By the time word spread of the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 24 decision to reverse the landmark abortion rights case Roe v. Wade, an Illinois-based hotline for one of the country’s largest abortion support funds was already about to close for the weekend.

When it reopened Monday morning, the staff was stunned to find 200 missed calls for help waiting for them. Overwhelmed, they had to shut down the line for the week — the first time in the Midwest Access Coalition’s 8-year history — just to catch up.

“We opened up the following Monday and, since then, we’ve been servicing about 50 clients a week,” said Alison Dreith, the coalition’s director of strategic partnerships. “We’ve finally started to average out and feel a bit more consistent but those first three weeks to a month were very chaotic…”

As Illinois begins to take its place as an island for abortion rights amid a sea of surrounding states banning the controversial procedure in the wake of the Supreme Court’s latest ruling, everyone from lawmakers to healthcare providers to advocates are bracing for record-shattering numbers of people seeking abortions.

Applications for physician licenses are already spiking, although its unclear how much of the increase is directly related to abortion services. Illinois legislation aimed at protecting abortion rights and providers is being debated.

President Joe Biden signed executive orders aimed at protecting abortion rights for travelers. Gov. J.B. Pritzker increased funding to protect access for those less able to afford it. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot set aside money to pay for lodging and travel services. Healthcare providers are pushing for more resources to meet a need they expect will break all state records as out-of-state patients cross over state lines seeking help.

Some of those records are already being broken.

One clinic in the Illinois suburbs of St. Louis saw a nearly 30% increase in those seeking abortions from June to August. In Chicago, one non-profit abortion support group served 4,000 clients this year, already 1,000 more than all of 2021.

“We’re expecting tens of thousands more people to come to Illinois,” said Alicia Hurtado, communications and advocacy manager at the Chicago Abortion Fund, a non-profit group to support abortion access. “We’re just hopeful we can continue to be there for our neighbors, but it’s going to take deep investment.”

Since it was founded in 2014, the Midwest Access Coalition supported a total of 3,000 abortion patients. Last year, across a 12-state midwest region, the coalition spent $120,000 on hotels, $15,000 for food and $55,000 on flights, according to its 2021 impact report.

The coalition’s fund helped 800 people in all of 2021. This year, they hit that number in July. As of Sept. 2, the coalition served 1,050 clients with meals, hotels and travel expenses, Dreith said.

“This is a healthcare issue, this is a basic human rights issue and we are in a crisis moment and Illinois needs to act legislatively like we’re in a crisis moment,” said Dreith. “Lives are on the line as far as freedom goes as we see more and more criminalization for providing and accessing health care.

“Access to abortion and these protections is not just about abortion.”

Abortion funding increased

Nearly 50 years after the right to an abortion was legally recognized throughout the U.S., the Supreme Court in June toppled the landmark decision with their 6-3 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

The ruling was the culmination of a decades-long strategy by abortion opponents who say life begins at conception. The decision kicked off nationwide protests about the loss of a Constitutional right, and how low-income patients — especially those living in more remote areas of the country — will be the most affected.

More than half the states in the country — including the five surrounding Illinois — have moved to ban or severely restrict access to abortion. Indiana’s ban goes into effect Sept. 15. In Iowa, abortions are banned after 20 weeks of pregnancy and a more restrictive ban is working its way through the courts.

The only states in the midwest where no abortion limits are being considered are Illinois and Minnesota.

“It’s time to look at this area of healthcare and make sure we have the infrastructure we need,” said Brigid Leahy, vice president of public policy for Planned Parenthood Illinois.

She said the state is already invested in being a leader in abortion access, and she hopes this newest crisis will renew that commitment with encouraging new clinics across the state and more funding for abortion support.

“There are two different parts of the conversation,” said Ameri Klafeta, a top official at the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. “One is what are the things that can happen right now or in the short term to help providers who are on the ground, and then there are those things that add additional protections, like shield laws with additional privacy protections. All are being evaluated.”

Klafeta, director of the Women’s and Reproductive Rights Project, said one positive step was Pritzker’s post-Dobbs decision in August to increase state medicaid reimbursements by 20%. That decision, according to one Pritzker news release, will help “to recoup more costs and enable providers and clinics to provide more care without financial strain.”

Pritzker also announced an additional $2 million in state money investment for family planning services for low-income people and families.

Shortly after the Dobbs decision, Pritzker and the top Democratic leaders even considered convening a special session of the General Assembly to consider new laws protecting abortion rights. However, it appears unlikely lawmakers will be called to Springfield before the midterm elections in November.

At an Aug. 30 news conference, Pritzker addressed his decision not to call the session, saying votes there would require Republican support he does not have.

“There are things that the legislature really does need to do, we need it enshrined into law,” Pritzker said. “And so again, those things are all being worked out where we’re talking to the legislature, working with the Attorney General’s office, but making sure that we’re making progress…”

Some of the measures lawmakers are being pushed to adopt include increased funding for existing clinics as well as new ones; more protections for providers who may come from other states to provide abortions; and legislation to allow advanced practice nurses and physicians assistants to perform abortions, according to BGA interviews with advocate groups.

“It’s clear that Pritzker is publicly in favor of protecting abortion access in Illinois and we’re hopeful he’ll listen to these policy pritoirities,” said Hurtado, of the Chicago Abortion Fund.

But she said it’s going to take more than “waves of support to sustain us through this new reality.”

Mayor Lori Lightfoot put $500,000 toward helping organizations like Chicago Abortion Fund and Midwest Access Coalition support people’s lodging and travel needs.

A City Council committee advanced legislation barring the Chicago Police Department and other city departments from assisting in investigations of those who come from out of state to get or provide an abortion related to laws in other states that restrict “an individual’s bodily autonomy,” the ordinance reads in part.

Some records already broken

Hurtado said the fund’s work has shifted since the Dobbs decision.

While the non-profit has always supported people from out of state, they’ve started to get calls from states they hadn’t helped before, like Arizona and Texas, as well as an increase from states across the region, like Wisconsin, Tennessee, Ohio and Missouri.

The abortion fund’s budget for patients jumped from $16,000 a week in the first three months of 2022 to around $25,000 after a draft of the Dobbs decision was leaked in May.

“And now, post-Dobbs, our weekly budget [for financial and logistical support] is between $35,000 and $45,000 each week,” Hurtado said. “It’s a really massive increase in scale and not just because of more people calling, but having many more cases requiring that deep case management, full-scale support, paying for people to travel longer distances.”

She spoke in support of mandating that private insurance plans cover abortion care without a co-pay, allow for advanced nursing and physician staff to provide abortions and for the state to invest in resources like the Chicago fund because they “make abortion access a reality, even in the face of a hostile landscape.”

The number of people they’ve heard from so far this year has already hit a record 4,000, 1,000 people more than the number of people served in all of 2021. In 2018, the number of people supported was 183. Currently the fund attempts to support 100% of the people they reach on their helpline, but Hurtado worries that may change without outside support.

At the downstate Fairview Heights clinic, which is under the umbrella of the Planned Parenthood Saint Louis Region, workers there have seen a nearly 30% increase in patients seeking abortions from June to August, going from 620 to 804.

The total number of patients in June, July and August rose to 2,130 this year, up from 1,689 last year, according to figures from the clinic shared with the BGA.

The clinic also saw an enormous spike since June in the number of patients coming from states outside Missouri and Illinois, two states in its service area. From June through August this year, the clinic served 698 abortion patients, up from 69 last year, according to data provided by Planned Parenthood officials.

The clinic is now open 10 hours a day on most days to accommodate the demand.

The BGA also sought metrics from state government to help illustrate the increasing demand, but they are more difficult to pin down because of a reluctance to single out clinics and physicians performing abortions.

More generally, however, the state saw a large spike in the number of physicians’ license applications since Dobbs, according to statistics provided by the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation.

From June 24, the day the final Dobbs decision was released, to July 26 the department received 375 applications from Illinois and out-of-state residents for physician licenses, a 31% increase from the same month in 2021 — one that saw 286 applications.

In that same time frame, the state nearly doubled the number of physicians’ licenses it awarded, from 346 in 2021 to 662 licenses this year, though that number includes licenses awarded to applicants who applied before the BGA made its request.

Other states moving quicker

Jessica Davenport-Williams, a co-founder of Black Girls Break Bread, said part of her group’s abortion advocacy centers on equitable access to all.

Davenport-Williams pointed to state figures from March on maternal and child health services that show since 2016, there have been 16 obstetric unit closures, six facility closures and three facilities opened hospitals closures in Illinois — 4 full facility closures, and 14 facilities that closed their obstetric units — and three new hospitals that opened and provide obstetric services, reducing the number of places people who can give birth can go.

Those numbers are higher in economically disadvantaged communities and she and others at the non-profit hope that features into the state’s conversation around abortion access.

“It’s one thing to shore up what the rights are but that does not ensure equitable access,” Davenport-Williams said. “So I think there has to be a multi-pronged approach in having more stakeholders at the table.

“What does it mean for the low-income patient who is trying to get access at a health system or a local clinic? How does this trickle down and ensure that that person is able to receive the best quality and affordable care? There’s a huge data issue in Illinois — not just on abortions but on women’s health.”

State Rep. Kelly Cassidy, D-Chicago, leader of a state taskforce to consider the legislative response to Dobbs, said government responses fall into three categories: protection, capacity and access.

“This is uncharted territory,” Cassidy said. “The stakes are incredibly high so we have to get this right.”

She said the major focus is on a “need to craft legislation that we can pass” — from creating the smoothest path possible to keeping a license and making sure actions by other states don’t deter access in Illinois.

Cassidy said bills are in various phases of readiness and are being tweaked as the taskforce continues to hear new concerns or questions from stakeholders.

The ACLU’s Klafeta, and others who spoke to the BGA, said they’re watching and learning from what other states are doing — both good and bad — to “make sure we can do everything we can to help accommodate the people who come to Illinois for care.”.

One such state is Massachusetts, which last month invested $2 million into abortion infrastructure and set aside more funds for abortion providers. In California, a new law passed in June protects providers from civil liability from states with abortion bans.

“The reality is, in places like Southern Illinois and Central Illinois, border cities where we’re going to see more and more clinics opening,” said Dreith, of the Midwest Access Coalition. “I think we stand to have a lot more risk and what is the legislature going to do to make sure we can provide abortion care in Illinois?”

“I’ve seen for a few legislative cycles that Democrats in Illinois continually say that they don’t want to focus on abortion,” Dreith said, “but they’re going to have to.”

A half dozen calls for help from a Rogers Park apartment complex went unheeded by city officials last month amid the season’s first heat wave that killed three senior tenants, a Better Government Association investigation found.

That’s because city officials say there was nothing they could do, given the lack of city laws to require landlords to cool their buildings during heat waves.

One alderwoman who visited the site two days before the deaths said she immediately joined the chorus of people trying to persuade building managers to turn off the heat and to turn on the air conditioning — all to no avail.

Help came too late for Gwendolyn Osborne, 72; Janice Reed, 68, and Delores McNeely, 76, all of whom died in their sweltering apartments on May 14. The official causes of death are awaiting a final decision by the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office.

The calls for help from their 120-unit James Sneider Apartments in Rogers Park — logged by the city’s 311-hotline set up specifically to respond to resident requests — began coming in three days before their deaths. All were routed to two different city departments with little response.

Now, their families are demanding answers.

“She was always encouraging. She was always nurturing. She was always advocating and fighting on somebody else’s behalf and she was just snatched from us,’’ said Ken Rye, Osborne’s son. “And that’s the hardest thing to deal with.”

He said his mother loved her apartment of more than seven years, her view of Lake Michigan, the convenience of the elevator and how close she was to the train and everything she needed.

“This was supposed to be the perfect setup and it turned out not to be,” Rye said in an interview with the BGA.

The problems began at the 7450 N. Rogers Ave. complex on May 11 during an unseasonably hot stretch of several days. That’s the day the first calls to 311 were made.

According to records and interviews, officials at the non-for-profit property management company that owns the complex, Hispanic Housing Development Corporation, denied requests — from residents and even from their alderwoman — to turn on the central air conditioning.

Ald. Maria Hadden, 49th, told the BGA she visited the complex on May 12 — two days before the three women died — to investigate complaints to her office.

Hadden said an employee there told her they don’t get to decide when the air conditioning comes on and she would need to talk to company vice president Christian Rodriguez.

Hadden said she reached Rodriguez by telephone, and he assured her the heat — that was still being circulated in the building during the heatwave — would be turned off and windows opened to circulate the air.

Hadden said Rodriguez mistakenly cited a city ordinance requiring buildings to provide heat through June 1 as the reason the building had not been switched to air conditioning. He promised Hadden to “move up that timetable.”

Hadden also suggested the company provide portable cooling devices in the interim, and Rodriguez promised to do so, she said. 

The on-site property manager, Maida Durakovic, offered tenants an air-conditioned community room on the first floor, along with one bottle of water from the room’s refrigerator, according to a letter from her provided by one of the women’s sons.

Hadden said she didn’t receive any further calls from residents until May 14, when she was told someone had died.

“I don’t know what Hispanic Housing was doing from the discovery of their first dead resident in the morning, but again they didn’t call me, they didn’t call the city, they didn’t call the fire department,” Hadden said. “They didn’t call for help, the residents and I did.”

Hadden said she again called Rodriguez, who told her the death was “not necessarily because of the heat.”

Police officers were already at the building when she arrived. The fire department arrived after Hadden and others had started wellness checks and began helping people get to the cooling center.

Over the next few hours, a maintenance crew came out to turn on the air conditioning, doors were propped open to allow air to circulate and the fire department and the city’s department of buildings vented the building, Hadden said.

Durakovic and Rodriguez did not respond to requests for comment. HHDC President and CEO Hipolito Roldan also declined to be interviewed, citing pending litigation from the families of their deceased tenants.

“The safety and security of all our residents have always been our highest priority,” Roldan said in an email to the BGA.

Hadden and other city officials interviewed said one central problem was the city’s lack of requirements for landlords to provide air conditioning during waves of extreme heat.

She now advises residents to call 911 instead of the 311 hotline if they feel their health is endangered. City Council is planning a public hearing in early July to understand “what happened, when it happened” and the failures that contributed to the situation, she said.

“I’m hoping to learn more through our hearing to make a better determination of scenarios like this, but I think some of the challenge is we tell people to call 911 in an emergency, but one of the challenges is how do people know if it’s an emergency?” Hadden said.

Hadden said calls to 311 can take days because it is not set up as an emergency response hotline.

The city bills its 311 system as a way to get “easy access to non-emergency police services, from filing police reports to talking to police personnel in your district” as well as other non-emergency services or requests, according to a set of frequently asked questions about the service.

Calls to the 311 system are then assigned to other city departments to follow up and determine next steps. The city’s first line of defense is supposed to be its 311 service line, which residents can call to seek information on cooling centers, transportation to those areas and requesting wellness checks.

Several of the 311 complaints from the building were diverted to the city’s Department of Buildings, which did not investigate. Officials there said they had no authority to force the landlord to address cooling issues.

Rye said following his mother’s death, he learned from other residents in the building that temperatures had been an issue in the past.

“They knew for a fact that the heat was already up and running and they really tried to make light of the situation, that there was a cooling room that was available, and ‘feel free to come on down for coffee and donuts,’” Rye said. “That was their response to the situation.”

He said the last time he spoke to his mom was six days before she was found dead in her apartment.

Rye said he’s gotten information from the media, “not from the complex, not from the property managers” about the tragedy.

Rye described his mother as a fierce advocate and fighter for causes she believed in, especially civil rights. He’s now advocating for her as he tries to understand how her death happened — and how to prevent it from happening again.

The families of all three women say they are pursuing legal action against the building manager and investigating the city’s role in the incident.

“This was not just preventable, it was egregious, and how easy it would have been to flip a switch or something and you change the entire course of three people’s lives,” said Brian Salvi, the attorney for McNeely’s family.

A caretaker who visited McNeely most days in her 7th-floor apartment found her in bed, Salvi said.

McNeely had two sons, Jerome McNeely and Tyrone Williams, as well as nine grandchildren. Williams, who lives in Dallas, was a week away from visiting his mother.

Larry Rogers, an attorney for Reed’s family, said the 68 year old was one of several tenants who went to the building’s management staff and asked for the air to be on.

Her body was found by friends in the building after she didn’t show up for a lunch date, Rogers said.

Along with her son, Reed is survived by five grandchildren.

Both Salvi and Rogers said the building’s managers showed “gross negligence” for failing to cool the building.

311 not for emergencies

Calls to the city’s non-emergency service line are received by Chicago’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications, OEMC. The call center routes 311 complaints to the responsible city agency based on the subject of the complaint or request, said Michael Puccinelli, the director of public affairs for the city’s Department of Buildings.

Records show six calls were made to the city’s 311 hotline between May 11 and May 16.

Of those calls, one was categorized as a shelter request; three were categorized as ventilation violations, another three were added to a city call log, two were requests for senior information and assistance, and three were categorized as requests for a well-being check for seniors.

At least two of those calls — one made three days before the women died and one that came the same day they died — were specifically about the high temperature in the building and lack of air conditioning, Puccinelli said in an email.

Four of the calls were routed to the city’s Department of Family and Support Services, DFSS, an agency set up specifically to support the needs of underserved residents from newborns to the elderly, records show.

The agency did not respond to questions from the BGA after initially agreeing to an interview — an agency spokesperson did not immediately respond to multiple requests for comment regarding the calls it received during the heatwave and the agency’s response.

In an email response to the BGA, DFSS spokesman Joseph Dutra said his department did dispatch an “outreach team” on May 14 in response to a 311 request that afternoon for a well being check.

Dutra said the outreach team confirmed there was no air conditioning and sent a senior well-being assessment referral to the family support services department, which followed up on May 16 — two days after the three women died.

Rye has decided to pursue legal action and is represented by Levin & Perconti.

Puccinelli said his office received two of the 311 calls, but did not investigate them.

“DOB does not have any authority to require air conditioning in apartment buildings and does not send an inspector in response to alleged conditions which are not violations of Municipal Code provisions that DOB has authority to enforce,” Puccinelli said in an email.

Puccinelli said OEMC operators are trained to provide information about cooling centers and other public resources to home and apartment residents who are concerned about high temperatures.

Based on information the BGA obtained through an open records request, none of the 311 complaints from the Sneider apartments were routed to emergency services.

The city’s 311 services, established in 1999 and administered by OEMC, have a well-documented record of long wait times and unfulfilled requests. The line is designed to field requests for city services such as graffiti removal and tree-trimming, along with non-emergency reports of crimes.

“Non-emergency” 311 complaint inspections are completed within 30 days, Puccinelli said in an email.

“Alleged emergency violations,” which include no heat during extreme cold, building failure, and dangerous and hazardous electrical issues, are inspected within 12 hours of receipt, Puccinelli said.

Asked to respond to concerns that the system is confusing or not helpful, especially as it relates to heat emergencies, a spokeswoman for OEMC said in an email the city “strives to make 3-1-1 easily accessible to all residents” and works with city departments and others “on ways to improve reporting and delivering services under the City’s jurisdiction.”

Attempted reforms

The widely-publicized deaths of Osborne, McNeely and Reed prompted City Council members to quickly adopt a number of reforms.

At its June 22 meeting, City Council unanimously passed an amendment to its municipal code that mandates landlords provide cooling centers in common areas in all buildings taller than 80 feet, with over 100 units and senior buildings.

Those systems will be required to operate when the heat index hits 80 degrees or higher. The updated ordinance also requires buildings to offer tenants temporary cooling systems, like window or portable air conditioning units. Those changes take effect in early July.

If not already equipped with a central air conditioning system, all buildings with more than 100 units and senior buildings will be required to install a separate cooling system in common areas by May 1, 2024.The council also amended the city’s municipal code to clarify any confusion about a landlord’s ability to turn on the central air.

“To be crystal clear, the current heating ordinance does not prevent and has never prevented a building owner from disengaging the heating system or engaging the cooling system prior to June 1, at the end of the period when minimum indoor temperatures are mandated,” Matthew Beaudet, the city’s Department of Buildings, said at a city council committee meeting last week.

Ald. Brian Hopkins, 2nd, who worked with Hadden who sponsored the ordinance, said landlords need no punitive incentives to keep their tenants safe.

“They understand that comfort, and now that safety, is at stake and if you get it wrong results can be tragic, as we’ve seen,” Hopkins told the BGA. “The old ordinance was written prior to the reality of climate change and it’s much more likely today that we’ll have a life threatening heat wave.”

Hopkins said City Council may revisit the 311 hotline’s response system as it relates to excessive heat complaints.

After a heatwave in 1995 killed more than 730, the city enacted “a lot of reforms,” he said. “But, like anything, time goes by and good intentions back slide a bit.”

“Chicago’s weather will make a fool of you. When you get it wrong and convert too early people just call and complain … so you really have to try to get it right,” Hopkins said.

Since 2012, 69 heat-related deaths in Cook

Heat is the leading weather-related killer in the U.S., according to the EPA.

Certain groups — Black people, those 65 and older, who have respiratory or cardiovascular illnesses, are economically disadvantaged — are at higher risk for heat-related death, according to an EPA study into climate change

A Better Government Association review of heat-related death records from the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office found that of the 69 heat-related deaths that were reported between 2012 and January 2022, 34 deaths were over the age of 65.

Over half were Black or brown.

The average age of those who suffered heat-related deaths was 62-years-old. Several of those who died also had health issues linked to cardiovascular issues, the leading cause of death for the state since the early 1900s, according to an IDPH spokesman.

Nineteen of those deaths came during a three-day heat wave in July 2012.

At the county level, there is likely no way to adequately determine the total number of heat-related deaths because not all such deaths are reported to the medical examiner’s office.

Trent Ford, Illinois’ climatologist, said the high temps in May were “very very odd” and those deaths are likely because the heat wave happened suddenly, which meant the women — and others in the Chicagoland area — were unable to properly acclimate to the suddenly sweltering temperatures.

“That three-day period (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday) was the third highest excess heat factor number of any heat wave going back to 1870 in Chicago and twice the number during the 1995 heat wave,” Ford said.

“It’s not like the heat wave was twice as bad as the 1995 heat wave,” Ford added. “But the biggest thing about this is not only how unusual the temperatures were but especially how quickly we went from these prolonged cool, cloudy, rainy wet days to the middle of July.

“And not just middle of July, like normal for Chicago, middle of July hot. And so that was a very unusual shift,” he said. “It had the perfect makings for a bad heat wave when it comes to human health.”

Ford said the sudden shift makes it more difficult for everyone — especially higher risk groups infirm — to acclimate.

May’s hot days are likely the start of what could be a warmer than average summer, per weather forecasting models, Ford said. That could mean a higher frequency of days with dangerous heat and more heat-related deaths and hospitalizations.

The warnings came too late for Rye, who last heard his mother’s voice on Mother’s Day.

Rye called from Atlanta and their last exchange was one of reminiscing about his infancy, when Osborne was at Michigan State and her fellow Deltas and fraternity brothers doting on him.

As always, there was the motherly advice on interpersonal relationships and checking in on Rye’s son, her only grandchild.

Along with being an advocate and romance novelist, Rye recalled his mother’s regimented schedule of sending cards sent in advance of friends’ birthdays or holidays and her “irreverent, spark plug” personality, one that led her to always fight for others.

The only child of an only child, Rye said those pieces of his mother now fall to him to carry on.

“There’s a void because she’s gone prematurely,” Rye said.

“​​There are people who are still going to receive cards from her, like, posthumously because she was always in touch,” Rye said.

Three years after becoming the state’s child welfare chief, Marc Smith presides over an agency inundated by crises — rising abuse and neglect complaints, growing vacancy rates among investigators and a litany of children who died in the agency’s care.

Smith, 53, who worked his way up the ranks of the Department of Children and Family Services and became a private sector executive before his 2019 appointment by Gov. J.B. Pritzker, said three years is not enough time to pass judgment on his administration’s record.

In an interview with the Better Government Association, Smith acknowledged the problems, but rebuffed his many critics and defended his record.

“Three years sounds like a long time. But it is not,” Smith told the BGA.

“A lot of these critics are the same critics who have been a part of this system for years, making the same complaints,” Smith added. “I am willing to take the time and take the hits and take the punishment and take the disrespect because I believe that we are doing the right thing.”

A BGA examination of DCFS under Smith found intensifying problems hampering the most fundamental parts of the agency’s mission: Finding appropriate placements for the youth in its care and ensuring the safety of its investigators.

The BGA obtained court permission to review dozens of confidential juvenile court files, interviewed numerous agency employees, and dug out several years of internal data on child placements and worker caseloads.

The examination found a steady increase in the number of Illinois foster children held for weeks or months after a judge ordered their release from detention centers. In other cases, children as young as two years old were held in offices or shelters and others as young as seven were kept in psychiatric hospitals long after doctors cleared them for release, the BGA found.

Since January 2018, when DCFS started keeping a count of foster childred improperly held in such settings, there have been 2,015 cases, according to its own reports to state lawmakers. 

At the same time, DCFS employees are reeling from the homicides of two colleagues slain while making home visits, and speaking out about a lack of support from management.

“Many times, with those interviews, it’s more of a confrontation. That’s just gotten worse,” said Gabriel Nagy, one of many veteran DCFS workers who spoke to the BGA. “My job is to protect the kids but there are a lot of unforeseen dangers. I don’t know what’s going to protect us.”

Smith said improvements are in the works, but “these aren’t things that happen overnight.”

He said DCFS is working to enhance law enforcement partnerships for home visits, and is starting to see improvements in hotline call response times and in the onboarding of new investigators – efforts that took his administration years of hard work.

But some lawmakers and child advocates say the growing problems signal a systemwide failure.

Inappropriate child placements, shoddy service delivery and employee danger are just a few of the problems intertwined with leadership failures, said Cook County Public Guardian Charles Golbert.

“If DCFS had the services it needs for the kids, caseworkers could spend their time doing actual casework as opposed to spinning their wheels for resources that don’t exist,” he said. “DCFS would be able to better retain workers.”

Gov. J.B. Pritzker contends the agency was gutted through a series of social services cuts from 2015 through 2017 — all amid budget disputes between former Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner and disgraced former House Speaker Michael Madigan.

State Sen. Julie Morrison, D-Deerfield, who for years has led efforts to improve the agency’s child-safety record, agreed the previous budget cuts took a toll.

“But you know, how … long do we have to wait to reestablish that because the director’s been there for three years,” she said.

“How long is it going to take to actually establish the number of beds, the capacity that we need?” she added. “And where are these community based services?

“This problem was there when he walked in the door. And I know he’s just one person, but I do feel like we’ve appropriated a lot of funding for DCFS. No one has come to me and said, ‘Gosh, if we only had more money, we could fix this.’ I think we’re at the point where it’s more than just dollars. I think it’s direction.”

A spike in abuse and neglect reports

Juvenile court records reviewed by the BGA detail the abuse and abandonment many Illinois children faced before DCFS took protective custody — and in some cases mistreatment that continued even after the agency intervened.

Consider the 15-year-old Chicago girl who as recently as of last year had spent 500 days in a state-contracted residential treatment facility — long after she was “clinically determined by DCFS” for release, court records show.

“What does a judge do when the department basically abuses a child?” juvenile court Judge Patrick Murphy asked at a September hearing for her case.

She was born to a drug-addicted mother and placed immediately in state care.

But her troubling saga with DCFS began when she was 7 years old and agency employees decided to remove her from her great aunt’s custody over an incident one agency-appointed psychiatrist would later suggest was overblown.

According to Murphy’s court order reviewed by the BGA, the aunt allegedly slapped the girl’s hand when she reached for a hot stove, an incident that began a years-long odyssey including more than 20 foster homes, shelters and residential treatment centers.

“I believe that (her) difficulties began with her removal from the home of (the aunt),” the DCFS-retained psychiatrist wrote in a 12-page report to the court. “There may have been compelling factors for her removal but I did not see them in the records available to me. The removal seemed to be due to a minor incident of corporal punishment.”

She is just one of the hundreds of Illinois foster children with mental health needs housed inappropriately for weeks or months in county jails, government offices and hospitals because DCFS officials couldn’t find suitable homes for them, the BGA found.

In 2021, 343 foster children — some as young as seven — were housed in psychiatric hospitals after doctors cleared them for release, records show.

That is up from the 309 cases from 2019, the BGA found.

“This is a true crisis,” University of Illinois at Chicago psychiatry professor Dr. Michael Naylor wrote in an October 2021 letter to state officials about the improper placements of foster children with mental health needs.

“This is illegal, a profound civil rights violation, and clinically devastating,” Golbert wrote in a November report to a federal court judge.

Another foster child — a 15-year-old charged with stealing someone’s backpack at a South Side bus stop — was locked in the Cook County juvenile detention center for seven months beyond his release date in 2020, even though judges repeatedly ordered him released, the BGA found.

He was among 73 foster children locked for weeks or months in the Cook County juvenile temporary detention center without pending charges during 2021, according to a BGA analysis of court and DCFS records.

That is an increase from the 49 similar cases in 2019, the BGA found.

“Being in the juvenile detention center makes me feel worthless and depressed,” the teen wrote in a two-page letter to the judge overseeing his case last year.

Another 17-year-old foster child was dropped off at a North Side Chicago shelter in June 2021 before state officials shuttled him to four more temporary facilities during the next 10 weeks. Then, DCFS administrators authorized strapping him down for the five-hour ambulance drive to a new shelter in southern Illinois, records show.

He was also among 167 foster children forced to sleep on air mattresses and cots in shelters, government offices or emergency rooms in 2021 as DCFS searched for placements, records show.

That is up from 154 cases the year before, according to the BGA analysis.

Other official documents obtained confidentially by the BGA suggest the actual numbers of foster children improperly held in detention centers, shelters and hospitals is higher than numbers provided by DCFS. In one instance, after the BGA questioned DCFS’ annual report to the state legislature, the agency amended its report to quadruple the number of youth in detention centers from 16 to 64 in 2020.

“Yes, those numbers have been rising because we have seen an increase in the severity of the needs of children in the state of Illinois,” Smith said of the improper child placements.

He said his agency currently is forced to hold youth in juvenile jails, psychiatric hospitals and shelters because the department lacks safe alternatives.

“Safety is the number one concern of the Department of Children and Family Services,” Smith said. “We do not want to step a child out of a safe environment into a chaotic environment, or into an environment that’s not appropriate. It is better than putting them some place where they’re unsafe.”

Under then-Gov. Rauner, Illinois in 2015 embarked on a deliberate mission to decrease the number of youth in large institutions after a Chicago Tribune investigation showed some facilities were riddled by violence, runaways and sex-trafficking.

Illinois lost an estimated 460 beds in private residential treatment centers for youth since then, and DCFS has struggled to create the hundreds of promised therapeutic foster homes.

As of November, there were only 26 therapeutic foster homes — all run by Lutheran Social Services of Illinois. Data provided by LSSI suggests those foster homes are effective in keeping their wards on track.

DCFS is currently negotiating to add 30 new shelter beds, 28 new residential beds for youth with autism or intellectual disabilities, and 43 new emergency foster beds “in the next few months,” according to a recent department plan.

The plan, authored in May, which begins by blaming “the previous administration’s gutting of the social service sector,” says its goal is to add 112 beds within the next 12 months for state wards who need psychiatric or medically complex care.

“There is no scenario in which every effort, reasonable and possible, is not being made by DCFS, working hard on each individual case, to get those children placed in homes,” Smith said.

“What I challenged our private partners in doing in developing new therapeutic treatment foster care models and submitting those plans to us is to be bold, think about doing something different that can help,” Smith said. “If it doesn’t work, we will help you dust off and then do something new.”

The BGA could find only a handful of states that reported similar problems with unlicensed settings in recent years. Other states where the problems have been reported include Texas, Massachusetts, Oregon and Idaho, according to national experts and news reports.

No federal data compares the scope and severity of such improper placements of foster children state-by-state, said Naomi Schaefer Riley, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute whose research focuses on child welfare. “The federal government is not forcing states to report that number,” Riley said.

For now, the backlog in placements for foster children with mental health needs ripples through Illinois’ entire child welfare system, Golbert wrote in a November 2021 court filing.

When one youth is held beyond medical necessity in a psychiatric hospital, that bed is taken from another child who may desperately need psychiatric care. “The entire system backs up,” Golbert wrote. “This impacts all of DCFS’ children.”

The workforce crisis

Multiple DCFS child protective workers told the BGA they still grapple with the fatal 2017 beating of child protective investigator Pam Knight and the January 2022 stabbing death of DCFS investigator Deidre Silas.

The two attacks illustrate long standing concerns with safety for the workers who visit homes to investigate child mistreatment allegations, veteran workers said.

“The issue is six months from now will people still remember the tragic death of our sister?” said Arnold Black, a child protection specialist and supervisor for the department’s Urbana office. “Based on what happened with Pam Knight, I think the fear is that this will go back to the back burner.”

Rising Abuse and Neglect Reports, Growing Investigator Vacancies

In the 12 months before March 2022, investigations into child abuse and neglect reports rose statewide to an average of 7,726 open cases, an 18% increase from the 6,535 such cases open the year before. At the same time, the Department of Children and Family Services saw its vacancy rate among protective workers growing from 9% to 21%.

Source: DCFS court filing from March 2022

After Silas’ death some workers expressed “their concerns (and) fear” prompting Black to go out into the field to assist members of his team. The screaming of one aggressive mother prompted one of two interventions, Black told the BGA.

Bill McCaffrey, a DCFS spokesman, said agency workers have endured only 20 threats or assaults in the five years ending in January, during which they made 2.5 million home visits.

Not true, says the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 31, which represents about 2,800 agency employees. The union reports 20 incidents of threat or assault against DCFS workers in the first quarter of 2021 alone, and 29 more throughout the rest of the year.

McCaffrey said the union’s figures reflect a broader range of threats and violence outside of home visits, including at hospitals, offices, residential facilities or through email or text. Not all warrant notifying law enforcement, McCaffrey said.

Marci Malnar, a 28-year veteran of the department, recalled being summoned to a home in the middle of the night and hearing a gun go off nearby after knocking on the door.

The deputy sheriff escorting her on that visit ran off after hearing the shots, leaving Malnar in the dark with nothing more than a cell phone flashlight to get back to her car, she told the BGA.

On another visit, Malnar said a grandmother was asked to unload the bullets from a shotgun kept by her door. She fired until it was empty.

And on yet another visit, a father shot a handgun into the grass as a member of Malnar’s team approached.

A second-generation DCFS investigator, Gabriel Nagy, recounted the threats he’s heard.

“It’s a unique situation with my dad and I both being in investigations,” Nagy told the BGA. “Several years ago my dad had taken some children from a family, and that father made a threat to my dad, that ‘you’ve taken my children away, I might just take yours away.”

After Silas’ death, the union proposed an array of protective initiatives, some of which dated back to the killing of Knight. On that list were requests for self defense classes; protective gear like bullet- or stab-proof vests; metal detectors in DCFS offices as well as an annual review of field safety procedures, among other measures.

The legislature considered numerous initiatives including: Self defense training; pairing investigators with plain-clothed, retired police officers; and increasing the safety training for employees.

The General Assembly sent only one measure related to employee safety to the governor, a bill that would allow workers to carry pepper spray.

“That’s the only thing we did. We have not gone nearly far enough,” said Sen. Julie Morrison, who recently chaired a legislative task force on DCFS employee safety.

“Anybody who takes on the job as Director of the Department of Children and Family Services is in an impossible situation,” said state Rep. Steven Reick, R-Woodstock.

“I don’t think anybody could walk into that situation and do the kind of job that’s needed” given the cratered morale within the department, Reick said.

“I do, however, strongly resent the idea that the default answer to every question that comes up either to the Governor or to Marc Smith is … that Bruce Rauner gutted the agency,” Reick added. “J.B. Pritzker has had three and a half years of promising that he’s going to do something and at this point, nothing has been done.”

Without tangible improvements, Morrison said, agency workers “don’t have the resources that they need to stay safe … I could never recommend a family member or friend to go into this job. I could never do it. I think it’s too dangerous.”

Since 2015, some 500 child protection staff have left the department, DCFS said in one court filing from late March. The COVID-19 pandemic created “a nationwide hiring crisis that has impacted the child welfare sector acutely.”

In that court filing DCFS acknowledged it wasn’t hiring new workers fast enough to keep up with investigations and rising numbers of children in state care.

Statewide, the agency’s job vacancy rate soared to over 21% this March from less than 9% in March of last year, court records show. In 2021, the agency employed nearly 3,000.

Of those who remain, nearly 35% are managing caseloads that exceed limits set by a 1991 federal consent decree, according to April figures from the union that represents agency employees.

“We have hired aggressively across the state,” Smith said. “Not only within DCFS but within our private partners, we have raised salaries, and it is working. We see consistently that we have high numbers of people who want to join our business. … This is good work, this is soul-fulfilling work, and this is work that people are motivated to do.”

Smith said DCFS is taking steps to protect workers by forging partnerships with local law enforcement agencies to pair officers with agency investigators on high-risk visits.

Investigators and caseworkers also have access to emergency safety features installed on their state-issued phones, the department said in a recent court filing.

DCFS also raised its recruitment staff from two to seven people, and cut the time to onboard new recruits from six months to two. It added recruitment efforts at the Chicago Auto Show and the Illinois State Fair, and brought on retired workers under 75-day contracts.

And the department has been conducting “blitzes” at field offices, in which volunteer staff from other sites sweep in to complete investigations and paperwork, according to court records filed by DCFS.

A new office close to home

One of Smith’s first acts upon taking the helm of DCFS three years ago was to work from a new executive office in an agency field facility in a Joliet shopping mall near his suburban home.

Among some agency workers Smith picked up a reputation for avoiding the public spotlight of the Chicago and Springfield offices.

Smith said the move was part of his career-long mission to be “as close to the ground of the work as possible.”

“Me having an office in Joliet keeps me connected to investigators, child welfare specialists, to moms to dads and to children every day, because I’m present with them,” Smith told the BGA.

“It helps to think about why it’s so important for us to be thoughtful and take our time to make the changes that need to be made, not be swayed by critics who are not thoughtful about this work.”

Lynn Cox recalls the day in 2016 when she and her daughter were told they’d have to vacate their apartment in Old Town’s Atrium Village.

They were swept out to make room for a glittering new luxury highrise Cox simply couldn’t afford.

And Cox, 55, remembers the broken promises made to tenants by their new Canadian landlords and their city council representative, Ald. Walter Burnett, 27th Ward, long touted a champion of affordable housing.

The tenants of Atrium Village were told they could remain in their community and move into new, nicer affordable units in the rising glass spires.

“They showed us pictures of how things would be, which was awesome,” Cox said. Burnett “was basically making the statement that we would move into better housing, and it would be better for the community.

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“They just plain out blatantly lied,” Cox said. “I just feel done wrong. It’s almost numbing.”

An investigation by the Better Government Association shows how a powerful builder deployed money and clout to recast an entire Chicago neighborhood, while long-standing renters say they were abandoned by their alderman.

Burnett went from publicly criticizing the developer — Onni Group — in 2015 for trying to “wine and dine” its way out of its affordable housing obligations to berating colleagues at a 2018 zoning meeting after they tried to slow the project over tenant allegations of unfair treatment.

“This is my ward,” Burnett pointedly told one alderman who voted against Onni’s plan at the time. “You are stepping too far. Don’t get involved in this.”

Burnett’s accommodations to Onni coincided with an influx of cash from the developer to people close to the alderman, a BGA examination of government records found.

In 2015, Onni hired Mazonne “Maze” Jackson, Burnett’s friend and political consultant, to lobby Burnett, eventually paying Jackson $417,500. Onni also pledged $25,000 over five years to a charity run by Burnett’s wife, Chicago Housing Authority official Darlena Williams-Burnett, and in 2020, donated $11,000 to a political action committee she chairs.

One of Jackson’s first reported actions on Onni’s payroll was to organize a fundraiser for Burnett.

After litigation and years of City Hall meetings, Onni eventually agreed to include the affordable units but grouped nearly 70% into a 1970s brick midrise that still stands in the shadow of three other luxury towers — a practice tenants decried as a throwback to segregation.

Jackson declined to answer questions or agree to be interviewed for this report.

“I have no comments because you’re always spinning the stuff negatively,” Burnett told BGA reporters in a brief interview near his City Hall office. “Write what y’all are going to write; I’m OK with it.”

But more than two weeks later, political consultant Alexandra Sims contacted the BGA for a follow up with Burnett at her offices. Burnett answered some questions about the Atrium Village redevelopment but did not address others and cut the interview short. Neither Burnett nor Sims offered new facts to substantially change this report. 

Burnett said none of the money to Jackson, his own political fund or to his wife had any bearing on any of his public actions.

Burnett recalled the fundraiser at Jackson’s office but said he was unaware it was organized on Onni‘s behalf. “I didn’t know it was for Onni,” Burnett said.

Recounting his childhood in Cabrini-Green, Burnett described his lifelong push for affordable housing as “personal.”

“My thing is, as I tried to explain to [the tenants], I fought to keep the affordable housing in place,” Burnett said. “My thing to them was I can’t do everything — I can only be responsible for so much.”

Onni executives — including President Rossano De Cotiis and Chicago-based Vice President Brian Brodeur — declined requests to be interviewed and did not answer a list of questions about their efforts.

Onni instead sent an email emphasizing its commitment to affordable housing in Chicago and in the Atrium Village redevelopment.

“We have honored the legacy of the community while ensuring an economically viable solution to affordable housing for the next 30 years,” Onni Chief of Staff Duncan Wlodarczak said in the email.

Onni is “one of the only companies to deliver a 20% affordable housing commitment, or 300 units of the total 1,500-unit project, all on-site,” he said.

Tenants, with the support of housing advocates and attorneys at the Shriver Center on Poverty Law, filed a 2018 complaint with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to force Onni to adhere to its affordable housing obligations.

Onni quickly settled the case by pledging to include 309 affordable units in the development — though 211 of those units were grouped in the existing midrise.

That settlement came too late for already-scattered tenants such as Cox, who moved to the city’s South Side.

“The redevelopment of our community has gone awry,” wrote 11 “current or displaced” Atrium Village tenants to the former church owners in December 2019.

The BGA review of government records sheds new light on this Chicago corner that was once considered to be a civil rights landmark.

Today, Onni’s luxury towers rise from the corner of Division and Wells streets, dwarfing the remainder of an apartment complex once called Atrium Village.

“You’ve lost the diversity of the neighborhood,” said Pastor Eric Worringer of the Holy Family Lutheran Church, one of four churches that built and owned the original Atrium Village, along with two construction firms.

“The neighborhood is stratified. It’s not diverse. Those are two different things,” Worringer said. “It produces resentment, and it produces frustration.”

A dream deal

The original 309-unit Atrium Village opened in 1978 as a counterpoint to Chicago’s long legacy of racial and economic segregation.

Constructed on a 7-acre swath of vacant lots, it was designed to bridge the mostly white and affluent Gold Coast to the east and the mostly Black and low-income Cabrini-Green public housing complex to the west.

To make Atrium Village mixed income, the four churches used federal subsidies for roughly half the units and market rates for the rest. To ensure diversity, racial quotas were employed — the Department of Justice under then-President Ronald Reagan filed a lawsuit in 1987 challenging Atrium Village’s use of quotas, but the case was settled on the church groups’ terms three years later.

 “If you go to planning school, you’ll read about that case,” said Jon B. Devries, an urban planner who advised the churches and still makes annual tours of the place. “Fortunately, Atrium prevailed.”

Waves of change swept through the Near North Side in the 1990s, as then-Mayor Richard M. Daley redeveloped the neighborhood and began to demolish Cabrini-Green.

Burnett played a role in that contentious history, as many former tenants said the city didn’t follow through on its promises of good jobs and the right to return to their former neighborhood, the BGA reported last year.

Real estate values in the area exploded as the once-predominantly Black neighborhood turned into a mostly white one.

In a November 2011 press release, the Atrium Village church consortium announced it was seeking a new developer. The site was rezoned to allow a much larger complex with 1,500 units.

“Staying true to the original mission, 20% of the apartments in the new complex will be income restricted,” the church leaders said.

The church owners filed a “restrictive covenant,” essentially requiring future developers to spread those low- and moderate-income units throughout the new buildings. The city’s affordable housing ordinance similarly requires low-income units to be equally dispersed throughout projects. The rules were established to curb racial and economic segregation and protect low- and moderate-income residents.

In late August 2014, Onni bought Atrium Village for $50 million, a deal that gave a $1.5 million bonus to each church, according to interviews. Parishioners at LaSalle Street Church were handed $500 checks with a short note of instruction — “Do good in the world” — the Rev. Laura Sumner Truax wrote in her book Love Let Go.

“It was a dream deal,” Devries told the BGA.

“They’re trying to wine and dine me”

Within months, tenants and news reporters began fielding rumors Onni was looking to escape its affordable housing commitment.

Amid the controversy, Burnett announced publicly he would hold Onni to its obligation, the news site DNAinfo reported in November 2015. 

“They’re trying to get out of it,” Burnett said. “It’s not right. They’re trying to wine and dine me. I’m like, ‘Nah, just do the affordable housing.’”

A few weeks earlier, records show, Onni penned a lucrative lobbying contract with Jackson, Burnett’s longtime friend and political consultant.

Before he was hired by Onni, Jackson previously worked as a consultant for leading Illinois political figures of both parties. His lobbying partners have included Michael Noonan, a former staffer to then-Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan, and Victor Reyes, a City Hall patronage boss under then-Mayor Daley.

Records show Jackson, in addition to being a lobbyist, has formed at least a dozen companies, including a parking valet service and a construction firm. As a radio personality, Jackson has highlighted issues important to the Black community and coined the catchphrase: “What’s in it for the Black people?”

Jackson outlined his mission for Onni in a six-page presentation filed as part of the company’s required lobbying disclosures. He said he could help the company pay fees in lieu of adding units for low-income tenants.

“The Onni Group would prefer not to build the affordable housing units,” Jackson wrote.

Jackson also identified the primary target of his lobbying as Burnett, “who is Chicago’s top affordable housing advocate, is currently opposed to the project. … The Onni Group has had a challenge getting the support of the alderman for the Atrium Village project.”

Jackson’s lobbying firm — The Intelligence Group — would “provide the Onni Group with the information, strategy and tactics necessary to complete its Chicago-based projects in the most efficient manner possible.”

Jackson has called Burnett a close friend and credited the alderman with getting him into politics. Both men worked for the organization of Secretary of State Jesse White, who has lived in the Atrium Village midrise for decades.

Jackson and Burnett bonded in part because they were accepted by political leaders after criminal convictions, Jackson told RollingOut.com. Jackson pleaded guilty to misdemeaners in three cases, including two felony charges in Champaign County, records show, and Burnett has talked about his two-year prison stint for his role in a Kankakee armed bank robbery.

Jackson helped Burnett market a rap album and Burnett supported Jackson’s unsuccessful run for aldermanic office, their interviews show.

That friendship also resulted in business for Jackson. 

Between 2001 and December 2015, Burnett’s political funds paid Jackson and his companies $28,048 for work on his campaigns, according to state campaign disclosures.

Records show the last check the Friends of Walter Burnett Jr. committee wrote to Jackson came in November 2015 for $200. That was two months after Onni signed an agreement to pay Jackson $60,000 per year, public city lobbying reports show. The contract increased to $78,000 in 2020 and continues to this day, records show.

In June 2016, among his first reported projects for his new lobbying client, Jackson hosted a political fundraiser for Burnett, spending $1,460.97 for “table chair linen rental” and “event catering,” city lobbying records show.

Burnett told the BGA he didn’t know how Onni selected Jackson to be its lobbyist.

“I didn’t talk to Onni; he did that on his own,” Burnett said. “I think he said they hired him because they wanted to have a relationship with me because they know I was mad about affordable housing, and nobody wants to be on the bad side of the alderman.”

Burnett added “I think [Jackson] saw an opportunity, and I guess Onni bit, but that’s between him and Onni.”

Throughout 2016, Burnett and Onni representatives appeared at tenant meetings. One poster for a tenant town hall meeting quoted Burnett: “I pray and hope that this continues to be holy ground as a development that helps people in our community from all walks of life.”

“My main thing was trying to keep the development affordable,” Burnett told tenants at one meeting, according to DNAinfo. “I was fighting for the affordable folks, and that’s what I try to do all the time.”

“An ARO runner this morning!!!”

While Onni and Burnett were navigating contentious meetings with Atrium Village tenants, city officials were trying to determine in August 2016 whether Onni had attempted to “sidestep” affordable housing requirements by using a slightly different address to apply for a key permit, according to emails reviewed by the BGA.

 “It is an obvious attempt by the developer to sidestep their obligation,” veteran City Hall planning coordinator Erik Glass wrote colleagues in an Aug. 31, 2016, email. “I will be damned if I let that go,” he said in another email that day.

Then-City Hall project manager Kara Breems notified colleagues with an email citing the Affordable Requirements Ordinance, or ARO.

She wrote: “We have an ARO runner this morning!!!”

Then-housing commissioner David Reifman reached out to Burnett for a phone call, the emails show.

Reifman, Glass and Breems did not respond to BGA interview requests.

Two current top city housing officials — both of whom spoke on the condition they not be identified — said Onni ultimately complied, and they don’t think the company was trying to sidestep its obligations at the time.

By fall 2016, Onni was proposing a new plan to meet its affordable housing obligations: It would put a majority of the low- and moderate-income units in the aging midrise building, an idea that some city officials said defied the ARO because it did not equally disperse the low-income tenants but clustered them.

“Now, the developer is proposing to put the majority of units in one existing midrise building, which earlier plans had proposed to demolish. The building would then be 100% affordable,” Breems wrote in an Oct. 7, 2016, email to colleagues. “Concentrating all the units in one building runs counter to city policy.”

Amid a flurry of news media reports, Burnett said Onni acted responsibly by offering to pay tenants’ moving expenses, return their security deposits, and help them look for a new place to live, the Chicago Sun-Times reported in December 2016.

In April 2017, Burnett wrote a letter to the city zoning administrator expressing support for Onni’s plan. “I am writing to express my support for the proposed minor changes,” Burnett wrote.

Burnett told the BGA he embraced Onni’s plan to condense the affordable units into the midrise “because they committed to keeping the Atrium building. It helped the affordable people and the non affordable people.”

Saying Onni treated them like “bald-headed stepchildren,” tenants, along with Shriver Center attorneys, filed their federal fair housing complaint in 2018.

“Onni Group and the city of Chicago are segregating and isolating the vast majority of affordable housing, predominantly minority renters, into the one remaining, aging building,” the complaint alleged.

As the fair housing complaint was pending, Onni made its $25,000 pledge in August 2018 to the charity run by Williams-Burnett, Burnett’s wife.

The nonprofit brought in $68,503 that year to support schoolchildren. Williams-Burnett declined to comment. Burnett posted a video showing the oversized mock check Onni handed him on his YouTube channel, WBurnett27.

Onni settled the fair housing complaint in September 2018 and has refurbished the original Atrium Village midrise building, scraping and repainting the outer balconies and creating a large day care center and comfortable TV lounge inside, the BGA found from site visits, interviews and public records.

“It looks way better than I have ever seen it,” Truax wrote in a newsletter after a December 2018 tour. But even with “a new gym [and] spiffy furniture,” Truax added, “there is a feeling of ‘separate but equal’ vibe to it.”

That month, City Council members, including Zoning Committee Chair Ald. Tom Tunney, 44th Ward, tried to force Onni to pause development or add more affordable housing in the luxury towers.

Burnett excoriated Tunney at the December 2018 public hearing.

“I know you are running for office, but don’t keep playing with my ward,” Burnett told Tunney. “This is my ward. You are stepping too far. Don’t get involved in this.”

The redevelopment of Atrium Village embittered some tenants but spurred new revisions to Chicago’s ARO, housing advocates told the BGA. 

“The redevelopment of Atrium Village was, I think, one of the catalysts for the recognition that we needed to revamp the Affordable Requirements Ordinance and actually move it to be a program that creates affordable housing units,” said Shriver Center staff attorney Emily Coffey.

A whiter, wealthier neighborhood

Burnett and Onni play outsized roles in Chicago affordable housing.

No other City Council member approaches Burnett’s impact on affordable housing construction in Chicago, the BGA analysis found. Thirty percent of the 19,400 new units subject to the city’s Affordable Requirements Ordinance since 2016 were built in Burnett’s ward, records show.

Burnett’s affordable housing victories include 59 on-site affordable units in the 586-unit development at 845 W. Madison Ave.

Yet overall, developers in Burnett’s ward have produced only 8% of their ARO-subject units as on-site affordable housing, the BGA found.

That puts Burnett in the middle of the pack among the 28 city council members with developments subject to the ordinance during that period.

For its part, Onni is among Chicago’s leading developers of highrise apartments subject to the ARO, the BGA found.

Of the 12 largest developments subject to the ARO since 2016, Onni constructed five of the towers with more than 2,000 units, the BGA found in an analysis of 218 ARO-subject developments during the last six years. No other developer came close to Onni’s record.

Onni told the BGA its new Atrium Village redesign is “one of the most innovative developments in the provision of affordable housing in Chicago.”

Onni also provided entry-level jobs to members of the four original congregations, one nearby church pastor told the BGA.

And Onni has poured more than $1 billion into rental, office and hotel projects around the loop, Crain’s Chicago Business reported in March. 

In two luxury developments in Ald. Brendan Reilly’s 42nd Ward — 369 W. Grand Ave. and 352 N. Union Ave. — Onni constructed 729 units and set aside only 18 as affordable, the BGA found. Onni paid the city $9.9 million in fees in lieu of building on-site affordable units in those two projects, the BGA found.

Onni also donated $20,800 to Reilly’s campaign accounts. Reilly did not respond to a request for comment.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot in a December press release touted the “unprecedented investments for affordable housing creation and preservation” since she took office in 2019. Burnett co-chaired the task force that oversaw those revisions to the ordinance.

The BGA found the citywide production of on-site affordable units in new developments peaked at 283 in 2017 and then decreased steadily to 213 units in 2020. The number of affordable units produced on-site increased to 252 last year, according to Chicago Department of Housing records.

Census data shows the neighborhood surrounding the Atrium Village redevelopment got whiter and wealthier from 2010 to 2020, a trend amplified by the redevelopment of Cabrini-Green.

The Black population in that census tract decreased from 40% to 25% during that decade. And the median household income soared from $35,139 in 2010 to $89,968 in 2020.

Among those who left the neighborhood was Cox.

“I loved that spot,” she told the BGA.

With her daughter finishing a master’s degree downstate, Cox said she is eyeing retirement — to a state south of Illinois where she plans to grow Christmas trees.

She said she’s not bitter today about the changes to her former community, but Chicago’s affordable housing programs could do more to protect low- and moderate-income tenants.

“Change is inevitable,” Cox said. But “the way it occurs doesn’t have to cause pain in the community.”

“It wasn’t just me, you know. Pricing people out is sad.”

BGA investigative reporter Casey Toner contributed to this article.

(This story has been edited to correct information regarding Mazonne Jackson’s conviction history. Although he was charged with felonies in two separate cases, both cases were resolved after he pleaded guilty to misdemeanors. We regret the error.)

The former head of the state’s Veterans’ Affairs office used her political campaign fund to write two checks totaling $50,000 to her mother last month, a move state elections officials say could be a violation of state election laws.

Linda Chapa LaVia said the checks — logged as January expenditures in her required campaign filings — were to repay a loan her mother made to help her start her political career about two decades ago.

But records at the Illinois State Board of Elections show her campaign made no disclosure of a loan to her committee, launched ahead of her successful campaign to become a Democrat state representative from Aurora in 2003. It also does not show up in the original documents creating her political fundraising committee.

State elections officials said failure to report that income accurately is a violation of the state’s campaign disclosure laws. After communication with elections officials following the BGA’s inquiries, LaVia returned the $50,000 to her campaign account Feb. 18, records show.

LaVia described the campaign snafu as an oversight.

“A lot of paperwork got lost in translation from one account to another and working on a full-blown campaign,” said LaVia, who was appointed by Gov. J.B. Pritzker to head the Illinois Department of Veterans’ Affairs in 2019.

“I’m trying to reconcile everything,” she said. “If mistakes were made in the past, a lot of it wasn’t my doing.”

LaVia said the logistics of her campaign at the time were run by the political operation of then-Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, who resigned last year amid a federal corruption investigation. Madigan did not return requests for comment.

“Between me opening my account and the speaker going into the account and taking it all over, I don’t even know” how the loan was never reported, she said, adding Madigan operatives handled everything. “You’re the candidate, and that’s all you’re doing.”

LaVia resigned as head of Veterans’ Affairs in January 2021 following reports of dozens of veteran deaths at state nursing homes with lax COVID-19 protocols.

Officials at the board of elections, the state agency in charge of investigating campaign disclosure violations and issuing discipline, said they are in communication with LaVia in attempts to resolve the issue.

“We don’t know where this goes from here,” said Matt Dietrich of the state elections board. He said he cannot recall a time in which a former politician was fined or rebuked for improperly using funds in their campaign accounts.

“This is the first time, that we can recall, where we’ve had this circumstance of a loan made to a committee, it being repaid after the fact, but it was never accounted for throughout the committee’s history,” Dietrich said.

LaVia has filed a new document — called an A1 — to clear up what she said was a paperwork mistake.

Reformers Decry Lax Laws

Election reform groups have long advocated for disclosure laws with more teeth.

“It’s incredibly frustrating,” said Jay Young, executive director of Common Cause Illinois, who has advocated for laws to mirror state’s such as California, where officials “go deep into all manner of contributions, loans and how those dollars are coming in and going out the door.

“We obviously didn’t get that here,” he said. “There’s not much risk of enforcement and kind of a slap on the wrist if you get caught.”

A review of board of elections records shows more than 150 campaign disclosure complaints filed since Jan. 1, 2017.

He said the board has issued fines to some officials who failed to file campaign disclosure reports or amendments within the statutory time frame required. Dietrich said in addition to investigating complaints, the board’s Division of Campaign Disclosure also conducts random audits of up to 3% of all campaign accounts every year.

Although enforcement against candidates for improperly spending their campaign funds is rare, one notable example came in 2016, when former Illinois State Rep. Frank Mautino — now Pritzker’s auditor general — used $250,000 in campaign funds for fuel and repairs to his personal cars. He said he and his associates were using the cars for campaign work.

After a process that bounced from the board to the courts to the Illinois Supreme Court and back to the board, state election officials decided not to pursue discipline against Mautino.

Under state law, former elected officials can keep their campaign accounts open indefinitely, Dietrich said.

A look at the campaign accounts of former elected officials amount to millions of dollars, and the law restricts use of all campaign funds to political activity. Notable examples of former officials with accounts still open include Madigan, former Illinois Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka, former Gov. Jim Edgar — who now uses his fund to support candidates and policy ideas — as well as former Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan.

“There are so many political committees, and it’s not realistic to go through all of them with a fine-tooth comb,” said Alisa Kaplan, executive director of Reform for Illinois. “But it needs to audit enough of them to deter wrongdoing. And in enforcement, the board needs to provide enough leeway for some honest or trivial mistakes, so as not to prevent good candidates from reaching  public office, while still sending a message that people have to follow the rules.”
 
Kaplan and Young pointed to laws elsewhere, such as those in New York City, with more proactive disclosure rules.
 
“We have to overhaul [and] replace what I would say is very weak and limited disclosure forms,” Young said. “There are other options; this isn’t rocket science; we can just duplicate what is being done — what is working well — in other states.”

‘My Political Days Are Over’

The $50,000 LaVia paid to her mother, Mary Lou Chapa, first showed up in a Jan. 17 campaign filing as two $25,000 “principal” payments. In her filing, LaVia said the payments were a reimbursement for a “startup loan for campaign from 04/01/2003. Previously reported as contributions.”

She said her accountant is working with the board of elections to try to document the loan, and she has provided bank records from 2001 through 2003 to help reconcile the problem.

When LaVia and her team opened her committee in 2001, it should’ve reported the $50,000 loan. But instead, the fund’s balance at its creation showed up as zero dollars, Dietrich said.

“At minimum, they’ll have to file a letter explaining all of this; then there are other possibilities that our disclosure division is looking into now as to how to handle this,” he said. “They may have to file 20-plus years of amended reports to account for this $50,000 that’s missing.

“If what they’re telling us is true, there should’ve been an extra $50,000 balance on all of those reports,” Dietrich said. “That money was never showed as being held by the committee.”

The board of elections has recommended LaVia do two things: Get an accountant, and do as thorough an audit of the committee’s finances as possible; and amend the committee’s quarterly reports as far back as they can be amended.

The former state representative’s campaign committee could face a fine for the late filing of its statement of organization, said Dietrich, adding the board has not yet received a formal complaint on the matter.

“Every business day between when they received the loan and when they formed the committee would be a $50 fine up to $5,000,” Dietrich said. “Did she give it in October of 2001, in which case 60 days before the committee was organized? We just don’t know. … If there’s no paperwork, then I’m not quite sure how we could calculate that fine.”

Loaning a committee money isn’t prohibited under state law, nor is it prohibited to give a loan to a family member’s campaign fund — but not reporting it is.

A review of campaign finance records shows LaVia did report two other campaign loans in 2002 totaling $35,000 from her mother and her mother’s realty company. Her campaign records indicate those loans were repaid within months. 

LaVia said she plans to close the fund and make sure “all paperwork is submitted properly.”

“You may wish you’d done X, Y or Z or had more insight into what was going on, but you don’t because you’re told to be a candidate,” she said. “We’re trying to make sure that we’re working with the board and only close the account properly once this is figured out.”

LaVia said she has no further need for a campaign fund: “My political days are over.”
 

As Black and Latino politicians continue to struggle for power on the Chicago City Council, the likelihood of a citywide referendum — followed by an expensive and lengthy court battle — grows along with political tensions.

New boundaries for the city’s 50 wards are being redrawn based on the 2020 census, leaving the potential for political winners and losers who could change the city’s political dynamic. They are also planting the seeds for what one powerful alderwoman says could be a $40 million legal fight over the fate of just one seat.

“Forty million dollars is a bunch of money,” said Ald. Michelle Harris, 8th, a member of the Black Caucus and head of the council’s Rules Committee. It “is a citywide facade program, not a citywide legal battle (fund). A fraction of this would give every citizen in Chicago PPE. … Every citizen in Chicago could have one mask free.

“But we’re going to give it to attorneys to fight over the fact that you won’t be able to get one ward?”

While remaps happen every 10 years, this redrawing of council boundaries has the potential to be one of the most significant in recent memory because it is happening at a critical juncture in Chicago’s political history. The decades-old political machine dominated by the Daley family and powerful white aldermen, such as now-indicted Ald. Ed Burke, is slipping away, leaving the decisions this year to have even more potential impact.

“The Latino Caucus is trying to get the power they think they deserve now,” said Dick Simpson, a former alderman and longtime political science professor at the University of Illinois Chicago.

“It’s always easier to go up from a number than to go down,” Simpson added. “The more seats you have now, the better positioned you are for battle” during the next remap fight.

One seat but not two

Every decade, the national census count prompts council members to rejigger the ward map, and a boom over the past decade in the Latino population is at the center of the debate. By contrast, the number of Black residents calling the city home has fallen. The two council caucuses representing Black and Latino residents are digging in their heels.

A group of Latino council members and their allies say the number of wards represented by a majority of voters who identify as Latino should rise to 15 from 13, enough to match the more than 40,000 additional Latinos living in Chicago compared to 10 years ago.

Most of the city’s Black council members are willing to concede one seat — but not two.

In the middle are the 18 white council members, who expect the number of seats they control to stay the same. The only thing on which all three sides agree is the need for the city’s first-ever ward with a majority of voters of Asian descent.

The two entrenched sides have been bickering over their proposals for months, and if they don’t reach an agreement by mid May, the issue is scheduled to go to the city’s voters in a referendum.

“We’re still continuing to try to negotiate,” said Ald. Gilbert Villegas, 36th, chair of the Latino Caucus. “But a negotiation has to have two sides that are willing to compromise. … Right now, we feel that compromise has only been one-sided.”

Villegas and others in the caucus insist the census supports their proposed map.

Census figures released in 2020 show the Latino population jumped from 778,862 in 2010 to 819,518, and now comprise a little over 30% of Chicago’s 2.7 million residents, which would equal 15 seats.

The Latino Caucus crafted a map that creates those 15 majority-Latino wards, and its leaders say they won’t budge for anything less.

The alternative is a map crafted by Harris’ Rules Committee, which supports 14 majority-Latino wards, up one from the current map.

Readying for a referendum fight, the Latino Caucus filed its map with the city’s clerk in early December. A third group, the independent Chicago Advisory Redistricting Commission, also submitted its version of a map that creates 15 majority-African American wards, 14 majority-Latino wards, as well as two wards with a Latino population over 45%. That independent map would need the support of 10 aldermen to be part of the referendum question.

Simpson was an adviser to that independent advisory group.

Villegas said it likely would cost more than $100,000 for his side to wage a political campaign to persuade voters. He’s skeptical of the Rules Committee process since Harris’ failed attempt to defeat opponents of her map by lowering the number of votes needed to pass it, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

Harris insists her process is a fair one, and most council members who’ve gone through it have “not been offended.”

“I just kind of resent the fact that I feel like the Latinos are being the crybabies,” she said. “I’m not messing with folks, I’m not saying, ‘Kill your project.’ … I’m not the crybaby in the group.”

“If 15 people can hold 35 people hostage because they simply aren’t getting 100% of what they want, they’re having a temper tantrum — and the taxpayers are going to be the ones paying for it,” Harris said.

While the Latino population has increased, the city’s Black residents have declined by more than 84,000 to 788,000, compared to more than 872,000 in 2010. The map drawn by Harris’ committee, and supported by the Black Caucus, allows for 17 wards with a majority of Black voters — one less than the current map.

Ald. Jason C. Ervin, 28th, the head of the Black Caucus, said giving up two wards would violate the Voting Rights Act of 1968, disenfranchising Black voters who still make up 29% of the city’s population.

Harris said she’s disappointed in how she’s been treated by a Latino Caucus that has “never wanted to concede — they only have demands.”

“You’ve got a loaf of bread, talking about you’re hungry, but you’ve got a loaf of bread under your arm, and you’re not even acknowledging that loaf,” she said.

‘Depends on how much grudge there is’

Both sides say they are still negotiating and hope to avert a protracted battle, including a citywide referendum. But with only one seat in the balance, room for a compromise seems doubtful.

The last time voters weighed in on a citywide ward map, the 1992 vote was rendered moot by a federal court battle that lasted six years and cost taxpayers $20 million in legal bills.

With that history as a guide, a federal judge — or an appellate panel — could once again make the final decision.

Harris has repeatedly estimated the legal costs for such a battle this time around could reach $40 million. Experts interviewed by the Better Government Association were split on the likelihood of a 1992 repeat.

“It’s slightly more likely because if it does go to referendum, … it means the voters will have decided, rather than the aldermen themselves,” said Jim Lewis, a senior research specialist at the University of Illinois Chicago’s Great Cities Institute.

“So I think it makes it a little more likely that one of the groups will sue somebody,” he said. “It kind of depends on how much grudge there is.”

Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University who was called to testify by the Rules Committee as an expert witness in the redistricting process, said he doesn’t think there’s a legal issue for the courts to decide.

“In terms of the Voting Rights Act, there’s no distinction between the two plans,” he said. “I don’t see the basis for a voting rights challenge here — they’re expensive, time-consuming and the city has plenty of problems of its own.

“It would not be a benefit to the city for feuding members to engage in expensive, protracted litigation.”

Robert Vargas, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, said a referendum is likely, but court intervention is “doubtful.”

Vargas said courts have typically given local authorities flexibility in redistricting decisions, only intervening in cases with “really egregious forms of disenfranchisement.”

“What’s really up for debate in the two maps is … one seat” and who will lose it, Vargas said.

“I really doubt a judge would look at that and say, ‘Oh, this has a huge effect on either of these communities,’” he added. “There are instances of this kind of disenfranchisement happening right now in places like Texas, and the (U.S.) Department of Justice is currently litigating. … Sure, I think a court case might arise, but I have really high doubts that it’s actually going to yield the intended outcomes for the folks filing the lawsuit.”

Lightfoot still on the sidelines

Mayor Lori Lightfoot has stayed out of the war of the wards, urging council members to figure out a solution to avoid a referendum.

But even in victory, there are no guarantees.

On the current city council, for example, there are several council members who represent wards with voter demographics different from their own race or ethnicity.

Burke, Ald. Susan Sadlowski Garza, 10th, and Ald. Marty Quinn, 13th, for instance, represent majority-Latino wards, while Matt Martin, 47th, who is Black, represents a ward with a majority-white population.

Currently, the council has 20 Black members, 12 Latino and 18 who are white, despite a ward map that was drawn in 2010 with 13 wards with a majority of Latino voters and 18 with a majority of Black voters.

Harris said those stats undermine the Latino Caucus’ demand for more wards because candidates have shown they can get elected in wards regardless of their race.

Ervin, chair of the Black Caucus, accused the Latino Caucus of wanting to “hold everybody hostage.”

“We’re only asking for what we’re due; they’re asking for what they’re due plus some, and they want to take ours in the process but won’t go across the aisle to deal with another community,” Ervin said, adding it’s “sad” the Latino Caucus has “pitted themselves against us,” rather than their other white colleagues.

Villegas said the Latino Caucus isn’t pitting itself against anyone, and must pursue all the Latino seats possible to avoid diluting that demographic’s voting power. The Rules Committee map “puts us in a position that, we feel, is not reflective of the city.”

“The Latino population has grown for the second decade in a row. To not take that into consideration in the reapportionment of the wards is something that I’m not prepared to let happen again, given that we did not capitalize on the seats the last decade.

“If the coalition map wins, I think you’ll see an opportunity for more Latinos and more African Americans to be elected as council members,” Villegas said. “When you’re talking about a $16.4 billion budget, the more people of color who are at the table having the ability to put forward recommendations for how that should be appropriated, the better.”

Ervin said the Black Caucus has made some preliminary estimates for a referendum campaign, and the group is currently in the process of putting funding and programming together in case the process is placed in the hands of voters.

Ervin wouldn’t say how much the campaign might cost. But he said, with redistricting being a mystifying topic and the primary election pushed back, there would definitely be a focus on educating city residents, so “they can understand what’s at stake.”

“We have to come to a conclusion one way or another, or the city residents will do that,” Ervin said. “Right now, the case is poised for referendum — there is a map filed, there is a referendum scheduled because a map has been filed. The question is will a second map be found.”

The death of the machine

Vargas, the University of Chicago sociology professor, said lack of a strong central powerbase within the local Democratic Party has prompted a new power struggle.

“Having a new state speaker, having a new mayor, seeing the downfall of some of these old key players like Burke, although they’re not entirely down yet, just shows how the whole structure and organization of the Democratic Party is much more in flux than it has ever been,” he said.

In the past, relationships between the council, the mayor, the state legislature and the governor were more “cohesive,” he said. Redistricting was run by mayoral allies such as Burke and former Ald. Dick Mell, council members who could lean on people to get what they wanted.

“It requires different means to resolve (issues),” Vargas said. “In the case of redistricting, it’s looking like that will be a referendum.”

Simpson agreed, saying a power vacuum enables the infighting that used to take place behind the scenes to happen front and center.

Unlike mayors of the past, Lightfoot doesn’t have a “rubber-stamp” city council. That’s a key reason for the mayor’s reluctance to wade into the controversy.

“No matter which side she would pick, or what she would do, she would likely create permanent opponents on her other legislation,” he said.

UIC’s Lewis isn’t convinced the fighting this time around is related to political shifts and pointed to intra-council squabbles during previous remap processes.

“There’ve been times where there just wasn’t anyone who could pull together interests that were very different, as the Latino interest is this time,” Lewis said.

A new map, whether by referendum or compromise, will likely bring few changes in policy. Most of the fallout will affect individual council members the most — especially those whose wards are moving to new neighborhoods altogether.

Villegas said “democracy is always an ugly process, and it gets messy sometimes.” But he hopes his colleagues will be able to move forward after the process is over and work together.

“Will feelings be hurt? Yes,” Villegas said. “But do I feel that it’s beyond a point where colleagues have to understand what’s in the best interest of the people? I would hope not because we’re elected to do a job there, and the job we’re supposed to do is making sure that we’re representing our respective wards and residents of the city of Chicago.”

Ervin said the ramifications of the new map will likely stem from the “lasting impacts of these conversations,” talks that could make governing more difficult in the future.

“Relationships have been damaged,” he said. “I think it will create a much harsher and much different climate in the city council than there has been in the past.”