Hey BGA - Look Into This

Since the Better Government Association seems to have nothing better to do than hassle citizens, we've made a list of things they might find the time to look at when they aren't doing Rahm's dirty work:

• Waste in the Chicago Public Schools: we posted here about warehouses and supply rooms full of tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars of books, computers, equipment, supplies, etc., squirreled away due to incompetence and outright fraud in the purchasing system. We did this 4 or 5 years ago. Never a peep from the media or the BGA.
  
• Waste in the City: it's no secret that contracts throughout the city are "padded" by directing them through "approved minority vendors." Most times these "contractors" are drop boxes that take orders, then run out to Wal-Mart, Costco, OfficeMax or similar stores and buy whatever the contract calls for, then they add anywhere from 10%-to-50% to the price. How about cutting costs there by buying direct from the supplier?
• $15 million in "leftover" NATO money: this one writes itself, yet the media won't make a move to investigate or call for accountability. These are our "Watchdogs"?
• TIF money: Ben Joravsky has been carrying this burden all by himself for years and publishing it in a paper that gives itself away FOR FREE! We'll see how much coverage is forthcoming in the near future since the Slum Times bought The Reader and might be persuaded to exercise some "editorial discretion" since they've been carrying water for Rahm lately.
• Maggie Boxes: one of the bigger boondoggles of recent decades. Concrete planters that take up an entire turning lane of traffic, reducing sight lines and hampering emergency responses when both lanes on both sides are crowded and no one can pull to the right for ambulances and police - no more traveling up the center of the street, so we hope no one is bleeding to death. And what about the maintenance of these monstrosities? Christy Webber Landscaping pulls in how much a year? And contributes how much to local pols?
• Bikes Lanes: A decade of pushing greener alternative transportation options resulted in 0.5% of the city riding bikes to work all the way up to 1.5%! Astounding! And at what cost? Millions? Tens of millions? And now Rahm is adding hundreds of miles of bike lanes at the low low price of $140,000 per mile, choking off vital transportation routes, scenic boulevards and necessary thoroughfares that light industry needs to move goods in and out of the city, not to mention reducing available parking, complicating winter plowing and lord knows what in future pavement repairs. The Slum Times noticed yesterday that bike crashes are up 38% while they still readily accept that crime is down 10%.
• CompStat is under fire everywhere: Milwaukee has been caught downgrading serious assaults; New Jersey cities were caught lying; New York is about to pay Officer Adrian Schoolcraft $50 million for his whistle blowing on the CompStat fraud while two New York professors (one being a retired NYPD Captain) have a book that spells out, step-by-step, how CompStat fudges numbers and lies to the public, all for political gain. Chicago politicians and police brass have bought into the system that may cost taxpayers millions in the years to come. And why is it that the FBI won't accept Chicago crime statistics for their annual crime report?
• What have we gotten for that CeaseFire million dollars anyway?

There's a starting list. We're sure the readers can come up with more. Investigative journalism is just about dead here and the BGA isn't doing what it was supposedly founded to do, but rather supplies a job to a washed up anchorperson whose own family is connected to the Chicago Machine.