Due to a pension sweetener available only to veteran Illinois lawmakers, Cullerton’s annual pension will soon be more than he ever made from his Statehouse salary.

Dictating teachers’ salaries from Springfield would impose a costly mandate on local school districts and expose struggling homeowners across the state to property tax hikes.

Duplicative school districts and an excess of publicly funded six-figure salaries have educated Norridge-Harwood Heights taxpayers on the benefits of consolidation.

Illinois has more units of local government than any other state in the country, many of which are duplicative and overlapping. In Belleville, where the majority of the city’s school districts cover fewer students than the state average, consolidation efforts could boost efficiency while saving taxpayer dollars.

Many school district employees’ earnings are more than double that of the typical Belleville household.