* State Scoop…

Tammy Roust, who previously served as the Illinois Department of Innovation and Technology’s chief data officer, was rehired this week to serve as the state’s chief artificial intelligence officer after the quiet departure of Kader Sakkaria after just a month on the job.

Roust served as the state’s CDO from November 2019 through October 2020, during the height of the COVID‑19 pandemic. Sakkaria, who was tapped to serve as CAIO in June, appears to have departed. His LinkedIn shows that he joined the professional services firm Marsh as its global head of data strategy in July. According to the Illinois State Comptroller’s website, Sakkaria’s last pay date was July 24, and he received a total of $9,000 from the state for the work between June and July.

StateScoop has reached out to DoIT for comment about Roust’s hiring and Sakkaria’s departure, but did not hear back before publication.

While she was with the state as CDO, Roust built and deployed the state’s contact tracing systems during the public health crisis by integrating multiple platforms and giving those tools directly to local health departments, according to her LinkedIn page. She also built an automated pipeline for hospital availability reporting, which she said reduced staff time by 96% and cut time-to-analysis from hours to minutes.

*** Statehouse News ***

* Rockford News First | NIU, IDOT announce $40M partnership to lessen environmental impact on state roads: The partnership will establish NIU’s Northern Illinois Roadside Ecology Program, bringing together researchers to study how transportation projects affect wetlands, wildlife habitats, endangered species and surrounding communities. Northern Illinois Center for Community Sustainability Director Matthew Deitch says roads can have consequences beyond what drivers see. “These are long roads that interrupt corridors that were here long before we were,” Deitch said.

* Sun-Times | Handful of competitive suburban races rev up November General Assembly elections: The Illinois Democratic Party is spending heavily to help Syed with her campaign. In September alone, the party and a committee led by Illinois Senate President Don Harmon — with the aim of bolstering Democrats’ majority — contributed almost $1 million to Syed, records show. Affordability and access to health care are among her top priorities, says the Palatine native. “Knocking on doors, I see that pain and I see that struggle,” Syed says.

*** Chicago ***

* Block Club | Why Did So Many Alders Skip A Domestic Violence Hearing? Most Who Missed It Won’t Say: Block Club reached out to the committee members who were not present in City Council chambers — though they may have been online, which doesn’t count toward a quorum: Hall, Gregory Mitchell (7th), Derrick Curtis (18th), Jeanette Taylor (20th), Silvana Tabares (23rd), Jason Ervin (28th), Taliaferro, Anthony Napolitano (41st), Jim Gardiner (45th) and Angela Clay (46th). Seven of those alderpeople didn’t respond: Taliaferro, Hall, Mitchell, Curtis, Tabares, Ervin and Clay.

* Tribune | Chicago mayoral race kicks off with the traditional hauling of the signatures: Five candidates showed up on the first day to turn in petitions, earning them a draw in the lottery for the first spot on the February ballot. Among them were, in order of arrival, businessman Willie Wilson, lobbyist John Kelly, U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley, Chicago Housing Authority commissioner Matt Brewer and Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias. Missing was Mayor Brandon Johnson, whose team said he was focused on his fourth budget address that’s scheduled for Wednesday morning.

* Crain’s | Supreme Court passes on Chicago parking-ticket case, but two justices sound alarm: The U.S. Supreme Court today declined to take up a challenge to the city of Chicago’s policy of immobilizing and confiscating all vehicles registered to an owner with as few as two unpaid parking tickets, with two justices expressing “serious concerns” about the city’s “vast and lucrative” vehicle-forfeiture system. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, suggested Chicago’s system may be an unconstitutional taking of property under the Fifth Amendment — which prohibits the government from seizing private property for public use without providing the owner just compensation — because it can impound not only the vehicles involved in parking violations, but also an owner’s other vehicles.

* Tribune | Caleb Williams’ return energizes the Chicago Bears: Brad Biggs’ 10 thoughts on the Week 6 win: They’d been able to win two of the three games he missed with a hamstring injury, but the Green Bay Packers showed no fear of the Bears passing game last week and played top-down to stifle the critical running game. The offense needed all of the dimensions Williams brings with his athletic ability and arm prowess. Top-tier quarterbacks find ways to elevate the players around them and are able to make up for deficiencies or holes the team might have elsewhere on the roster.

*** Cook County and Suburbs ***

* Daily Herald | I-490 rising: Cost overruns, delays trail monumental O’Hare corridor: Interstate 490 is crossing the finish line over budget and tardy, records show. The Illinois tollway’s new road swirling around the western flank of O’Hare International Airport will connect drivers with I-90 near Des Plaines, Route 390 in Bensenville and the Tri-State in Franklin Park. It is “the most complex undertaking in the Illinois tollway’s history,” spokesperson Joelle McGinnis said Friday of the Elgin O’Hare Western Access Project that includes I-490 and extending Route 390

* Crain’s | DOJ alleges racial bias in Evanston reparations program — and seeks to shut it down: Evanston’s program of reparations for Black citizens does the very thing it aims to remedy, discriminating on the basis of race, the U.S. Department of Justice claims in a document filed in a federal court Friday. That’s why DOJ wants the 7-year-old program, which to date has distributed about $5 million, stopped and the city fined for violating the Fair Housing Act, U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros and attorneys in DOJ’s Civil Rights section wrote. Filed Oct. 16 in the U.S. District Court for Northern Illinois, the complaint-in-intervention follows Judge John Kness’s ruling last week allowing DOJ to join an existing lawsuit against the reparations program, a move DOJ requested in June.

* NBC Chicago | Schools issue statement after racist, homophobic comments reported at football game: Kevin Watts, a member of Evanston Township’s marching band, described what he experienced Friday night on the field. “The n-word, the f-slur, that’s personally what I heard,” Watts said. Kiro Tabor, also in the marching band, said they were harassed by students from New Trier High School. It started during their pregame cheer just under the rival school’s student section. “This line of boys in front of us just kind of starts yelling the n-word at me, hard E-R,” Tabor said. “I was a little shaken by that, and then obviously, you know, saw the whole thing happen with Kevin.”

* CBS Chicago | Amazon Prime Air drones now making deliveries in south suburbs, causing mixed reactions from residents: According to Amazon, there are 21 drones at the Markham center and they aren’t impacting jobs, but instead handle small deliveries while drivers continue delivering all other packages. Concerns still remain, as pointed out by those who shared cell phone video with CBS News Chicago from a Homewood neighborhood delivery — they’re loud. “It was decently noisy!”

* Daily Herald | Preliminary plans for development on old Pheasant Run Resort site get OK from St. Charles City Council: The project is slated to include businesses like Chase Bank, Valvoline Instant Oil Change and Dutch Bros Coffee, with the development of some of the other lots set to require future city approval. The overall project calls for a total of 18 to 25 businesses, with a construction cost of $70 million to $100 million. In question by some council members over the course of the discussions about the proposed project has been the number of drive-throughs permitted as part of the development, as well as the possibility of things like car washes or gas stations being built on the site. Some aldermen also expressed concern with the project’s overall concept.

*** Downstate ***

* IPM News | C-U Reparations Coalition receives $1M to help repair harms caused by slavery, systemic racism: Trask read a statement from the anonymous donor who said he’s a white man in Champaign County from the baby boomer generation. The donor said he wants to help “repair the damages from slavery, the Jim Crow era, and current mass incarceration and other forms of discrimination caused by systemic racism.” The donor also said one of his biggest concerns is C-U’s wealth gap, specifically focusing on housing and healthcare.

* Illinois Times | Sean Grayson’s conviction will stand: An initial filing in September by Grayson’s lawyers after Grayson’s death from cancer while in the custody of Rhode Island officials as part of an agreement with the Illinois Department of Corrections asked that Grayson’s conviction be thrown out because of a legal doctrine known as “abatement ab initio.” The next day, however, lawyers for the 32-year-old former Sangamon County sheriff’s deputy moved to withdraw the motion and said they wanted to refile it, along with other legal documents with a copy of Grayson’s death certificate, at a later date. Grayson’s attorneys, Dan Fultz and Mark Wykoff, never renewed their motion. Fultz declined comment when contacted by Illinois Times.

* Southern Illinois Now | Secretary of State Bomb Squad called to dispose of grenade in rural Centralia: A rural Centralia man reported that a person hired to do work at his home left behind a grenade. The Marion County Sheriff’s Department reports the incident occurred at a home in the 1400 block of Zion Hill Road on Saturday afternoon. The sheriff’s department called the Secretary of State Bomb Squad to determine if the grenade was live. The conclusion was that the grenade was capable of being used, but was empty.

* WCBU | Tazewell County Veterans Assistance Commission expanding its services and scope: Superintendent CJ Pulcher joined the agency in June. Since then, he said, he has been able – with county board approval – to expand the staff from one full-time employee and one part-time employee to six full-time veteran service officers. “That increases our capabilities exponentially,” Pulcher said. “We can take three to four clients each day, and my 1.5 veteran service officers, their schedules have been packed two weeks out. So, we’re going to grow from a capability of doing roughly 30 a week to about 90 a week.”

*** National ***

* ProPublica | Scammers Are Stealing Millions From Food Stamp Recipients. Congress Could Fix It — but Won’t: EBT cards are not a particularly high-value target compared with bank cards. (The average monthly SNAP benefit is about $350 per household.) But funding boosts to SNAP during the pandemic temporarily increased benefit amounts, and profits could be considerable if you skimmed hundreds of people’s card information every month. Skimming teams, often run by Romanian gangs, pivoted. With cloned magnetic-stripe cards, they started buying up huge quantities of SNAP-eligible products like energy drinks and baby formula that are easy to store and resell. […] Yet congressional leadership has continually blocked legislation that would fund chip EBT cards nationally, despite universal support for the measure among Democrats and significant support among the Republican rank and file. For instance, House Committee on Agriculture Chairman Glenn Thompson, a Republican from Pennsylvania, said at a hearing in March that chip technology is “very effective.” But he shut down a bipartisan proposal to upgrade EBT cards with chips, citing unspecified budgetary constraints.

* Center on Budget and Policy Priorities | Ballot Measures Restricting State Revenues and Citizen Initiatives Would Impede Needed Investments and Supports: State and local governments need flexibility and sufficient revenue to respond to pressing challenges in both good times and bad.[3] Yet, some November measures would do the opposite by locking tax restrictions into a state’s laws or constitution, reducing policymakers’ options to address fiscal challenges and increasing reliance on revenue sources like sales taxes and fines and fees, which ask more of people earning the least. Some measures before voters this November would also strip local lawmakers of power over raising needed revenues, which could sharply erode communities’ ability to adequately support K-12 schools, emergency services, libraries, and other needs.

* AP | Supreme Court agrees to review a Reconstruction-era ban on distilling spirits in private homes: Attorneys for the plaintiffs in both cases argue that Congress could ban a broad array of activities inside private homes — including cooking, gardening and remote work — under the government’s interpretation of the 19th century law. “The importance of this case and the questions it presents could hardly be overstated,” the plaintiffs’ lawyers wrote. “It presents fundamental questions of the extent of federal power and the powers reserved to the states and the people.”