Erin Allen: Good morning. I'm Erin Allen and this is The Rundown. It's Monday y'all, the weekend is over, but I hope you got some rest because your heart may depend on it. The Chicago based American Heart Association is sharing tips for maintaining a healthy heart this holiday season, and for the first time that includes getting a good night's rest. My colleague Nereida Moreno has more.

Nereida Moreno: Experts say a healthy amount of sleep is essential for helping prevent heart disease. It's part of "Life's Essential Eight," a new checklist from the American Heart Association. Dr. Danny Luger is a preventative cardiologist with Rush University Medical Center. He says the holidays are a good time for people to reset and think about lifestyle changes. 

Danny Luger: They really recommend that you do two things in the bedroom: it's sleeping and sex. That's it. You shouldn't be in bed on your phone, you shouldn't be in bed watching TV.

Erin Allen: Other recommendations include quitting tobacco and being more active. Hey, take care of yourself. 

Today is the deadline for candidates to submit their petitions for the municipal election in February. This includes people running for mayor, City Council and the district councils, which are a new public office meant to give Chicagoans a voice in how their communities are policed. They were created in response to years of protests against police misconduct. Come February, 66 community members will be elected to the district councils. Three people will be elected from each police district and their job will be to serve as the eyes and ears of a community wide commission that has the power to shape public policy. My colleague here at WBEZ, Anna Savchenko, is reporting that this is the first time that the district council seats will appear on the ballot. As of Friday, 55 people had submitted their petitions, according to the board of elections. 

A couple of weeks ago, my colleague Mawa lqbal had a story on Illinois voters passing a constitutional amendment this month, guaranteeing workers the right to collective bargaining. And that had us wondering, where does that leave independent contractors? Over the weekend, Mawa went to get that question answered.

Mawa Iqbal: Michael Leroy says the current language doesn't include workers in the gig economy like Uber drivers or freelance artists. He's an employment professor at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, who says he could see follow up legislation that mirrors the so called ABC test used in other states.

Michael Leroy: A simple three part test of who is an employee. Is the individual subject to the controls of the work organization, is this in the usual course of business for the employer - those are the two major factors.

Erin Allen: Leroy says this would narrow the occupations considered to be contract work, granting more workers the right to organize. 

So we've been talking here and there about the SAFE-T act in Illinois, and it's set to go into effect eliminating cash bail in a little over a month. There has been heated debate about the impact it will have on public safety. David Olson is a criminal justice researcher at Loyola University, and he says it's hard to predict what will happen, but a lot of confusion can be cleared up by looking at what is currently happening. He's gathered data from counties across the state and found that most people accused of crimes, including serious crimes, already get released from jail at some point before their trial. Olson says most people detained in jail are currently there for just relatively short stints. 

Abortion is still legal and accessible in Illinois, and a few aircraft pilots are helping to get pregnant people here and to other states, where they can access abortion care. Elevated Access is a fledgling Illinois nonprofit that started back in April. Since then, they've recruited almost 1,000 volunteer small craft pilots to ferry people. The pilots not only volunteer their time, but they pick up the cost of flying, which can total hundreds of dollars for a single flight. There are some risks to this; antagonism and harassment from anti-abortion groups and potential legal threats. So pilots are hoping to remain relatively anonymous. But the Elevated Access founder says they've received hundreds of inquiries from interested pilots and people seeking abortion care alike, and he says donations are pouring in. Elevated Access keeps passenger information completely anonymous, and the organization can fly patients, physicians, clinic staff or even supplies. 

And a few quick hits before we get to weather. Just because you don't qualify for public aid like SNAP food assistance or SSI, doesn't mean you don't need help as the price of everything continues to rise. Several Chicago organizations are taking a different approach to providing assistance, from connecting people in need with helping neighbors, to providing cash assistance in the form of mutual aid fundraising. Check out a list of these organizations and their programs at WBEZ.org. And this past weekend marked 35 years since former Chicago Mayor Harold Washington died of a heart attack. Tens of thousands of people filed through City Hall to pay their respects on Friday. And right now also a WBEZ.org you can listen to excerpts of programs on our station featuring Washington and hear more about the Chicago institutions he shaped.

As for weather, we've already seen the coldest part of the day. It's getting up to the mid 40s this afternoon with sunny skies, partly cloudy this evening, low around 40 degrees. And that's it for now, coming up this afternoon: Did you know that people with disabilities actually walk and use transit for trips at a higher percentage than people without disabilities? I know right? That's interesting. We'll chat with a UIC professor about just how accessible the Windy City really is for people walking and wheeling around. That's coming up at 2pm on the rundown. I'm Erin Allen. Talk to you then.

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.