It’s just a coincidence that Happy Death Day hit movie theaters not long before Mayor Rahm Emanuel unveiled his 2018 budget with a big speech before the City Council. The film is a grisly Groundhog Day in which a college student wakes up over and over again to the same day that culminates in her getting murdered. Her challenge is to decipher the murderer’s identity and kill him before he kills her again.
In this passage Emanuel’s referring to the school aid distribution bill, signed last month by his new best friend, Illinois governor Bruce Rauner, which brings roughly $200 million a year to help Chicago pay its teacher pension bills. So that’s good.
He was referring, in part, to the dreaded 2008 parking meter sale, in which the city received about $1 billion up front by agreeing to turn over as much as $10 billion in parking meter proceeds over the next 75 years to a group of investors put together by Morgan Stanley.
The mayor also spent a good chunk of his speech praising himself for making tremendous progress with the Chicago Public Schools. (Speaking of municipal entities using fiscal smoke and mirrors to pretend its books are balanced!) “Chicago’s education system,” he said, “has gone from a national laggard to a national leader.”
Not surprisingly, the mayor made no mention of Karp or her report in his budget address.
