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Chicago Tribune: Redistricting reform: Will an amendment finally make it on the ballot?
Once again, a citizen-driven movement to change the process of drawing legislative districts has reached a milestone. Volunteers say they collected twice the necessary signatures to get a redistricting amendment on the November ballot.
That effort is laudable. We’re clapping. Hundreds of volunteers spent the past year standing at train stations, outside grocery stores and at concerts, festivals and sporting events, asking voters to sign their names to a petition. The goal? To change the system of gerrymandered legislative districts that serve the politicians, not the people, of Illinois.
Gathering the signatures and preparing them for submission to the Illinois State Board of Elections is a monstrous undertaking. Two years ago — the last time redistricting enthusiasts tried to get an amendment on the ballot — the group had to hire a metal fabricator to create a unique punch system to bind all the papers together. They built a special box for the piles of petitions and needed a forklift to load it onto a truck.
Sun-Times: CTU: Teachers leaning away from May strike
The Chicago Teachers Union appears to be backing off an end-of-year strike, citing concerns about losing health insurance as well as pay all summer, as the committee tasked with setting a strike date is to meet Wednesday.
The union also is concerned about the difficulty of winning support so close to the end of the year from Chicago Public Schools parents, who’ve already scrambled to make plans for kids out of class on a district-mandated March furlough day and a one-day teachers strike on April 1.
Pantagraph: Illinois needs to push harder for school consolidation
One of the maddening aspects of the state’s ongoing financial crisis is that some obvious long-term solutions are rarely considered.
As we’ve stated before, one solution to the massive tax collections by state and local government is to reduce the number of local governments. That includes school districts that have been slow to consolidate in ways that would save money and allow more money to flow into classrooms.
According to a recent research report by the Illinois Policy Institute, the state’s 859 school districts are ripe for consolidation. About 25 percent of them serve just one school. One-third of Illinois school districts serve fewer than 600 students.
Quad-City Times: No, Hastert shouldn't receive his Illinois pension
Dennis Hastert shouldn’t receive a dime from Illinois’s pension system.
The former Illinois GOP powerbroker and speaker of the U.S. House won’t serve a day for preying on young wrestlers under his tutelage decades ago. The statute of limitations have long passed. Instead, it’s his hush money scheme, millions spent keeping the men quiet, that this week sent him to prison for 15 months.
Hastert’s banking crimes were directly facilitated by his power made available through his elected office.
Northwest Herald: The SEIU is hurting Illinois caregivers
Illinois politics is too often a master class in masking true intentions.
A legislative push by the Service Employees International Union and some state lawmakers is one such case. Behind the curtain of Senate Bill 2931 is a greedy ploy by the SEIU to make more money at the expense of the state’s most vulnerable residents.
The bill mandates that personal assistants, also known as at-home caregivers, attend an in-person training session once a year. Sounds innocent enough, right? But what happened at mandatory caregiver trainings in 2014 offers clues to the union’s true motives.
Sun-Times: State FOP paid ex-Chicago cop union boss $100,000 to settle suit
The former president of Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police has obtained a $100,000 legal settlement from the state FOP in a lawsuit he filed accusing the union of removing him from office in retaliation for exposing corruption, a source told the Chicago Sun-Times.
Michael Shields was suspended as the head of Chicago’s police union in December 2013 after he sent a letter to City Hall Inspector General Joseph Ferguson charging that two prior police contracts and a sergeants’ contract were fixed.