Taxpayers in the metro-east saw their property taxes rise faster than their incomes from 2009-2013.

Using census data and figures from the Illinois Department of Revenue, the Belleville News-Democrat found that:

▪  St. Clair County saw median property taxes, adjusted for 2014 dollars, increase 34 percent over the five-year period

An Illinois appeals court has ruled that a law defining what not-for-profit hospitals have to do to get tax breaks is unconstitutional. The ruling is yet another setback for not-for-profit hospitals, which have come under increased scrutiny in recent years over their tax exemptions.

The 2012 Illinois law was meant to provide clarity around exemptions for hospitals.

The law says that the value of certain charitable and other services offered by a hospital must exceed the estimated value of its property tax liability if it’s to get a property and sales tax exemptions. The law was passed after the Illinois Supreme Court, in 2010, upheld a decision to revoke Provena Covenant Medical Center’s property-tax exemption, worrying other nonprofits across the state. (The Urbana, Ill., hospital is now part of Presence Health.)

Crime statistics often are confusing, misleading and incomplete — and rarely more so than at the start of a new year, when cities start reporting last year’s crime totals. Numbers out this week show a surge in homicides in many cities, adding urgency to the usual early-January headlines, but you should view them with extreme skepticism.

The New York City Police Department, for example, has been trumpeting what it calls record-low crime rates in 2015 — in the commissioner’s media appearances, in a press release and in tweets — without mentioning that homicides, rapes and robberies all rose from a year earlier. Meanwhile, the police chief and his predecessor are embroiled in an ongoing spat over the reliability of the department’s reporting of murder and shooting stats.

Late last month, former NYPD commissioner Raymond Kelly said current commissioner William Bratton tried to deflate the city’s shooting totals by directing officers not to count people injured by broken glass caused by gunfire, or whose clothes but not bodies are hit in shootings. Bratton sayssuch incidents have been omitted consistently since the department started tracking shootings during his first stint as commissioner in 1994. But he pointed out that both types of shootings are counted as aggravated assaults in official stats reported to the FBI.¹

An Illinois center that assists manufacturers has received a $25 million federal grant.

The funding to the Illinois Manufacturing Excellence Center comes from the U.S. Department of Commerce and will help small businesses keep up with changing technology.

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin announced the grant this week at Bradley University in Peoria where the manufacturing center has its headquarters.

OAK PARK, just outside Chicago, is known to architecture aficionados as the home of Frank Lloyd Wright, who built some fine houses there. This small suburban village also has another distinction: it is racially mixed. In the 1970s it vigorously enforced anti-segregation laws; today the “People’s Republic of Oak Park”, as it is sardonically known, is 64% white, 21% black and 7% Hispanic. “Oak Park stands out so much,” says Maria Krysan at the University of Illinois at Chicago. But it does not stand out quite as much as it used to.

America remains a racially divided country, and Chicago is one of its most segregated cities. The south side is almost entirely black; northern districts such as Lincoln Park are golf-ball white; a western slice is heavily Hispanic. Yet the Chicago metropolis as a whole—the city plus suburban burghs like Oak Park—is gradually blending. For several reasons, that trend is almost certainly unstoppable.

City Council members are showing signs of flexing their collective muscle given Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s low approval ratings in the wake of the Laquan McDonald fallout.

Aldermen are poised next week for a showdown on a couple of fronts. First, whether or not the city’s inspector general should have power to police them; second, on whether or not to approve $3 billion in new borrowing.

Aldermen, even those traditionally allied with the mayor, are starting to step out to take independent action, seizing on the fact that he may be politically weakened.

If there’s a bright side to the Chicago teacher’s strike as it continues to victimize (for no good reason) hundreds of thousands of kids and parents, it’s that it will provide an opportunity for many Chicago-based entrepreneurs and education start-ups.

Kids attending charter schools, after all, are still in class. But for entrepreneurs, the opportunity goes way beyond new charter schools. Chicago entrepreneurs have a unique opportunity to demonstrate that more and more effective out-of-class and self-directed (or computer-enhanced) learning opportunities are available to students of all ages.

These new tools for teaching have multiple advantages: Flexibility, ease of access, cost-effectiveness, scale, and, importantly, appeal to young learners. These attributes suggest the direction in which all educators, and education, need to travel.