Gov. Bruce Rauner on Tuesday blasted House Democrats for leaving town during the budget impasse and said House Speaker Mike Madigan needs to do his job.

“Speaker Madigan right now is not doing his job,” Rauner said at a news conference. “He’s not here in town.”

“This is the time for the regular session. This is not the time for vacations.”

SINCE news first emerged last year about dangerously high levels of lead in the drinking water in Flint, Mich., it has become shockingly clear that that city is far from alone. Reports of lead poisoning are on the rise across the country, from New York to Ohio and Iowa, particularly among low-income and minority children.

Not all of the cases involve tainted water supplies. In many cases, the blame lies somewhere else entirely: federal housing policies, in place since the 1990s, that have placed 1.6 million households with children at risk for lead poisoning.

The problem is a dangerous mismatch between the prevailing science on lead poisoning and the Department of Housing and Urban Development‘s standards. These outdated regulations set the blood lead level for lead poisoning three to four times higher than that set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

During a Monday afternoon appearance at John A. Logan College, Rep. Terri Bryant (R-Murphysboro) offered new details on the rift between Gov. Rauner and Speaker Madigan, as well as the likelihood of a tax hike.

“It was like being thrown into the deep end of the pool,” Bryant told the crowd about her first year in the General Assembly.

The freshman lawmaker says everything seemed to be going well when the governor and lawmakers agreed on a short-term fix last spring that got the state through the rest of the fiscal year, which ended in June.

Simmering tensions at Chicago public schools rose a notch last week with the announcement that school employees would have to take three unpaid days off this school year.

Chicago Public Schools CEO Forrest Claypool said that the move to lop off one day in March and two days in June is an effort to “chip away at our budget gap” and would save $30 million.

Karen Lewis, Chicago Teachers Union president, responded that adding the unpaid days to a 7% giveback on teacher pension contributions the school district is already requesting in contract negotiations would make for an 8.6% pay cut overall.

The Joliet Region Chamber of Commerce & Industry has sent a letter to Gov. Bruce Rauner and legislators saying economic and social progress made in the Joliet area is being “wiped away” by the actions of state leaders.

A county health department in central Illinois says it will close one of its offices because of the state’s ongoing budget crisis.

The Mattoon Journal-Gazette reports that the Coles County Health Department plans to close its Mattoon office on Tuesday. The department’s main office in Charleston will remain open.

Administrator Diana Stenger says the department is owed $169,000 by the state, primarily from the Illinois Department of Public Health.

As Berkshire Hathaway closed its acquisition of Duracell this week, the Bethel-based battery maker appeared to be settling on Chicago — where its new CEO works — as its de facto headquarters.

Duracell and Berkshire Hathaway have made no announcement designating Chicago as Duracell’s new headquarters, and on Thursday Duracell spokesman Richard Abramowitz told Hearst that the battery maker’s main office will remain in Bethel. But an online job ad for Duracell disclosed an intent to set up camp in there, and Abramowitz confirmed that CEO Angelo Pantaleo is hiring corporate staff to work in a new Duracell office in the Windy City.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel was accused Monday of flexing his eminent domain muscle on Chicago’s Old Main Post Office to divert attention from the furor over his handling of the Laquan McDonald shooting video.

One day before the Community Development Commission was poised to ratify the mayor’s plan, Brtitish developer Bill Davies vowed to exhaust “all legal means to stop” City Hall from seizing the building from Davies and soliciting bids to redevelop it.

“A lot of things have happened in Chicago in the last few months that the mayor has been criticized for that are far more serious than a building that’s not being developed. Issues in the Chicago Police Department have put him under great pressure,” said Martin Mulryan, Davies’ project manager.

Illinois still has the second-highest property taxes in the nation, according to a surveyby personal finance website WalletHub.

Only New Jersey has a higher effective property tax rate, the survey found.

Though property taxes vary from county to county across the state, the average effective rate in Illinois — the proportion of the value of a home that a homeowner must pay each year in taxes — was 2.25 percent, just a hair below the New Jersey rate of 2.29 percent.

Hawaii has the lowest effective property tax rate in the nation at 0.28 percent, WalletHub found. But before you rush to move to Honolulu, bear in mind that the median Hawaiian home costs $504,500, nearly three times as much as the median Illinois home.