Daily Herald: Three plans to solve the Illinois budget crisis
Illinois faces two fiscal challenges: a large backlog of unpaid bills and even larger unfunded pensions.
With Gov. Bruce Rauner previewing his budget proposal for fiscal year 2017 (which starts in July), we took a look at three existing proposals for solving the state’s budget crisis.
Chicago Tribune: Broken Illinois and the AFSCME gambit
Gov. Bruce Rauner will deliver his budget address Wednesday, the second of his tenure. So if you’re keeping score at home: 2 budget speeches, 0 budgets, because Rauner remains in a stalemate with the free-spending legislature over how to fund cash-strapped Illinois.
We knew Rauner’s budget speech last year, given on his 38th day in office, wouldn’t go down easy: It was Republican governor from the outside vs. Democratic lords of the realm. Of course there would be pushback. But we wondered if long-serving House SpeakerMichael Madigan and Senate President John Cullerton could look anew at the state’s financial crisis and acknowledge the day of reckoning was finally at hand.
We wrote: “Will they now try to school (Rauner) on the art of obstruction? Or will they work with him to fix a broken Illinois?”
Bloomberg: School of Debt: How to Bankrupt Public Education, Chicago-Style
Most people in Chicago’s City Hall probably recall a moment of clarity, a little voice whispering, this can’t last.
Maybe it came in 1979, when the city’s schools nearly went broke. Maybe it came in the late 1990s, when no one funded the teachers’ pensions. Or maybe, finally, it came this month, when the nation’s third-largest public school district, with almost 400,000 students, once again slid toward the brink.
Today the Chicago public schools are in such dire straits that officials from the Illinois governor down wonder aloud about its solvency. Yes, a few other big-city systems, like Detroit’s, are in worse shape. But nowhere else in American public education have local mismanagement and Wall Street engineering collided so spectacularly.
DNA Info: My Block, My Hood, My City' Group Shovels Snow for Free on South Side
Jahmal Cole said he believes in leading by example, which is why he shoveled sidewalks for free in Chatham on Monday.
The “My Block, My Hood, My City” group founder spent $250 on 10 shovels and invited people to come help him clear the sidewalks for senior citizens. He and two volunteers started on 79th Street and headed south on Michigan Avenue, ending at 83rd Street. After receiving requests from Facebook, the small group also traveled to other blocks, including 8800 South Indiana Avenue, on Monday.
“Chatham is like 60 something percent seniors, so I figured why not do it here,” Cole said.
Sun-Times: Emails raise new questions about handling of Rekia Boyd shooting
The Emanuel administration agreed to pay $4.5 million to the family of a woman killed in 2012 by an off-duty Chicago cop even though city lawyers didn’t interview the officer or other witnesses under oath — an unusual move in such wrongful death cases.
Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez’s office, meanwhile, waited months to gather key evidence in the shooting, including the ownership history of the officer’s unregistered gun and blood tests on a cell phone and knife found at the scene, records show.
Those details — revealed in emails released by Alvarez’s office after a public-records request by the Chicago Sun-Times — raise new questions about how city lawyers and county prosecutors handle controversial police shootings like Detective Dante Servin’s killing of 22-year-old Rekia Boyd.
Daily Herald: The timeline of Illinois budget stalemate
Gov. Bruce Rauner is set to deliver his second budget proposal to lawmakers Wednesday even though no spending plan has ever been approved for this year. Here’s a timeline of the stalemate that has consumed state politics for a year.
City Limits: Chicago officials to kick pedicabs while they’re down
In 2014, Chicago aldermen passed an ordinance that devastated the city’s pedicab industry, capping the number of licensed pedicabs at 200 and banning them from operating in the most lucrative areas, to name just a few restrictions. The Chicago Pedicab Association estimated that less than two months after the implementation of the new rules, pedicab operators’ incomes had plummeted by 40 percent.
Now, the office of Mayor Rahm Emanuel is aiming to crack down even further on pedicab operators, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
Emanuel’s office wants to change the Municipal Code of Chicago to state the following: “A person engages in the occupation of a pedicab chauffeur by seeking or accepting a fee, an economic benefit of a donation or gratuity or any form of compensation [goods or services] for providing transportation to passengers in a pedicab.”
AP: Next Illinois government holiday could be Obama's birthday
A group of Illinois House Democrats are proposing President Barack Obama’s birthday become the next state holiday.
The State (Springfield) Journal-Register (bit.ly/1OeeX74) reports Presidents Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Harry S. Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson are the only former presidents that have their own state holidays.