* 5:34 pm - I’ve been working on this for the past couple of hours. Nobody from either side has either been available or has wanted to talk until now. From AFSCME…
QUINN ADMINISTRATION TERMINATES UNION CONTRACT
In an unprecedented step, Governor Pat Quinn’s administration late today terminated state government’s contract with its largest employee union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Council 31.
“In 40 years of collective bargaining, Pat Quinn is the first and only Illinois governor to terminate a union contract,” AFSCME executive director Henry Bayer said. “His actions will heighten employee frustration, provoke instability in the workplace and make settling a contract more difficult.”
AFSCME has been in negotiations over a new collective bargaining agreement for nearly a year. Scheduled to expire last June 30, the previous contract’s terms had since been extended by mutual agreement of the parties. But following a bargaining session with a federal mediator in Springfield today, the Quinn administration rejected a further extension offered by the union.
Terminating the contract has little immediate practical effect, as all existing terms and conditions of employment remain in place under state law. But it signals the Quinn Administration’s lack of respect for the collective bargaining process.
“While AFSCME is committed to reaching a fair agreement, Pat Quinn seems bent on heading in the wrong direction,” AFSCME director Bayer said. “Our union wants constructive engagement but the governor is choosing confrontation instead.”
AFSCME Council 31 represents 40,000 men and women who work for the State of Illinois. AFSCME-represented state employees care for veterans and the disabled, help struggling families, protect children from abuse, maintain safe prisons and much more.
No word yet on what might happen next. Stay tuned.
* 5:47 pm - The Quinn administration’s response via Abdon M. Pallasch. Asst. Budget Director…
After 11 months of bargaining, we informed AFSCME’s leadership Tuesday that there will be no more extensions of their contract that expired in June.
Governor Quinn has cut state spending down to 2008 levels and proposed closing empty or half-empty, very expensive state facilities that are no longer needed. After decades of mismanagement, he state is behind on $8 billion dollars of payments to vendors including social service agencies. And the state’s pension shortfall has risen to $96 billion – the worst of the 50 states.
During 11 months of bargaining, the state has extended the contract three times and made significant efforts to compromise. But the government employees union, which has not offered a single proposal to deal with retirement health care, continues to seek millions of dollars in pay hikes the taxpayers can’t afford to give them. It has refused to recognize the extraordinary financial crisis squeezing the state.
* 5:53 pm - The next bargaining session is not until December 11th.
Tuesday, Nov 20, 2012 - Posted by Advertising Department
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Gov. Pat Quinn said Tuesday that while he wants to make local schools and community colleges responsible for the cost of teachers’ retirements, it isn’t an “essential” part of his immediate plans to cut spending for the state’s troubled pensions systems.
In a meeting with the Daily Herald editorial board, the Democratic governor said he’d like the General Assembly to take up the controversial proposal to shift the state’s share of pension costs to local schools before lawmakers are scheduled to leave Springfield May 31.
But, Quinn said, he’ll focus more in the coming weeks on getting legislators to approve his proposal, announced last week, to have teachers pay more toward their pensions and to raise the retirement age to 67. […]
“We want to deal with that accountability principle, but we’ll do it on a separate track,” Quinn said.
Two of Gov. Pat Quinn’s top media spokespersons, Kelly Kraft and Brooke Anderson, just called to try and clarify the governor’s position on the proposal to shift employer pension costs to schools and universities. […]
But to characterize his comments as backing away from the proposal is “not his position at all,” the spokespeople said.
“In no way shape or form do we want it to get out there that he’s backed away,” I was told. “Nobody here has been talking about that, including the governor.”
“This is something the governor supports. He thinks it should be part of the legislation.”
* November 14th, 2012, Quinn was asked whether the cost-shift was still a major component of his pension reform plan…
“I don’t think we should let one particular segment of a reform bill hold up progress. So, uh, what we want to do is negotiate and figure out a good plan that saves taxpayers money and still maintains and rescues the pension system.”
“It’s not confusing. I favor that (the cost shift),” Quinn said Friday at a separate news conference. “I think it should be done that everybody who is involved in government when they negotiate a contract should have a stake in having to pay for the pensions that are part of the contract.”
Still, as he took questions from reporters, Quinn stopped short of his previous demand that any comprehensive pension plan should gradually shift the cost of pensions for teachers outside Chicago from the state onto local school districts — and local property taxpayers. Suburban Republicans and Democrats have adamantly opposed the cost shift.
Transcript…
REPORTER: Does it include the suburban, Downstate teacher pensions being transferred over to those schools?
QUINN: There’s a number of parts to the pension reform that I laid out that can really deal with this issue that can reduce and eliminate the liability. One of those is a principle of accountability for all of those who are involved in employing public workers. And I’m anxious to continue that discussion and I think, uh, we need to have that with our members of the Legislature. But I think really part of that discussion has to involve the people who pay the taxes, who are citizens of Illinois who are concerned about their kids’ future and their grandkids’ future.
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We can only imagine the brainstorming sessions with Quinn’s leadership team that resulted in Squeezy and his artistic rendering: an orange snake coiled around the state Capitol, his (or maybe her) forked tongue slithering into an open window ominously. Which ideas ended up on the cutting room floor? Buddy the Bankrupt Bear? The Great Disappearing Dollar, Bill? Puff the Magic Draggin’? What about Peter, Peter Pension Eater?
* The Question: Which other ideas ended up on the cutting room floor?
Virtually every big-name politician in Illinois, with the exception of the two Republican legislative leaders, will gather Tuesday to support an upcoming push to license as many as 250,000 undocumented immigrants to drive in Illinois.
In a nearly unprecedented show of support, Gov. Pat Quinn, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Senate President John Cullerton (D-Chicago), former GOP Gov. Jim Edgar, GOP state comptroller Judy Baar Topinka, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and state Rep. Edward Acevedo (D-Chicago) plan to sign on to the immigrant-rights driving initiative and attend Tuesday’s press conference in support of it.
The event, sponsored by the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, aims to highlight legislation in the works that would equip undocumented immigrants with three-year temporary driver’s licenses, said Lawrence Benito, chief executive officer and executive director for the group.
The proposal that likely will be voted on sometime during the post-election legislative session that spans from later this month through early January will be a variation from 2007 legislation for undocumented immigrant drivers that narrowly passed the House but failed to get called for a vote in the Senate, he said.
“I don’t think it’s going to be as hard a sell [as 2007], but we’re belts-and-suspenders people. We’ll work until it gets signed into law,” said Benito said. “I do think there will be strong bipartisan support for it based on who’s showing up [Tuesday].”
* Treasurer Dan Rutherford is among the Republicans not scheduled to appear today. More from the Sun-Times…
Not on Tuesday’s lineup of political attendees is House Minority Leader Tom Cross (R-Oswego) and Senate Minority Leader Christine Radogno (R-Lemont).
“This is the closest thing that Springfield sees to the immigration debate. If the Republican Party wants to show good faith in doing outreach to the Latino and immigrant community, this is a bill that would show good faith, that they weren’t Johnny-come-latelys.”
A Cross spokeswoman said she was not certain what Cross’ posture on the legislation would be and noted that the House Republican caucus has not yet met to discuss the initiative.
* The Republicans have paid a lot of lip service to Latinos since election day. But this will be one of the first opportunities in the country to actually court that vote. Edgar and Topinka know what’s what. Others? Maybe not so much. The right wing hates it. But one of the far Right’s Illinois heroes has recently jumped on board…
Lake County Sheriff Mark Curran is backing proposed legislation that would allow illegal immigrants to get driver’s licenses, saying it’s an economic imperative for our financially struggling state.
“We need them to be getting to work,” Curran said. “We need them to have driver’s licenses.” […]
Elected sheriff as a Democrat in 2006 and re-elected as a Republican in 2010, Curran initially had a fairly hard-line view. He was the first sheriff in Illinois to request jail officers be given formal deportation powers, and he backed a program that helps identify illegal immigrants arrested in the county.
By early 2010, however, Curran was endorsing national immigration reform and calling for a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants.
A devout Catholic, Curran has said discussions with Catholic leaders prompted the change in attitude.
He quoted the biblical Gospel of Matthew when explaining his position, saying, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”
Speaker of the Azerbaijani Parliament Ogtay Asadov received the delegation led by Speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives Michael J. Madigan, the parliament’s press service told APA. Ogtay Asadov said that the US and Azerbaijan have a strategic partnership: “Currently, the working group on the US-Azerbaijan interparliamentary relations is functioning at the Azerbaijani Parliament. We want such working groups to be established mutually with the various states of the US, including Illinois.”
Michael J. Madigan highly estimated the rapid development of Azerbaijan, direction of oil incomes to new spheres, especially information technologies. The guest said that the development and implementation of special projects by the government of Azerbaijan on information technologies were estimable: “The Illinois State will get benefit from the experience of Azerbaijan in this sphere in the future.”
The sides exchanged view on organizing of mutual visits, interparliamentary cooperation, exchange of experience in the legislation sphere and etc.
Madigan’s spokesman said he was in Turkey last week and this Azerbaijan excursion was a “side trip,” but did not know any details about the visit.
The House of Representatives of Illinois state (USA), will provide the necessary financial support for cooperation of the state finance funds with the Azerbaijani State Fund for Development of Information and Communication Technologies, the House Speaker Michael Madigan said at a meeting with Azerbaijani Minister of Communications and Information Technologies Ali Abbasov, the ministry report stated.
Appreciating the achievements of Azerbaijan, the speaker spoke about the work implemented in the state of Illinois, including Chicago.
* There are 34 lame duck lawmakers coming back for the January lame duck session, unless some resign between now and then. Getting those lame ducks to vote for pension reform won’t be as easy as convincing them to vote for an income tax hike was two years ago - mainly because many of those lame ducks are about to collect pensions.
State Rep. Elaine Nekritz, who chairs the House Personnel and Pensions Committee, said that when the legislature does approve pension reform, the plan won’t go into effect right away. She said legislators have until the end of the fiscal year at the end of June to act and they don’t necessarily have to pass reforms when they meet in January.
“The pension systems themselves don’t want anything implemented in the middle of a fiscal year. And legislatures don’t like to act too early, so I still think that spring is a very likely time for us to be doing this as well,” Nekritz said.
Nekritz, however, told me last week that she believes she’s the only one who feels that the pension reform bill can wait until the spring.
Quinn also reiterated his support for the so-called ‘cost shift’ proposal, which would require local school districts to help pay for the cost of teachers’ pensions. Republican leaders have criticized the idea, saying school districts couldn’t afford to take on the added costs without raising property taxes. Last week, Republican House leader Tom Cross said he and Quinn share a lot of common interests on the pension issue.
“It’s not confusing. I favor that (the cost shift),” Quinn said Friday at a separate news conference. “I think it should be done that everybody who is involved in government when they negotiate a contract should have a stake in having to pay for the pensions that are part of the contract.”
In the House, only 24 of the 71 Democrats elected this year are white guys. There are 31 women, 18 African-Americans and six Latinos. (Some of these categories overlap, obviously.) Of the 47 Republicans, 36 are white guys, and 11 are white women.
In the Senate, white guys do a lot better. They make up half the 40 Democratic senators elected this year. The Democrats have 10 African-Americans, four Latinos and 11 women.
Of the 19 Republican senators, 15 are white men and four are white women.
So overall, white men make up 39.6 percent of the Democratic legislators in Springfield — almost exactly their proportion in the state as a whole — and 77.2 percent of the Republicans.
“If you want to see how Democracy works, see that movie … You will appreciate the battle to get pension reform if you see the movie and see how hard it was to abolish slavery and get that amendment for the people. And they went to great lengths to use the Democratic process properly.”
So, he’s a pension abolitionist? Or something?
* The We Are One Coalition’s response was furious…
“We are also shocked and disturbed by the Governor’s recent comments to the Associated Press that compared his efforts to enact unfair and unconstitutional pension legislation to one of the greatest moral crusades in our nation’s history, the struggle to abolish slavery.
“Governor Quinn’s continued use of over-the-top rhetoric is not helpful to the effort develop a comprehensive fix to our pension shortfall. His careless comparison of slavery to the policy debate over pensions is insensitive, offensive and wrong.
“The We Are One Illinois coalition calls on Gov. Quinn to apologize for his remarks and then start showing true leadership on the pension issue. We hope the governor will join us in developing a plan that is fair to the workers and retirees who paid into the system and ensures adequate funding for state services going forward.”
* The governor talked about how Lincoln “went to great lengths to use the Democratic process properly” to abolish slavery. From the Illinois Times’ review of the movie…
However, the most pressing concern is making sure that there are enough votes to pass the amendment [to abolish slavery] if it comes to a vote. What ensues is a display of real politics in action as promises are made, arms are twisted and patronage jobs are given as well many other backroom deals that’s “the end justifying the means” in vivid action. James Spader, Tim Blake Nelson and John Hawkes provide welcome comic relief as “skulky men,” charged with getting the final 10 votes needed by hook or by crook.
After months of promising a major grass-roots effort to win public support for reforming the state’s government worker pension system, Gov. Pat Quinn on Sunday unveiled a plan that featured an incomplete online strategy, children wearing red plastic megaphones and an animated “Squeezy the Pension Python” mascot.
There were, however, no solutions offered on how to fix the nation’s most underfunded retirement system.
The Democratic governor, known for a style that sometimes veers into the corny, attempted to jump-start the pension overhaul push by lauding the power of “the people of Illinois, good and true” through what he called the “electronic democracy” of Twitter and Facebook. Quinn went so far as to encourage families gathering at the Thanksgiving dinner table to “speak to each other” about the pension crisis.
The approach left some lawmakers questioning whether the governor demeaned the severity of one of the most pressing unresolved problems facing state government in Illinois. State Rep. Jack Franks, D-Marengo, called Quinn’s strategy “juvenile.”
The video is too long (it is the longest 3:44 of my life, do it in 90 seconds with a different host). Do not explain what a pension is in your intro video, have a different video for that.
Have some ways to illustrate the problem from a local perspective…
Enter your address and see how much the pension hole is for your school district(s) for example… How big is your family’s cut of the pension hole.
Have immediate next steps defined. There should be no ’stay tuned’, there should be we are having a meet-up/tweet-up/google+ meetup thing on X at Y and again at Z on A
Start taking names for an e-mail list… Gee, this is obvious.
* As ArchPundit points out, the hashtag they’re trying to push (#thanksinadvance) is already in widespread use and won’t stick out. For example…
If someone could kindly go and remove the sand from formby beach before tomorrow morning i would be very greatful. #thanksinadvance
* Finding the accompanying Facebook page ain’t easy, but here it is. Check out some of the comments…
#Peggy Glatz: How about politicians work for minimum wage FOR ONE YEAR. That would fix a lot.
#John C. Gallagher: What about the grants given to the families of large campaign funders? Maybe some of that money could have gone to funding the pensions in prior years. Always easy to say this caused that, Governor Quinn, but how does it feel coming the other way?
#Bob Madura: Posts are being deleted from this forum !
* But most of the comments are focused on the thing that Quinn’s new website completely ignores…
#Jim Johanson: Don’t Penalize The Employees Who Made Their Contributions…While The Politicians Underpaid The Pension Funds For Decades!!!!
For the past few years, the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago has been one of the most feared participants in the state’s pension reform debate.
Ty Fahner, a former Illinois attorney general who heads the Civic Committee, managed to convince both political parties of the need to compete for a position of favor with him and his influential group.
When Fahner and the committee ended up siding with the House Democrats in May and endorsing their pension reform plan, including the controversial cost shift from the state to school districts, the House Republicans were furious.
They had been assiduously courting Fahner and figured that because the Civic Committee consists of top Chicago business leaders, they’d be the natural ally of choice.
Not to mention that Fahner also formed a political action committee (“We Mean Business”) to back up his word. Everybody wanted that money, so the PAC gave his position additional strength.
But those days appear to be behind us, at least for now. Fahner’s histrionics last week over what he claimed was an “unfixable” pension problem have all but cut him out of the statehouse mix.
“He’s made himself irrelevant,” said one top Democratic official who’s intimately involved with pension reform.
In a memo to Civic Committee members, Fahner wrote that “the pension crisis has grown so severe that it is now unfixable. There simply won’t be enough money” to pay pensions for young teachers just starting out.
But then Fahner constructed a bizarre dichotomy by both claiming the problem to be completely unfixable while simultaneously demanding specific changes to the state’s pension systems. He said four things had to be done “just to slow the bleeding and reduce the size of the financial burden Illinois taxpayers must bear.”
Those four items included eliminating annual cost-of-living raises for pensioners, instituting a pension salary cap, increasing the retirement age to 67 and shifting the teachers’ pension costs to school districts and universities.
Because he said there was no real fix, there’s little to no use in negotiating with Fahner now because any solution the General Assembly comes up with will be dismissed by him as wholly inadequate.
Legislative thinking goes like this: Why bend over backward to accommodate someone who will never admit that you did the right thing? There’s absolutely no political or legislative advantage to dealing with the guy.
Making matters worse, Fahner refused to disclose the actuarial data upon which he based his dire projection. That has led to more than one suggestion behind the scenes that Fahner may have cooked the books to arrive at his striking conclusion.
The Teachers’ Retirement System released a statement last week, saying that Fahner’s conclusions were wrong based on its actuarial data. That statement just fueled the flames of suspicion.
So it’s little wonder that neither of the Republican legislative leaders have jumped to Fahner’s defense. House Minority Leader Tom Cross’ office was silent, and Senate Minority Leader Christine Radogno continued to call for a balanced, comprehensive pension solution.
Fahner wasn’t with them before and can’t be placated now, so he’s off the invite list.
The Senate Democrats were even harsher, issuing a statement from their attorney that ripped Fahner’s arguments into tiny shreds.
Fahner had earlier backed a “comprehensive reform” plan introduced by Republicans that would cut the state’s unfunded pension liabilities by $3 billion to $5 billion. It was so severe that just about everybody considered it unconstitutional.
The Senate Democrats’ attorney, Eric Madiar, noted in his response to Fahner that the Democratic proposal now on the table cuts the same amount from the unfunded liabilities — a plan that Fahner now calls “insufficient” and “token.”
Only the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board, whose often ill-informed catcalls about pension reform make Fahner look downright moderate, attempted to come to his defense. The editorial page claimed that Fahner didn’t really mean that the problem was “mathematically” unfixable, but that it was unfixable because of a lack of political will.
That’s a misreading. Fahner clearly stated in his memo to the Civic Committee membership that even the reform measure he demanded would merely “slow the bleeding” and “minimize the long-term damage” to the system.
Either way, few at the statehouse will listen much to the Tribune editorial board in light of the election outcomes. The paper’s endorsed candidates and positions were almost thumped harder than the GOP.
TRS in its piece toughened its bargaining position. While the head of the agency a few weeks ago had seemed to suggest that some reductions in benefits are inevitable, the article by TRS chief Dick Ingram emphasizes that all changes must follow a clause in the state Constitution that TRS believes bans any reduction in benefits once a teacher is hired and, beyond that, says lesser benefits that lawmakers enacted a couple of years ago create “inequity” and “penalize” the newbies.
* SJ-R Editorial: The Civic Committee’s pension meltdown: Unfortunately, Fahner provided no proof or actuarial study to back up his statements. Regardless, those suggestions are both unconstitutional and politically dead on arrival.
* Sun-Times Editorial: Excellent time for a state pension storm: But we part company, vociferously so, on Fahner’s proposal to eliminate COLAs altogether. This would mean a $30,000 pension for a retired 70-year-old today — a retiree who gets no social security — would never change. Instead, we favor scaling back the compounding and overly generous COLA that retirees currently receive. We also support the strongest language possible to force the state to make its annual pension payments.
Monday, Nov 19, 2012 - Posted by Advertising Department
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