1 Park patrol
In an effort to curb violence, the police department will deploy off-duty cops to patrol Chicago parks at night. The plan is to put two cops each in 20 parks and pay them overtime. It will cost the city about $250,000 this year and $4 million next year. [Sun-Times]
2 OT fever at city hall
Speaking of overtime pay, Mayor Emanuel has been handing it out like Halloween candy. His budget team argues it’s better than hiring new cops or other city workers who’d also get benefits, including pensions we can’t afford. [Crain’s]
3 Pension jackpot for Blue Island bros
Speaking of pensions, get a load of this. The Rita brothers, who are like the Daleys of Blue Island (in that their dad was mayor and they’ve each made a ton of money off local government), are both in line to collect on three government pensions apiece. State Rep. Robert Rita is also a Calumet Township supervisor and a former Cook County analyst; when he turns 60 he can collect from the pension funds for all three of those jobs. His annual take could be more than $118,000. [Sun-Times]
4 Super-school shuffle
A shuttered school building in Humboldt Park will be the new home to the Chicago High School for the Arts, the Sun-Times has learned. The news irritates denizens who sent their kids to the closed school, but it’s a relief for ChiArts, which has outgrown its building in Bronzeville. [Sun-Times]
5 Tour of Eataly
Eataly, the giant Italian food court opening this month on Ohio Street, will be cavernous and noisy and it will seem to go on forever, the construction manager tells Grid’s Meg Graham. It’s designed to suck you in and keep you there for a long time, which sounds a little frightening until you think of all the salami. [Grid]
6 Google: Give us your government’s data
Google’s Margo Georgiadis, the Chicago-based VP for the Americas, told a crowd of municipal officials here Friday that the search gorilla wants to get its hands on all the data cities have. That way, you wouldn’t need to search Google for stuff because Google would know what you want to know before you know. And life would be far better, trust her. [Forbes]
7 Google: The government can’t have our data
Meanwhile, Georgiadis’ boss Eric Schmidt blasted the NSA for spying on Google’s data centers. It was “outrageous” and maybe illegal for the agency to hack 300 million-plus user phone records that Google had collected and stored in order to make those people’s lives better, trust him. [Wall Street Journal]
8 If we can put a man on the moon …
… we damn well ought to be able to get salad from a vending machine. Meet the Chicago entrepreneur behind this achievement. [Grid]