The departments of Healthcare and Family Services and Human Services will process payments to Medicaid providers as if a budget had been enacted this fiscal year, the departments announced today. The decision comes after the departments reviewed relevant consent decrees and recent court rulings. The effect of today’s decision is to include providers beyond those who serve children. Details will be announced soon.
A University of Illinois official says the outgoing Urbana-Champaign chancellor will receive $400,000 as part of her resignation.
U of I spokesman Tom Hardy says Phyllis Wise’s contract includes a $500,000 retention bonus — $100,000 for each year she stayed. She’s been chancellor for four years.
Wise announced Thursday she’s resigning effective Aug. 12. She cited a range of “external issues” she says have become a distraction.
Wise, 70, is expected to join the faculty after her resignation is effective next week, though, according to her contract, she is first eligible for a one-year sabbatical. Her salary is $549,069 this year, and her new faculty salary is expected to be about $300,000. [Emphasis added.]
There’s also yet another new scandal under Wise’s tenure. Click here.
* I don’t always express love for the Illinois Policy Institute, but their research and hard work on criminal justice reform has been astoundingly good this year…
Illinois law provides few remedies for property-crime victims to recover their losses. Anyone guilty of a property crime, such as theft or destruction of property, may be sent to jail or prison, but this precludes them from working to pay off their debt. And even if victims can cover the cost or time needed for a civil lawsuit, incarcerated defendants rarely have the assets to pay them.
Instead of sending property offenders to prison – a solution that isn’t always the best option for low-level offenders – a better approach is to pursue restorative-justice programs that ensure that property offenders work to pay back their victims.
States such as Texas and Kansas have implemented restorative-justice programs as an alternative method of addressing nonviolent property crimes. For example, “Bridges to Life,” a Texas program, is a 12-week course for offenders currently serving time in prison. Bridges to Life, which has provided services to 3,100 offenders, is a faith-based program that encourages interaction between offenders and victims.
The program requires the willing participation of both the defendant and the victim, as well as either the admission or – more rarely – a finding of guilt by the defendant. If both parties are willing, the process begins with a conference between the two. The victim is given an opportunity to discuss the harm inflicted by the offender. Through this discussion, the victim is able to determine appropriate sanctions, such as compensation for damages, community service or the defendant’s volunteering at the victim’s preferred charity.
Research has shown higher rates of victim satisfaction upon the completion of restorative-justice programs than through trials resulting in incarceration. The restorative-justice process continues only if the defendant clearly acknowledges responsibility for the harm he or she caused and demonstrates remorse.
Mary Beth Jachec lives in a three-bedroom house in Wauconda, a village of 14,000 in Illinois, 45 miles northwest of Chicago. Her semi-detached brick home is unassuming. Her tax bills are not.
The 53-year-old insurance manager gets a real estate tax bill for 20 different local government authorities and a total payout of about $7,000 in 2014. They include the Village of Wauconda, the Wauconda Park District, the Township of Wauconda, the Forest Preserve, the Wauconda Area Public Library District, and the Wauconda Fire Protection District.
Then there is Wauconda Road and Bridge, not to be confused with Road and Bridge, Wauconda Gravel, or with Wauconda Special Road Improvement and Gravel unit – all three of which have imposed separate taxes on her and the village’s other homeowners.
Those three road entities come under the auspices of Wauconda Township. Officials there struggled to explain exactly what they each do, and why three separate taxing bodies are needed. The Wauconda Township Highway Commissioner, Joe Munson, said: “They are all for road maintenance.” So why three? “I don’t know why,” Munson said. “It’s always been that way.” […]
The average homeowner pays taxes to six layers of government, and in Wauconda and many other places a lot more. In Ingleside, 55 miles north of Chicago, Dan Koivisto pays taxes to 18 local bodies. […]
The state is home to nearly 8,500 local government units, with 6,026 empowered to raise taxes, by far the highest number in the U.S. Texas – whose population is more than twice that of Illinois - is second highest with about 5,150 local government units. Florida, with a population 54 percent greater than Illinois, has just 1,650, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
The Plaintiffs and intervenors in the Ligas Consent Decree accused the State of Illinois late Thursday of flagrantly disregarding the rights of more than 10,000 people with developmental disabilities, and they urged the federal court to order the state to issue Medicaid payments to providers immediately.
Their motion, obtained by McManus Consulting, seeks payments not just for members of the Ligas class but for non-class members as well.
Earlier in the week, attorneys for the state appeared before Judge Joan Lefkow in a case involving Medicaid payments for children and made oral promises to the judge to begin making all Medicaid payments. But the state failed to follow this up with any statement in writing to clarify their intentions, prompting the Ligas lawyers to file their motion.
Residents of CILAs and ICFDDs “are in immediate peril,” according to the motion. “As private providers inevitably reduce or cease their operations, the state will likely have no other option but to place individuals in State Operated Developmental Centers.” The state’s disregard of the court’s orders and federal statutes is “tantamount to placing the Illinois Constitution above federal law, in violation of the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution.”
The motion was filed by Equip for Equality and the Roger Baldwin Foundation of ACLU, representing Ligas plaintiffs, and attorney William Choslovsky, representing residents of intermediate care facilities who are intervenors in the case. They requested a hearing next Tuesday before Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman.
Joining in the request was Ligas Court Monitor Ronnie Cohn, who filed an affidavit pointing out that most providers are completely reliant on state funding. “These providers literally live from payment to payment and have no ability to survive even a short termination or reduction of funding,” she said.
PROVIDERS SAY THEY ARE ON THE VERGE OF CLOSING . . .
Affidavits also were submitted by Charlene Bennett of Individual Advocacy Group, Romeoville; Mary Beth Hepp, Helping Hand Center, Countryside; Jessica Rosales, Progressive Housing, Olympia Fields; James A. Keller, Keltech Management Co., Anna; Karen Donovan, Futures Unlimited, Pontiac; Krystal L. Gruenfelder, Parents and Friends of the Specialized Living Center, Swansea; John Huelskamp, Community Link, Breese; and Michael S. Poe, ARC Community Support Systems, Teutopolis.
Rosales said Progressive, which provides residential services to 244 people, has less than 30 days of cash on hand and has maxed out a $750,000 line of credit. They will be forced to close and will default on $12.6 million in revenue bonds. Bennett said IAG has 57 CILAs and “unless some dramatic reimbursement arrangements occur soon,” they will be unable to meet their obligations. Hepp said Helping Hand serves 80 persons in CILAs, including 17 Ligas class members, but will not be able to operate the CILAs with funding for only Ligas class members.
The motion asks for enforcement of both the Ligas decree and an order that Judge Coleman issued June 30, directing the comptroller to make all payments to providers. It says on July 23 the state sent a letter to providers informing them that payments would be made only for Ligas class members, “in complete disregard” of the decree and the order.
The lawyers called the letter seriously misleading. “Through this letter, the state attempts to transform the agreed order into something it’s not–an order which requires the comptroller to make only some payments and which allows the state to pick and choose which payments the comptroller should make.”
“The state’s disruption of funding to service providers impermissibly shifts from the state to the providers the obligation to provide funding to people with developmental disabilities. . . . Funding through the state, though at a rate among the lowest in the nation, is the only means by which providers can pay their employees and pay for housing, food, nursing care, therapy and the other essential needs of the individuals they serve.”
The lawyers said it is a violation of the decree to provide funding only for class members. “As a specific example, Stanley Ligas, one of the named plaintiffs, lives in a four-person CILA (run by IAG) with three roommates he chose, none of whom are class members. With funding only for Mr. Ligas, this CILA home and the supports necessary to maintain Mr. Ligas’ life in the community cannot be sustained.”
* This particular settlement was expected to be the same basic plan that was behind the state employee pay issue. Instead of just paying union members during the budget impasse, because it was too complicated, the judge ordered all state workers be paid.
But, instead of covering everybody at a facility, the state is only providing funding for those folks narrowly impacted by the consent decree. That’s very odd because the object is to keep services flowing to those folks and the groups in question can’t do that with only a fraction of their current costs.
What could happen is that several facilities will have to close. And it’ll be a crazily complicated task to figure out who goes where and who gets dumped into the street.
* I’m pretty darned certain that we’re gonna see more and more public pressure to pass a state law which removes pension benefits from the local collective bargaining processes. A major reason why is that Chicago picks up most of its teachers’ pension payments. The CTU is so far refusing to give any ground on that topic, so something is gonna have to eventually give…
Eliminating the district's practice of picking up the bulk of teacher pension contributions is "strike-worthy," Lewis says.
The problem becomes if the governor leverages the pension bargaining issue to get even more of his collective bargaining “reform” proposals into law. There’s only so much that the Democrats will accept.
Mayor Emanuel essentially dodged the allegation last night on “Chicago Tonight.” But he did have this advice…
“I asked the Speaker and then Gov. Quinn and President Cullerton, that I ran on an effort to make sure our children have the full school day, the full school year, no longer the shortest school day and the shortest school year. We couldn’t make progress, work with me so that we should not have to negotiate that in a contract.
“We worked on it, got it done.”
[Cross talk, including a question about how Gov. Rauner wants a bill that applies statewide.]
“Then work with the legislative leaders on a bill to do that, not try to hold the children of the City of Chicago hostage, not try to hold parents who rely on daycare hostage.”
During a Thursday evening appearance on WTTW’s “Chicago Tonight,” Emanuel said Rauner’s “finger-pointing and name-calling” are not the way to get results. And the mayor expressed frustration over Rauner’s tactics.
“Two weeks ago the governor said that with me and John Cullerton, he’d get a deal already, and now I’m a problem this week.”
When asked if Rauner was trying to get Emanuel to turn on Madigan, Emanuel said: “That’s not going to be a successful effort.”
The Chicago Public Schools pension provision in Cullerton’s bill is designed to offset state funding of teacher pensions granted to every school district in Illinois except Chicago. Emanuel said Rauner’s opposition to the bill amounts to holding Chicago students hostage while trying to squeeze concessions on politically unpopular concepts like right-to-work laws.
“Don’t use it as a pawn to get your agenda where people have hard feelings about it,” Emanuel said.
Emanuel said the governor needs to look at what’s in the bill, not what’s missing, and use it as a starting point for his agenda.
“I say to the governor, having worked for two presidents and as mayor, there’s a way to get some of the things you want done,” Emanuel said. “My point is, rather than try to turn one person against the other, John Cullerton has a bill that addresses two years’ worth of property tax freeze. Let’s work on that product. It also addresses my needs, it addresses some of the Republicans in the suburbs’ needs. There’s a real bill there.”
• Enhancing pension benefits. Former GOP Gov. James Thompson agreed in 1989 to establish a compounding, 3 percent cost-of-living increase for retirees. Another round of benefit enhancements followed in the late 1990s. In May, the state Supreme Court ruled that those changes can’t ever be revoked for tens of thousands of current and retired government workers.
• Clearing a bloated state payroll by letting workers retire early. A 2002 plan created under Republican Ryan and pushed by Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan cost the pension systems at least four times more than originally billed and won’t be paid off until after 2045, when early-century budgetary ills will be the stuff of history books.
Other factors happened outside policymakers’ control. The collapse of the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s and the 2008 stock-market meltdown accounted for a combined $15.9 billion in pension-investment losses, CGFA reported. And an adjustment downward in long-term investment return assumptions in 2011 pushed Illinois’ pension systems $9.8 billion deeper into the red.
But perhaps the most enduring culprit is the “Edgar ramp,” conceived in 1994 by Republican Gov. Jim Edgar as a 50-year program to stabilize the retirement systems.
* Our resident pension expert RNUG e-mailed me today…
Pretty decent overall but they blew it at the end, failing to note the Rauner pension reform proposals are just as unconstitutional as SB-1 was. Still, it’s a decent primer for people who won’t take the time to read Eric Madiar’s report.
Friday, Aug 7, 2015 - Posted by Advertising Department
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* Former Gov. Jim Edgar told reporters Gov. Bruce Rauner should focus on the budget, not the Turnaround Agenda…
“He comes from a different background than I do. But I just think it’s very important for a governor, you’ve got to have a good budget and you need it in place,” Edgar told reporters. “You can try to compromise on some issues — and I think there are certain things (Democrats in the Legislature) might give him — but some of the things he’s asking for, they’re not going to give him. They’re just not going to give him.” […]
“But I come at it from a little different background. I come at it as someone who came out of state government, and I’m still concerned about the state budget and having a good fiscal foundation,” Edgar said. “(Rauner) comes out of the business world and he’s very worried about some of these economic issues. He’s the governor. I’m not going to argue with him.” […]
“Truthfully the Democrats can walk away a lot easier than he can. They’re not the governor,” he said. “I told him, they’ve proven they walked away before. It’s not like they lay awake at night wondering if everything is working 100 percent. Particularly now that we have a Republican governor, they probably even worry less.” […]
He said he was “worried that in two or three weeks we might be in the same position that we are right now. We need a budget. There are too many things that can fall through the cracks and wheels beginning to fall off and it’s unfortunate.”
Edgar has said the same to me, but he was off the record. This public comment is significant, to say the least.
* ABC 20’s Jordan Abudayyeh sat down with House Speaker Michael Madigan the other day. One of the topics they discussed was Gov. Rauner’s election. Here’s the Speaker’s analysis…
I don’t think that Gov. Rauner won the election, I think that Gov. Quinn lost the election.
And let me just explain this. There was an advisory question on the ballot in November of 2014 concerning the minimum wage. And the thinking was that if somebody came to vote for the advisory question on the minimum wage their political thinking would be such that they would go for Gov. Quinn.
Well, there were 650,000 Illinoisans who found their way to vote for the advisory question on the minimum wage, but could not find their way to vote for Gov. Quinn.
And that’s where I would say that Quinn lost the election, not Rauner winning the election.
Lots of folks have repeatedly made that very same point in comments here.
But just as interesting to me is that Madigan all but admitted to Jordan that he put that advisory question on the ballot to help his governor win an election. It’s an obvious point. Everybody knew it. But I don’t think he’s ever actually come out and said it before.
