Fifteen City Council members — including a mayoral challenger and a retiring member who may join the field — are saying, “No, thanks” to a 9.62% pay raise.

The Chicago Bears are cracking open their playbook this week, providing a glimpse of the stadium and entertainment complex planned for Arlington Heights.

Master plan renderings of the team’s proposal for the 326-acre former Arlington Park Racetrack site convey the massiveness of the proposed project, but not much detail other than a stadium surrounded by green space, roads and a “mixed-use district” of anonymous-for-now structures.

For the first time in five years, union membership is up in Illinois just as a battle is brewing over an amendment on the November ballot regarding collective bargaining.

According to the Illinois Economic Policy Institute, Illinois gained about 16,000 union members last year even as the number of workers in unions declined nationally.

The Chicago City Council will see significant turnover next year as a wave of aldermen will not be running for reelection. The reasons vary but here’s a list of aldermen who started 2022 in office but won’t be running to keep those seats when the municipal elections are held in February.

Some minority marijuana licensees want the state of Illinois to loosen ownership regulations to make it easier for them to raise the money necessary to build out new retail shops.

The state legalized recreational marijuana in mid-2019, with the goal of creating social justice by diversifying ownership in the cannabis industry. The state finally issued 185 new dispensary licenses this summer, coinciding with a steep decline in the value of marijuana stocks, an increase in interest rates and signs that marijuana sales are leveling off.