Erin Allen: Good morning. It's Wednesday, I'm Erin Allen and this is The Rundown. So, remember that email situation with Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration? When they were asking folks in CPS to volunteer for her campaign. Well apparently it did not stop there. My colleagues here at WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times recently got a hold of some documents. And they show that since April, Lightfoot’s re-election campaign has sent more than 99 hundred emails to Chicago Public Schools and City Colleges employees. The emails include general fundraising pitches, requests for help gathering petitions and an event invitation to the head of City Colleges, Juan Salgado, who reports to the mayor. In response, the campaign says they've worked to purge their contact lists of government employee email addresses. Now, it is unclear whether employees themselves signed up to receive the emails. But ethics experts say the campaign should have been more proactive about making sure government employees weren’t on their email lists. In a statement, the campaign reiterated it was a mistake to reach out to city employees.

If you’ve been listening to The Rundown for the last few weeks, you know that from some of our surveys, we’ve been noticing that Chicagoans are worried about crime in the city. And Cook County and Illinois officials are picking up on it too. They’re talking up 25 million more dollars for anti-violence efforts in Chicago and nearby suburbs. The money will help fund street outreach, jobs, counseling and services for shooters and potential shooters. Avik Das heads up the county’s Justice Advisory Council.

Avik Das: The sense of diminished safety of opportunity, the trauma, the loss of life. This has been felt most acutely in our Black and brown communities that have suffered from historic disinvestment. This grant initiative focuses investment in these communities.

Erin Allen: The medical examiner’s office reported 927 homicides in Cook County last year. Out of that, 20% were outside of Chicago.

And some news of the craft cannabis industry in Illinois. People with grower, infuser and transporter licenses now have some more breathing room, now that the state has extended the deadline for when they need to be operational. My colleague Alex Degman is reporting that they now have until either February or December of 2024. Before, the deadline was next Wednesday. But Lisbeth Vargas Jaimes, who is executive director of the Illinois Independent Craft Growers Association, says money is still a problem.

Lisbeth Vargas Jaimes: While we were very grateful that there had been a pathway to funding through the state, there has not been a clear access to the funding. So again, it brings on this conversation of access versus reach.

Erin Allen: Vargas Jaimes says license holders are still having a hard time raising private capital to open their cannabis businesses.

There’s a new movie and TV studio on Chicago's South Side. It’s called the Regal Mile Studios. Derek Dudley is an executive producer of Showtime's The Chi and the visionary behind it the studio. He was on WBEZ’s daily talkshow, Reset, and he said the project will include job training and development for South Side residents.

Derek Dudley: And I think that's very important for me because what I don't want this to do is become a tool for, as we've seen in a lot of our communities, gentrification. 

Erin Allen: Dudley says he hopes the studio will help Chicago become some thing like what Atlanta has going on since similar projects have been launched. Ground was broken on the Regal Mile Studios in the South Shore neighborhood last month.

And a few quick hits before we get to the wild wild weather today. A beloved comedy set in Chicago is coming to an end after its third season. Yesterday, HBO announced that South Side, has been Canceled. And some fans are not trying to hear it. People took to social media to praise the show and criticize HBO. And I'm talking boos and hisses. And the Resurrection Project is opening its fifth affordable housing development. It’ll have fifty-three units, spanning two properties along South Racine and Ashland Avenues, over in Pilsen’s Historic District. Developers say the rentals are part of a strategy to help prevent Pilsen residents from being displaced.

Alright as for the weather today, the National Weather Service has a warning of potentially hazardous weather throughout the day in Cook, DuPage, Will, McHenry, Lake, Kane, Kendall, Grundy and Kankakee counties. A winter storm is expected, heavy rain and wind, with freezing rain and sleet near the Wisconsin border. Temperatures in Chicago are in the mid to low 30s.

That’s it for the Rundown. This afternoon we’ll hear the lovely story of a Chicago poet. It’s from the Chi Sounds Like show on our sister station, Vocalo. 

Kimberly Dixon-Mays: To hear the nuances and to hear the influence of the language that comes from Mississippi that's still very alive. Even if the migration was a couple of generations back. I just love the language

WBEZ transcripts are generated by an automatic speech recognition service. We do our best to edit for misspellings and typos, but mistakes do come through.