"People want to smoke marijuana in places that they couldn’t before because it was taboo and illegal," a cannabis consultant told the Sun-Times. "Just like a bar, just like coffee, this a huge experiential thing."
Any two aldermen can move to "defer and publish," which delays action for one meeting without explanation. The move is likely to start with downtown Ald. Brian Hopkins.
Ald. David Moore said the Lightfoot administration offered substitutes, such as renaming the Dan Ryan Expressway. That had "racial overtones," he said. "Keep it on the South Side. South of like 35th Street. Let’s be honest. Keep it in the Black community," Moore told the Sun-Times.
Brian Ernst / Sun-Times
A former video store three blocks south of the Chicago Ridge police station, revived as a video gaming bar, has gotten caught up in two federal criminal investigations in the past three years.
As Terry Ferguson and his son Timothy Ferguson were working on converting the shuttered video store into a bar, he already was the target of a sting operation in which a federal agent bought guns from a food truck owned by Ferguson, who also had been peddling cocaine.
Ferguson’s arrest in October 2018 ultimately led to the end of his son’s dream of opening the bar.
Brian Ernst/Sun-Times
If someone wants to put up a building in Chicago, the process can be as muddy as our baseball diamonds in the spring thaw. Whether and how the developer needs a zoning change can be tricky enough, and then there’s the towering question of “aldermanic prerogative.”
It’s a political courtesy City Council members allow one another. If a particular alderman doesn’t want something approved in his or her ward, the others are unlikely to vote it through.
It confers enormous power not only on aldermen but on community groups able to raise a fuss. At its best, it’s a veto for something a neighborhood doesn’t want; at its worst, it reinforces segregation. It’s also given some aldermen cover to solicit bribes.