For the first time, Springfield will be spending more on its fire and police pension payments in the next budget year than it’s expected to collect in property taxes.

The pension costs are predicted to exceed property taxes by $600,000, according to Bill McCarty, Office of Budget and Management director.

Nearly five years after shuttering a record number of under-enrolled schools, Chicago once again confronts the same stark realities: plummeting enrollment and more than 100 half-empty school buildings, most on the city’s South and West sides, according to a WBEZ analysis of school records.

Chicago Public Schools has lost 32,000 students over the last five years, nearly the same enrollment drop as in the 10-year period leading up to the closures of 50 elementary schools in 2013. Those missing students could fill 53 average-sized Chicago schools.

More than 15 years after the federal court system went paperless, Cook County Circuit Court clerks still spend their days ferrying stacks of Manila case folders and entering handwritten judges’ orders into an antiquated computer interface.

Many judges and attorneys still use carbon paper — a cotton-gin-era innovation for simultaneously making multiple paper copies.

But after years of lobbying by frustrated attorneys, the county will soon take an important step toward catching up with a world that already does much of its business online

The existence of a code of silence within the Chicago Police Department was finally coming to the forefront in November 2012 when former homicide detective Joseph Frugoli was sent to prison for an off-duty drunken driving crash that killed two young men.

Four days before Frugoli’s sentencing, a federal jury found that a code of silence allowing problem cops to act with impunity contributed to the high-profile, videotaped beating of a female bartender by off-duty Officer Anthony Abbate.

The Cary School District 26 Board approved its 2017 tax levy request Monday.

A debt service abatement could lower the district’s tax rate from 4.2998 percent in 2016 to 4.0357 in 2017, but some homeowners might see an increase in property taxes paid to the district.

McHenry County College passed a flat property tax levy request for the fifth straight year.

On average, the board’s action saves taxpayers more than $20 a homeowner over five years, according to a news release from the college.