* Senate President John Cullerton spoke today to the Illinois Chamber’s annual lobby day conference. He talked about several issues, including a lunch he had with Caterpillar CEO Doug Oberhelman before the tax hike vote in January. Watch…
* Cullerton also took yet another whack at the governors of Wisconsin, Indiana and New Jersey. Cullerton said it was “disheartening” that other governors “have used our actions to distract from their own economic woes.” Cullerton went on to thank Wisconsin’s Gov. Walker for “making Illinois look normal again.”
Cullerton dismissed the idea that anybody would ever move a business to New Jersey. “And then, New Jersey. Please,” he cracked. “New Jersey has the highest taxes in the nation. Nobody’s going to be going to New Jersey from Illinois.” Have a look….
The original video can be found at Illinois Statehouse News’ site. Senate Republican Leader Christine Radogno also spoke at the Chamber event today, and you can watch that here.
Illinois Senate President John Cullerton says the Legislature must reform the state’s workers’ compensation system to improve conditions for business.
But the Chicago Democrat told business leaders today that there’s no one in the Senate willing to vote for reform right now and it will take compromise to win approval. […]
He says there’s room for compromise on a key dispute - whether employees should prove injuries were caused by their current job.
* Democratic Sen. David Koehler’s new amendment is creating a bit of an uproar…
Religious child welfare agencies. A child welfare agency that is religiously based or owned by, operated by, or affiliated with a bona fide religious organization may decline an adoption or foster family home application, including any related licensure and placement, from a party to a civil union if acceptance of that application would constitute a violation of the organization’s sincerely held religious beliefs.
Koehler sponsored the civil unions bill in the Senate. Two other, far more conservative Democrats, Bill Haine and Ed Maloney, are co-sponsoring the new bill, which is set for a hearing in the Senate Executive Committee tomorrow.
* From the ACLU…
The federal equal protection clause bans the government from allowing private agencies to practice discrimination when choosing families for adoptive children. The obligation to license foster parents and to screen adoptive parents is the state’s. When the state delegates part of that duty to a private agency the state remains responsible to make certain that the process is consistent with state and federal law, including the 14th Amendment; religiously affiliated agencies should not be permitted to discriminate, especially when doing so can hurt children by excluding a whole class of loving families.
Anthony Martinez of The Civil Rights Agenda (TCRA) spoke to Windy City Times, saying that, “We know this is an attack on the civil-unions bill. We’re seeing a re-presentation of that bill through an amendment to another bill, originally intended to expand the civil rights of the blind.”
According to Martinez, “If an agency decides to not provide service, they can turn [the parents] away through the process of a referral.” Martinez was also clear about the origins of the amendment, saying that it was definitely an attempt to undermine the civil unions bill: “We know that the Catholic Caucus and the Catholic Diocese is involved in this bill and advocating for it and really trying to push it through. They are the most vocal opponents of the civil unions bill.”
According to both Rick Garcia, who is also following the bill in Springfield, and Martinez, this amendment is a watered-down version of a previous version. Speaking with WCT, Garcia said, “What it really wanted to do was exempt any religious organization or any religious individual, anyone who holds deeply held religious beliefs, that’s how they put it, would be exempt from the Illinois Human Rights Act. That piece didn’t make it into this amendment. So we have this bill that would allow faith-based foster and adoption institutions that would discriminate. Any agency that takes state or city or federal funds has to obey the law. That is a slippery slope that we do not want to go down.”
“The civil union bill complicates matters a bit because the civil union bill changes the definition of a spouse,” Sen. Haine said. “So, the Catholic Conference, the Roman Catholic Church and some of the other denominations [with] adoption services, had historically not placed children in households where there’s a couple and they aren’t married. Sexual orientation’s never been brought up.”
Haine said the groups he spoke to, who work with “hard to place” children, want to continue offering adoption and foster care services but do not want to approve applications that are inconsistent with their “right of conscious” and religious beliefs. Traditionally, he said, these organizations place children in married households only.
Unlike the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Haine voted against the original civil unions bill in the Senate because he feared it “would create problems such as this.”
The Cubs have tried a number of ways to fend off the birds, which occasionally circle over Wrigley Field during games and dive-bomb for hot dogs and nachos, according to Carl Rice, vice president of ballpark operations and “resident expert on things that fly.”
“We’ve tried a little bit of everything, but honestly our flying friends, they usually adapt,” Rice said. “I am convinced now that no matter what we do, they will always be here until the beaches open up.”
To ward off the gulls, the Cubs have experimented with using a chemical repellent that sprays something similar to purple grapefruit juice into the air, Rice said. They have also tried shooting off air cannons before games to make a loud blast that sounds like a car backfiring.
The birds “don’t like noise,” Rice said. “It scares them away but only for a short period of time. I need something that scares them away for a baseball season.”
Um, dude, the birds don’t like noise, so maybe getting more fans into the park might help. I mean, check out this photo of a recent game. There are more birds than fans at Ricketts Field…
I mean, I’m just sayin’. Getting more people to the games could do the trick. Of course, the twin dangers of being bonked on the head by falling concrete and dive-bombed by crazed nacho-craving birds could be hindering attendance. Not to mention that the team sucks, but, heck, the Cubs always suck.
Seriously, though, how are players supposed to deal with stuff like this?…
* This is a 2011 Major League Baseball open thread. Have at it.
* I’ve been a State Farm auto insurance customer for 20 years, but I’m not so sure that I’m cool with them tracking my mileage via OnStar, even if I might get a discount…
The Bloomington-based company says its new Drive Safe and Save program will only be available to its customers who have OnStar devices on their vehicles and use its vehicle diagnostics tracking tool.
Company spokeswoman Angie Rinock told The Pantagraph newspaper in Bloomington that people who drive about 12,000 miles a year or less could save 10 percent or more on their premiums.
Rinock said State Farm will only gather mileage information and will not track other data such as driver speeds.
Yeah. They won’t track speeds now, but how long before they do?
* Illinois increased rural interstate speed limits for semi-trucks a couple of years ago, but now lawmakers want to increase speed limits on some rural sections of four-lane highways…
The speed limit for trucks could rise to 65 miles per hour on a number of non-interstate highways in Illinois.
In a proposal winding its way through the General Assembly, a number of stretches of rural four-lane highways would be added to the list of roadways where big rigs can move at the higher limit.
The move comes two years after lawmakers approved a change in law allowing trucks to travel at the same speed as cars on interstate highways outside of the Chicago area. But, that measure didn’t address roads built to interstate standards, but not officially interstates.
The measure earlier won Senate approval. If OK’d by the House and signed into law by Gov. Pat Quinn, the legislation would bump the speed limit from 55 mph to 65 mph on roads including:
* And, of course, no post like this would be complete without talking about gas prices. Yikes, man…
According to the latest Lundberg Survey, Chicago is number two in the nation for highest gas prices with an average of $4.11. However, some gas stations in the city have even higher prices. One gas station in the city’s South Loop area priced regular gas at $4.39 per gallon Monday morning.
So far, the usual call to lower the state’s gasoline tax has not yet been heard. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.
Gas sales have fallen for five straight weeks nationally, according to MasterCard SpendingPulse, which tracks credit card, cash and check spending at 140,000 service stations nationwide. Drivers bought about 3.6 percent less gasoline the week of April 1 compared to a year ago, it said.
Before the decline, demand for gasoline had been increasing for two months — a trend some analysts had expected to continue because the economic recovery is picking up.
“More people are going to work,” said John Gamel, director of gasoline research for MasterCard. “That means more people are driving, and they should be buying more gas.”
Instead, about 70 percent of the nation’s major gas-station chains report sales have fallen, according to a March survey by the Oil Price Information Service. More than half reported a drop of 3 percent or more — the sharpest since the summer of 2008, when gas prices set record highs.
But prices are going up faster than people are cutting back. Americans are paying roughly $340 million more per day to fill up than they did a year ago.
* The gas price hike is hurting just about everybody…
Like most businesses these days, Alliance Poultry is dealing with higher costs. Co-owner Fayyad Abdallah says the price of cracked corn that he feeds to the birds has doubled in about a year and a half.
But it’s the price of gas that’s really making his costs go up. Abdallah says he’s now paying about 20 cents more a pound for the organic chickens he buys from Amish farms in Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana.
So in turn, Abdallah has to raise his own prices. But he’s only increased his chicken price by 5 cents a pound.
“We don’t want to go up that much because right away, customers would notice that there’s a big increase and then they’ll be questioning, and then they might not come back again,” Abdallah says. “So I’d rather lose a few cents a pound than lose a few customers.”
Early last year, the then-freshman Oregon House member from Portland was getting ready for bed when he and his wife, Katy, began bantering back and forth about what might be the ultimate political prank, something that could lighten the increasingly divisive political mood among his colleagues.
As Smith recalls, the idea came almost instantly. “What if we were to Rick Roll the legislature without anybody noticing?” he wondered.
And that was the seed for what may ultimately prove to be one of the most elaborate political jokes of all time: A nearly two-minute long video of members of the Oregon House of Representatives saying the lyrics of Rick Astley’s ubiquitous ’80s pop ballad, “Never Gonna Give You Up,” literally one word or phrase at a time while in session.
* Gov. Pat Quinn spoke to the Illinois Chamber this morning and started off his talk with a jobs announcement. According to the governor, Navistar is hiring 500 engineers here, many of them apparently brought from their facility in Indiana. We’ve known about the Navistar move for a while now, but that’s a fairly impressive number.
* Much of Quinn’s talk to the Chamber this morning was about workers’ compensation reform. The Peoria Journal Star’s editorial page laid out the problem pretty well this week…
Marc Collins, associate risk manager for CORE, compared five years’ worth of claims between the local construction firm Otto Baum Company and Sun Valley Masonry, another of their holdings in Phoenix, Ariz. The two companies are of similar size, with about the same number of employees. What he discovered was that local claims averaged $32,807 each over that time frame, compared to $6,212 in Arizona. While some of that reflects differences in wages - employers are required to pay two-thirds of an employee’s compensation while he’s hurt - it most certainly does not account for the more than five-fold difference.
Caterpillar - which obviously deals in much bigger numbers - has an even more dramatic story, one CEO Doug Oberhelman shared with Gov. Pat Quinn when he was in town last week. The Peoria-based company compared an engine manufacturing plant in Illinois to another it has in Indiana. “The jobs are essentially the same. The injury risks are the same. The production work force head count was roughly the same,” noted the company. And yet in 2008, “the total incurred cost of the injuries at the Illinois plant was seven times higher than the cost of the injuries at the Indiana plant.”
That is borne out statewide. If a hernia suffered on the job costs an employer more than $18,700 in Illinois, the next closest state comes in $6,300 less, with we flatlanders nearly 140 percent higher than the national median. A shoulder or elbow injury? The Illinois employer is out almost $24,000, compared to about $14,300 for the runner-up, 160 percent higher than the median. Need an arthroscopic procedure? Illinois is double its nearest competitor, more than triple the median.
While workers’ comp rates have been trending downward across the U.S., Illinois has experienced the opposite. It’s not just the wage coverage while injured employees aren’t working for months or even years, but the medical bills and often the settlement beyond that (all tax free, by the way). In fact, “even if the medical fee schedule were reduced by 30 percent, Illinois would still have the second highest rates in the nation, but our employers could save up to $500 million,” acknowledges the governor’s office.
The startling statistics do not end there, unfortunately. State government is an employer, too, with approaching 70,000 full- and part-time workers. And from that pool there are currently 25,000 open workers’ comp claims. That’s a breathtaking number. It is impossible to believe all of those are legitimate. [Emphasis added]
Oof.
And that state worker stat is just downright appalling.
Gov. Pat Quinn’s office reports that the medical fees for a hand/wrist injury are $17,180 in Illinois—nearly three times the $6,775 median in the rest of the nation. The fees for a knee injury here are $30,185— more than three times the $9,473 median in other states. Illinois has the second highest costs in the nation. And even if Illinois cut its medical fees in half, it would still be the third most expensive state in the nation.
And we’d be just barely third at that.
* We’ve talked before about Rep. John Bradley’s proposal to repeal the entire workers’ compensation system. He talked passionately the other day about his idea. Have a look…
Bradley has not yet called his bill for a vote. We’ll see what he does today.
Chamber President & CEO Doug Whitley offered up some high praise after Quinn’s speech, saying they were “great remarks… exactly the kind of commentary that we like to hear from the chief executive officer.”
Words are not deeds, however. We’ll see what actually happens.
*** UPDATE *** The Chamber’s Whitley talked to the media after the event. Watch…
[ *** End Of Update *** ]
* Meanwhile, business and labor were able to negotiate a Statehouse deal on unemployment insurance, but it has some real costs for both sides…
Starting next year, Illinois businesses will see a tax increase and the recently unemployed will lose a week of jobless benefits, according to a compromise bill passed earlier this month in the Illinois Legislature.
The deal is part of a longer-term plan to help contribute to Illinois’ depleted unemployment trust fund, which owes $3 billion to the U.S. Treasury, according to a story published Monday in the Rockford Register Star.
Illinois Department of Employment Security spokesman Greg Rivara said the tax increase and benefit cut are expected to generate about $100 million for the unemployment fund next year, or about 3 percent of its debt.
Illinois is among more than 30 states that have borrowed money from the federal government to keep jobless benefits going and the state isn’t alone in reducing unemployment benefits to help funding. Michigan recently did something similar and other states are considering it.
* The headline on Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka’s latest quarterly report pretty much says it all…
* From that report, we see that the problem of unpaid bills is persistent and is no better so far…
At the end of March, the office of the Comptroller had $4.515 billion in unpaid bills with some vouchers dating back to mid-october 2010, compared to the $4.496 billion it had on hand at the same time last year.
So, we’re actually a bit behind last year’s bill-paying rate. Not great.
A helpful graph shows where we are. The red line is the current fiscal year. Click the pic for a larger image…
The income tax hike was designed to get rid of the structural deficit, not pay off old bills, so this should be no surprise. The governor wants to borrow to pay off those old bills, but there’s little chance of that happening…
State Sen. John Sullivan, D-Rushville, said he asked Topinka recently what exactly the backlog stood at so he could formulate some way to pay down the bills.
“Instead of doing a borrowing bill like the governor came out with of $8.75 (billion) maybe we could cut that in half. Maybe we would only have to borrow four or five billion dollars to pay those vendors and those schools that are owed money from months and months and months ago,” Sullivan said.
He said the oldest debts should be paid first.
State Sen. Matt Murphy, R-Palatine, said that any amount of borrowing is a non-starter for the GOP.
“We don’t view borrowing as part of the solution to this,” Murphy said, pointing to a plan by the Senate Republicans that outlined $6.7 billion in possible cuts. “It’s time to get responsible and knuckle down and actually bring spending down to levels the people of this state can actually afford.”
* But while lawmakers go back and forth, people like Tazwood Mental Health Center CEO Caterina Richardson find themselves drowning…
Richardson said Thursday that the state owes Tazwood $850,000 for this fiscal year, which runs from July 1, 2010, to June 30, 2011. Since Tazwood opened its doors in Pekin in 1996, state funding has declined by 48 percent.
Tazwood is a not-for-profit organization that provides substance abuse treatment and outpatient mental health care. Fewer state dollars means fewer services to clients in need.
“We are having probably more clients coming into contact with the corrections and the justice system because we are not able to serve as many people as we have in the past due to the funding cuts,” said Richardson. “Things are not getting better.
“Last year we were cut in funding to non-Medicaid clients, so at this point the funding that we can receive for clients who are not on Medicaid is very, very limited. As little as five hours of case management is all they can have in one year. We can do very little in five hours. We’re essentially trying to get them hooked up with natural support and identify other community resources that are available.”
A Metra train has a starring role in the new Hollywood science fiction thriller, “Source Code.” It is one of the many movie negotiations handled for more than a decade by Jonathan Gottlieb, a Metra special transportation services manager.
But after Gottlieb negotiated a $19,000 contract for “Source Code” last year, a film location manager reportedly complained that Gottlieb demanded additional cash for all his hard work — $2,000 — be delivered in an envelope to him or another Metra employee.
On the morning of the first shoot, the complainant said, Gottlieb was furious to learn the money would not be delivered and said told her she’d never be able to work with Metra again.
Gottlieb denies the allegation, but retired soon after it surfaced…
Gottlieb says the only money he ever received from a movie production company was for work he did as an extra. He also said he once arranged for his condo association to be paid $1,900 for allowing a film crew shooting nearby to park vehicles behind his building.
A complaint filed on the matter has been sent to Metra’s inspector general, according to the report.
* Meanwhile, a familiar name has resurfaced in a federal probe…
A federal grand jury has subpoenaed dozens of doctors in the Chicago area as part of a probe into a wealthy Indian-American fund-raiser who owns surgical centers — and has ties to U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. and former Gov. Rod Blagojevich, sources told the Chicago Sun-Times.
While the FBI and IRS investigation is centered on businessman and political fund-raiser Raghuveer Nayak, who owns surgical centers in Illinois and Indiana, the feds have cast a wide net: Sources said at least 30 doctors received grand jury subpoenas, and more than 10 of Nayak’s employees have also been subpoenaed.
In addition, two of Nayak’s surgery centers in Chicago were hit with search warrants in late January, and at least half a dozen doctors have been offered immunity or been granted immunity for their testimony, sources with knowledge of the investigation say.
Federal authorities are investigating whether Nayak made improper payments to the doctors in order to draw their surgeries to his centers. Under the allegations, while private insurers paid doctors and the centers for surgeries performed, Nayak is under investigation for allegedly separately paying doctors hundreds of dollars for every surgery brought to the centers. Doctors who perform out-patient surgeries, including chiropractors and podiatrists, practice at the centers and can choose to bring their work to the centers rather than a hospital.
Once you come into the US Attorney’s gunsights, you tend to stay there.
Prosecutors in the Rod Blagojevich corruption case are asking Judge James Zagel to forbid the former governor and his defense team from suggesting to his upcoming jury that certain unplayed tape recordings might actually contain information which would prove his innocence.
“Not only do questions designed to elicit such evidence serve no legitimate purpose,” the prosecutors write, “they focus the jurors’ attention on evidence that is not before them, and act as a suggestion that other evidence, favorable to the defense, is being withheld from them.” […]
Another motion seeks to stop Blagojevich’s lawyers from eliciting testimony from lay witnesses about the legality of certain practices in the governor’s office; a related request asks the court to prevent Blagojevich from asking witnesses about “normal practices,” suggesting that “business as usual” should not be an acceptable defense. […]
The prosecutors say the former governor’s lawyers should not be allowed to elicit testimony related to what happened with the Senate seat, after it was publicly disclosed that Blagojevich had been targeted by secret wiretaps.
The feds say that after Blagojevich discovered he was being recorded he tried to conceal his alleged wrongdoing, so what he did (gear up to appoint Lisa Madigan to the seat) was about covering his tracks, not doing what was right. They’re right.
The Rev. Michael Pfleger, the embattled pastor of Chicago’s St. Sabina Catholic Church, told radio show hosts Tavis Smiley and Cornel West this weekend that he would look outside the Catholic Church if offered no other choice but to work at a Catholic high school.
Pfleger also said on the “Smiley & West” public radio program that he had been banned from speaking at events in the archdiocese and blamed pressure from conservative Catholics and the National Rifle Association for his most recent clash with Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George. […]
On the radio, Pfleger said conservative Catholics want to return St. Sabina, a mostly African-American parish on the South Side, to the way it was before he got there nearly three decades ago and silence what they believe to be progressive messages coming from the pulpit. […]
“The NRA … says I’ve been much too vocal about assault weapons and much too vocal about guns being registered and being accountable to gun owners,” Pfleger said on the radio. “So all that combined and I guess the cardinal didn’t have anything to do one morning and decided he wanted to get rid of me again.”
* Timetable for state employee health choice could be pushed back: State employees could get more time to decide which health insurance option they want next year because of protests filed over the decision to drop two popular HMOs. Nothing’s been decided yet, but state officials said Monday the benefit choice period — currently set to run from May 1 through May 31 — could be adjusted.
* Health care switch for state workers may be in trouble: Sen. Mike Frerichs, D-Champaign, who is one of 12 members of the Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability that will vote on the state’s health care contracts to begin July 1, said he believes the Quinn administration’s preliminary contract awards could be in trouble with lawmakers who repeatedly expressed questions Monday about suggested cost savings and limited access to health care providers.
* State health insurance change could be delayed: “We are grateful that the process is being slowed up,” said Hank Scheff, director research and employee benefits for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union.
* New DuPage leader to form panel on pension abuses - Pension deals such as those profiled in Sunday’s Tribune are ‘outrageous,’ Cronin says
* Advocates push back against Smart Grid: The legislation “puts the risk on consumers and businesses while the utilities can go on a technology shopping binge,” Clough said. “Illinois consumers and business simply cannot afford for automatic rate increase and guaranteed profits for utility companies to be put into Illinois law,” he said.
* Local foreclosure rates drop; state’s highest court to help those who face losing homes
* Preckwinkle visits Palatine residents to reassure them county works for them - Under Stroger administration, Palatine threatened to secede because of a tax increase
* Rahm Emanuel looks to innovators, reformers in CPS CEO search - Unlike Daley, he’s aiming for an outsider
