High-ranking Illinois Democrats gave support to Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s proposed income tax overhaul Thursday, calling on opponents of the plan to offer specific alternatives to balancing the state’s long-term budget deficit.

Mirroring fellow Democrat Pritzker’s rhetoric, the group framed the $3.2 billion structural deficit issue as having three solutions: 15 percent across-the-board cuts to all state budgets and programs, including education; a 20 percent income tax increase on every Illinoisan; or the graduated tax which they said lowers the tax rate for 97 percent of Illinoisans.

It was just 12 words in a court hearing that lasted only a few minutes, but the fallout seemingly has no end in sight.

“The state’s motion in regards to the indictment is to nolle pros,” a Cook County prosecutor said Tuesday, using the common Latin legal term for “decline to prosecute” while dismissing all charges against “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett.

Sinai Health System administrators were surprised when a Medicaid managed care insurer refused to reimburse the hospital chain for treating a patient with two broken bones. It’s not uncommon for medical claims to be denied by the private insurers administering Medicaid benefits in Illinois—especially when doctors fail to request prior authorization. But a doctor can’t get approval to operate on someone two weeks before he’s injured in a car accident, as Sinai CEO Karen Teitelbaum points out.

The claim, which has since been paid, is just one example of care being denied due to process and paperwork rather than medical reasons in the government-funded program for low-income patients.

The CTA has finished work on the redesigned Belmont Blue Line station in the Avondale neighborhood, a $17 million project that includes a dramatic blue canopy.

The completion of the station is the biggest project so far under the $492 million “Your New Blue” program to modernize and improve the O’Hare Branch of the Blue Line.

Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle laid off hundreds of workers after her controversial pop tax was repealed in fall 2017, but one county employee who didn’t lose his job was Edward Burke Jr.

Burke had been hired at the county’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Department a few years earlier after Preckwinkle met with Burke’s then-powerful alderman father about opportunities for his son. And when the layoffs came, two employees who were being paid partly with federal grant funds were let go, while Burke Jr.’s salary was moved off of county funding and onto the federal grant, the Tribune found.

Chicago Police Supt. Eddie Johnson on Friday made the case to keep his $260,044-a-year job even after the retirement of Mayor Rahm Emanuel — and acknowledged that some officers “look the other way” when it comes to reporting police misconduct.

“The reason it’s so difficult to change police cultures is because the leadership changes so often. Every three years. You have to start over again,” Johnson told the Chicago Sun-Times.

Lawsuits churning inside Algonquin Township have drained hundreds of thousands of dollars from taxpayers for almost two years – and the people involved in those courtroom battles expect the legal tango to continue for years to come.

“Litigation is probably going to continue until the end of all our terms,” Supervisor Charles Lutzow said.

A controversial measure seeking to increase the McHenry County Board chairman’s powers to cut property taxes is dead in its original form, but that doesn’t mean the issue is going away, the legislation’s sponsors said Friday.

House Bill 3317 — sponsored by state Reps. Sam Yingling, a Grayslake Democrat, and David McSweeney, a Barrington Hills Republican — has been stripped of provisions that would have reorganized McHenry County’s government structure and significantly increased the chairman’s authority.

Winnebago County Sheriff Gary Caruana took a two-year budget fight with the County Board to a new battlefield on Friday — the county courthouse, where he filed a lawsuit against the board for allegedly interfering with the daily operation of his department.

The sheriff, through a court-appointed lawyer, had been threatening litigation for months as he and the board sparred over budgetary and personnel authority for his department. County Board Chairman Frank Haney and Treasurer Sue Goral are also named as defendants in the sheriff’s lawsuit.