It looks like a divided City Council may be headed for a showdown vote next week over the thorny issues of ethics and oversight.

Ald. Michele Smith (43rd) said Wednesday she has gathered signatures from 26 aldermen — enough to force a vote on her stalled ordinance empowering Inspector General Joe Ferguson to investigate aldermen and their employees.

A signature on a parliamentary procedure known as “Rule 41” does not guarantee 26 votes on the ordinance vehemently opposed by the City Council’s two most powerful aldermen, Finance Committee Chairman Edward Burke (14th) and Budget Committee Chairman Carrie Austin (34th).

Chicago will head to the municipal bond market next week with a $500 million bond issue amid uncertain pension funding requirements and political turmoil.

The general obligation refunding bonds are scheduled to be priced through Citigroup on Jan. 12, according to bond sale documents released late on Tuesday. The sale comes as state legislative fixes to address Chicago’s $20 billion unfunded pension liability remain up in the air and Mayor Rahm Emanuel struggles with political fallout from controversial police shootings, including calls for his resignation.

Chicago’s current budget relies on a bill passed by the Illinois House and Senate that would reduce city payments to its pension funds covering police and fire fighters. The bill has not been sent to Governor Bruce Rauner, who has been critical of the measure.

The Springfield City Council next week will consider formally asking the state of Illinois to start paying the millions of dollars’ worth of utility bills it has racked up as the state budget impasse drags on.

Aldermen will vote on a resolution requesting that Gov. Bruce Rauner and the General Assembly designate utilities as an “essential service” and authorize paying the more than $9 million that’s owed to City Water, Light and Power, which includes overdue bills of more than $6 million.

The resolution notes that having millions of dollars in overdue bills “is causing a hardship to the operation of the city of Springfield.”

Chicago’s law department is examining more than three dozen open cases that were being handled by a former top city attorney who resigned this week after a federal judge accused him of hiding evidence in a fatal police shooting, a department spokesman said Wednesday.

Bill McCaffrey said Jordan Marsh was either the supervisor or lead attorney in 37 police misconduct cases at the time the judge issued his ruling. McCaffrey said the decision to look at the cases was made by the head of the city’s law department, Steve Patton, and that there are no plans to examine closed cases that Marsh worked on since joining the department in late 1997.

In a 72-page opinion Monday, U.S. District Judge Edmond Chang accused Marsh of hiding evidence and lying about it later in his work representing the city in a civil lawsuit brought by relatives of Darius Pinex, a 27-year-old black man shot and killed by police during a 2011 traffic stop in Chicago. Chang tossed out a jury’s findings in April that the shooting was justified and ordered a new trial.

Seven years after former Mayor Richard Daley pushed through his much-loathed $1.15 billion deal to lease the city’s parking meters, a former executive has been quietly charged with taking kickbacks to steer a multimillion-dollar contract to install the privately owned meters.

Philip “Felipe” Oropesa, 56, of Marietta, Ga., is due to be arraigned Jan. 22 after he was charged in U.S. District Court last month with one count of wire fraud, court records show.

The charges allege Oropesa, who was vice president of government relations for LAZ Parking, took about $90,000 in bribes in exchange for steering a $22 million contract to supply and install the parking meters to a company identified only as Company A.

The “I” in IPRA is supposed to stand for independent.

Yet the former chief of Chicago’s Independent Police Review Authority routinely consulted with Mayor Rahm Emanuel‘s staffers as they struggled to contain the damage after the shooting of a black teenager by a white cop in October 2014.

Emails show that the statements attributed to then-IPRA Administrator Scott Ando were vetted and tweaked by the mayor’s communications staff and the city’s top lawyers. Ando also passed along lists of police misconduct cases under review by prosecutors and sent links alerting City Hall to news coverage.

Is it time for Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner to throw in the towel? To give up on reforming Illinois, and instead agree to let House Speaker Mike Madigan and the Democrats continue to have their way in Illinois?

That seems to be what the editorial board of the Post-Dispatch is suggested in “State of dysfunction,” but it’s a terrible prescription for Illinois.

First, having a state budget isn’t a panacea for Illinois’ many troubles. If recent history has taught us anything, it is this: A bad budget can be worse than no budget.

Illinois’ months-long budget impasse has a new set of victims — thousands of Chicago car owners.

Chicago drivers have been hit with a spike in parking tickets for expired registrations since theIllinois Secretary of State stopped sending out mailers to remind them to renew their license plate stickers this past fall.

According to Chicago Department of Finance data, city ticket writers wrote 4,230 more tickets for expired registrations in November and December of 2015 compared to the same two months last year. Expired registration violations rose from a combined 70,857 for November and December in 2014 to a total of 75,087 for November and December in 2015 — a 6 percent increase.

Mondelez International’s allergy-free unit, Enjoy Life Foods, will move its lone manufacturing facility to southern Indiana from Schiller Park in the second quarter in a bid to expand capacity fourfold.

The move will result in 125 to 150 job losses in the Chicago area, though all plant employees were offered employment at the new plant in Jeffersonville, Ind., about 350 miles south of Chicago.

Enjoy Life, a so-called “free-from” food manufacturer, makes snacks and other products free from dairy, wheat, egg, soy, fish and certain nuts. It plans to retain its corporate headquarters in Chicago, near O’Hare International Airport, which employs about 50 in sales, marketing, finance and product development…

The financially troubled suburb of Harvey will not be able to collect property taxes in 2016 after county officials determined the city’s ordinance to collect the funds — filed without the approval of the City Council — is invalid.

Last month, Mayor Eric Kellogg and his political ally, City Clerk Nancy Clark, filed the ordinance with the Cook County clerk’s office as required by law. However, the measure had been previously voted down by the majority of the council after weeks of bitter infighting over what some members say is the mayor’s refusal to provide them with information about city finances.

A spokesman for Cook County Clerk David Orr said after consulting with the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, officials concluded the levy filed by the mayor and city clerk “was not legally valid.”