We are proud to announce that Friends of the Parks, a non-profit organization focused solely on improving parks in the city of Chicago for more than 30 years, recently honored Alderman Fioretti with its Legislative Award for his work on our parks.

Since being elected, the alderman has made improving and expanding our parks one of his top priorities. To accomplish this, he has budgeted City resources for our parks and has worked to secure both TIF and state dollars. In 2009, Alderman Fioretti dedicated two improved parks, Printing House Row and Battle of Fort Dearborn.

In 2010, he broke ground for improvements to Dunbar Park and opened a new park at Adams and Sangamon.

We want to thank Friends of the Parks for this recognition. Alderman Fioretti shares this honor with everyone who has donated their time toward this common goal. A key leader in the alderman’s parks efforts is volunteer liaison Leslie Recht.

For more information on Friends of the Parks, including information on this event please view the web site: www.fotp.org.

I was recently interviewed by WTTW’s Jay Shefski of the Chicago Tonight program and we discussed the city’s method of garbage collection. Currently the city picks up trash by Ward: a task anyone familiar with the Ward boundaries would recognize as unnecessarily complex. This method is inefficient and expensive. Too many man hours and too much gas money is wasted as drivers are forced to traverse the gerrymandered Ward limits and drive from one end of the Ward to the other. During this interview I propose a new grid-based system of garbage collection which will save the city millions of dollars and ensure more efficient services.