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Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Rahm finds $100M for air conditioners. Does Ari have an A/C company client?

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Rahm finds $100M for air conditioners. Does Ari have an A/C company client?:



Rahm finds $100M for air conditioners. Does Ari have an A/C company client?

A cool $100M for A/C. 
A hundred million here. A hundred million there. It soon adds up.

But that doesn't seem to be a problem for Chicago's mayor, who can always find $100M lying around whenever he needs it for one of his favorite projects. It just so happens that contributing the city's required share to the pension fund or paying teachers and municipal employees what they deserve is not one of those projects.

This week, air conditioners are.
Chicago Public Schools put a $100 million price tag Tuesday on Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s sudden mandate to air-condition classrooms in 206 schools, even as CPS faces a $1 billion shortfall and many other pressing capital needs.
Irony is that the CTU pushed to make air-conditioned classrooms, especially following Rahm's longer-school-year mandate, part of the contract negotiations back in 2011. The mayor's response then was:
“Everything here is down to two final issues, and it’s not air conditioning, OK? ...We don’t go on strike for air conditioning.”
The change in course wasn’t lost on the teachers. “We were told it wasn’t  Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Rahm finds $100M for air conditioners. Does Ari have an A/C company client?: