1,200 inmates in the IDOC who are 65 or older.

One example in the report described a 74-year-old patient losing 61 pounds and then dying of septic shock, a perforated colon and rectal cancer in July 2021 after doctors failed to order a colonoscopy and diagnose the disease for a year and a half.

“This was a basic medical judgment issue that was addressed in an unsafe and harmful manner,” the report said, recommending the doctor for peer review.

Lazerrick Coffee, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said IDOC refused to help him manage the pain he suffers from sickle cell anemia, which causes him to develop ulcers and experience extreme pain informally called a “sickle cell crisis.” He said prison officials removed him from the doctor-prescribed treatment — Tylenol and a painkiller — that he had taken for nine years ending in 2020, when he began his sentence.

“He told me that I was taken off the medication I was getting for 9 years because it’s a narcotic, but ever since I been off that medication I been dealing with so much pain,” wrote Coffee, who is serving a 13-year sentence at Pinckneyville Correctional Center for carjacking. “It gets to a point that I cry, my (cellmates) will try to help but they really can’t do nothing.”

The legal proceedings for the prison health care lawsuit have been fraught. Last year, a federal judge held the IDOC in contempt for failing to create an implementation plan as required by a consent decree.

A prison singled out for reforms

Ten years ago, Lester Dobbey filed a lawsuit alleging that Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill was filled with vermin, birds and mold, and other structural problems that made the facility hazardous to inmates’ health.

Dobbey told Illinois Answers in a phone interview about a wide range of safety and sanitary concerns at the prison: cracks separating the building from the roof, roaches freely scuttling around the food serving line, flocks of as many as 50 birds flying around the prison at night, expelling waste into the living quarters of inmates. He recalled one incident from when he was working in a kitchen, passing out what he thought were chocolate chip cookies from a garbage bag.

“I get to the bottom and it’s hundreds upon hundreds of mice pellets all in the bag,” said Dobbey, who has since been transferred to the Danville Correctional Center. “So I’ve been serving mice crap on cookies.”

An IDOC-commissioned master plan published in May estimated that the prison has $286 million worth of “deferred maintenance,” a significant part of the $2.5 billion maintenance backlog that exceeds the IDOC’s annual budget by $670 million.

The report took special aim at Stateville’s sleeping quarters, saying that its dorms “are not suitable for any 21st century correctional center.” Last year, hundreds of inmates were transferred out of the building after two water heaters at the facility broke down.

“The Quarterhouse particularly has a design developed during the penitentiary period of the 1800’s,” the study states, noting that $12 million in immediate structural repairs are needed.

The report suggested building new housing at Stateville to “help create a positive environment for staff and inmates.” The estimated cost for 700 new beds at Stateville? $72 million.

“The place is literally falling apart, the infrastructure is gone,” said Charles Randle, an inmate at Stateville from 2017 to 2021, when he was transferred to Menard. “You can’t do any major work or it will collapse. It’s like you’re trying to bring a dinosaur back to life.”

Heather Lewis Donnell, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said that since the lawsuit was filed, the number of people staying at the prison has plunged from more than 1,000 inmates to about 500 and the decrepit “F-House” dorm was closed, except for temporary use as a COVID-19 infirmary early on in the pandemic. She was unsure when the case would end but said that significant changes would need to occur before then.

“We’d like to see it be a humane, habitable prison for the residents,” Lewis Donnell said.

Hearing lawsuit ends

The IDOC was ordered to pay about $430,000 in fees and fines earlier this year as part of a settlement of a 13-year-old case that sought to provide interpreters and hearing aids for inmates who are deaf or hard of hearing.

Amanda Antholt, an attorney with the firm Equip for Equality that represented inmates in the lawsuit, said that IDOC reported in April 2022 there were 1,695 inmates in custody who identified as deaf or hard of hearing.

IDOC had agreed to screen new inmates for hearing, provide communication plans and hearing aids for inmates who were deaf or hard of hearing, and supply American Sign Language translators for all “high-stakes interactions” such as medical and mental health care appointments, disciplinary hearings, educational and vocational programs.

The IDOC noted in a January filing that in November 2022 there were 55 “high-stakes” interactions involving inmates who were deaf or hard of hearing and 48 of those involved an interpreter.

“Despite a few issues at the remaining facilities, the issues are sporadic, not systemic, and are resolved when they arise,” the report stated.

Billy Johnson, who is serving a 53-year sentence for murder and robbery at Danville Correctional Center, said that isn’t always the case.

Johnson said his concerns about access to interpreters and other tools that would help him communicate as a person who is deaf get brushed aside. One of his goals is earning his GED so that he can join a carpenter’s apprenticeship upon release, but the IDOC refuses to place him into the program, which would require an American Sign Language interpreter.

“I feel like they force me to try to feel like I’m hearing, which obviously isn’t an option for me,” said Johnson through an ASL interpreter. “I do a lot of watching and looking and wondering what’s going on.”

“All the hearing guys, they get their GED, they go to college and I’m over in the corner working hard. I’m trying to get my GED, I���m trying to go to college, but it’s not accessible to me.”

Tillie Lloyd, Johnson’s fiance, is also deaf. The 39-year-old resident of Chicago’s Riverdale neighborhood said through an interpreter that she is “very angry” about the services that are being denied to Billy on account of his disability.

“I want to see him get a better life,” Lloyd said. “I want to see him get a second chance.”