Buddy the Budget is the fully funded budget Illinois needs, but who Governor Rauner has held hostage to his extreme agenda for more than year.
Buddy the Budget and social service, faith, and labor leaders will gather outside a $150 a plate BBQ fundraiser in Springfield this evening to free Buddy. Families across Illinois are hoping Governor Rauner will set the state budget free so children, students, seniors, people with disabilities, and working families get the services they need to get ahead.
What: Buddy the Budget and social services allies will ask Governor to sign a fully funded budget
Where: Outside Governor Rauner’s BBQ fundraiser at the Illinois Association of Realtors
522 S. 5th Street, Springfield
When: Tuesday, Aug. 16th 5:00 p.m.
Visuals: Buddy the Budget, signs
Buddy the Budget will be accompanied by her spokesperson Megen Rose and is available for media interviews.
Buddy the Budget is supported by a grassroots coalition of social service, and community, and worker’s organizations fed up with Governor’s failure to secure a budget for the State of Illinois.
I asked which groups are in the coalition and was told that the Chicago Metropolitan Battered Women’s Network “and all its members” are part of it as well as the Faith Coalition for the Common Good. “We’re just getting off the ground.”
While U.S. Senator Mark Kirk is running ads criticizing GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump and Congressman Adam Kinzinger (IL-16) continues to refrain from voicing support for Trump, GOP Congressman Rodney Davis (R-13) signed onto the Trump campaign’s new agricultural advisory committee.
Davis, who is serving his Congressional second term, is a member of the U.S. House Agriculture committee and Subcommittee Chair of the Bio Tech Committee.
The formation of the board represents Trump’s endorsement of these individuals’ diverse skill sets and ideas that can improve the lives of those in agricultural communities, a campaign statement said Tuesday.
Mr. Trump said, “The members of my agricultural advisory committee represent the best that America can offer to help serve agricultural communities. Many of these officials have been elected by their communities to solve the issues that impact our rural areas every day. I’m very proud to stand with these men and women, and look forward to serving those who serve all Americans from the White House.”
Davis has only token opposition in the general election. That district of his is loaded with college campuses and Trump’s numbers are absolutely horrible with young people. So if the Democrats had recruited a decent candidate, the incumbent may not have been able to stick his neck out this far.
Sent: Monday, August 15, 2016 20:26
To: HFS.SendAll
Subject: Health Benefits Update from John Terranova
Dear Colleagues,
Many of you have questions about the State’s health insurance proposal. That is understandable, as health insurance is a very important topic that affects us all. Indeed, like you, I participate in the very same health insurance program, so frequently have many of the same questions. Would I be able to continue paying the same premium I am paying now? How much would it cost to obtain basic services like immunizations and vaccines? What would be the most that I have to pay out of pocket in any given year?
To answer these and other questions, I sat down with a knowledgeable colleague, Teresa Flesch, who serves as the Assistant Deputy Director in the CMS Bureau of Benefits. Teresa is a terrific source of knowledge about health insurance benefits, and what resulted from my conversation with her is a very informative and short video that you can access by clicking here. Teresa and I believe you will find the video useful and recommend that you find five minutes to watch it.
As always, if you have more questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to me and my colleagues in CMS Labor Relations, or submit questions through the FAQ website.
Yours,
JT
John Terranova
Deputy Director
Office of Labor Relations
Department of Central Management Services
* I asked AFSCME for a response…
Rich,
This latest video from the Rauner Administration is riddled with misstatements, omissions and outright falsehoods—not unlike all of its communications related to the state contract.
To be clear, despite our repeated information requests across the bargaining table dating back nearly a year, the Rauner Administration has refused to provide AFSCME with its proposed health plan summaries containing the level of detail discussed in this video. As a result we cannot independently analyze the validity of some of these claims.
That said, under the terms the Rauner Administration had on the table when it walked away from negotiations back in January, for an employee to keep their current plan—same doctors, same coverage and same co-pays and other out-of-pocket costs—premiums would double in the first year the plan is implemented, and could continue to go up another 10% per year after that.
Those premium increases would cost the average worker some $10,000 over the term of the contract. Since Rauner is also demanding a four-year wage freeze, that’s effectively a $10,000 pay cut for the typical employee.
The Administration claims it would offer a choice of other plans, including ones at current premium levels. But employees would likely pay sharply higher co-pays, deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs under those plans. In essence, here the Rauner Administration is telling workers who can’t afford higher premiums to simply hope they don’t get sick.
What the Rauner Administration never admits is that its overall demand is for workers to pay 67% more of the cost of health care in the aggregate. Their vaunted “choice” for employees is whether to bear those vastly higher costs in the form of premiums or co-pays, deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs.
The AFSCME bargaining committee has made clear its willingness to moderate increases in employee health costs. But there is no justification for the radical cost-shifting demanded by the Rauner Administration. The overall value of the state health plan is now about average among the states. The Rauner Administration’s demands would drop Illinois to the bottom five worst state health plans in the nation.
Just two examples of this video’s misleading claims and omissions:
* The section from 1:23-1:40 discusses certain plan options that may offer the same coverage at the same premiums as today—but doesn’t disclose until a later section the vastly higher co-pays, deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs that would be imposed under these options.
* The section beginning at 1:55 discusses preventive care, noting that “many of the most common services would be free”. The implication is that the Rauner Administration is somehow due credit for this, or that it’s offering free services out of kindness. The reality is that every health plan is required by federal law—President Obama’s Affordable Care Act—to provide these preventive services free of charge.
It’s also worth noting that it’s not only the 38,000 AFSCME-represented state employees who would be affected by the Rauner Administration’s demands. These demands would be imposed on all the more than 360,000 people covered by the state group health plan, including all active and retired state employees, active and retired university employees, and their spouses and dependent children.
Misleading communications—including videos like this one—are intended to confuse employees. It’s a disservice to workers and to the collective bargaining process for the administration to cherry-pick information in this manner instead of providing the complete proposed plan summaries to our union. This type of misinformation is even more troubling when public taxpayer resources are being expended to produce and disseminate it, and when public employees are being subjected to it on the job.
Many state employees feel these videos and emails are inappropriate and unethical. State workers have tough and important jobs to do, serving their communities. When they’re at work they want to focus on their service, not be distracted and harassed on the job by the Rauner Administration’s anti-union misinformation campaign.
I hope this information is helpful.
Martha Merrill
Director of Employee Benefits
AFSCME Council 31
Illinois’s fiscal crisis has been a long time coming. From the late 1980s on, Illinois has spent more than it has collected in revenues. And while the typical U.S. state has also generally spent more than it has collected, Illinois’s overspending has outpaced the national average since the mid-1990s, primarily through pension spending. How could Illinois get away with this for so long when it is required by law to have a balanced budget? Over the years, lawmakers used a variety of techniques to put off paying the bills, including underpaying into the pension systems. Such techniques can work for only so long, and Illinois is now coming to terms with over 20 years of poor fiscal performance.
Figure 3… shows that starting in the mid-1990s, Illinois began spending a greater percentage of its revenues than the average U.S. state. In addition, since the late 1980s, Illinois has been spending more than 100% of its revenues, meaning it hasn’t had a truly balanced budget for well over two decades and has been accumulating debt.
Keep in mind that the difference between spending and revenues in Illinois shot way back up in Fiscal Year 2015 and 2016 because of the partial expiration of the income tax hike without many cuts.
How, specifically, has Illinois overspent relative to its revenues? To shed light on this question, I look at expenditures by category, as classified by the Census Bureau, for Illinois versus the average U.S. state during FY1994–2010 (Illinois’s overspending became markedly higher than that of the typical U.S. state in FY1994, and Illinois raised taxes in FY2011). For those 17 years, I calculate the average of yearly expenditures as a percentage of total revenues. Figure 4 shows that over those years, Illinois’s spending averaged 115.9% of its revenues compared with 105.7% for the typical U.S. state.
Thus, while spending outstripped revenues for both Illinois and the typical state during this span, Illinois overspent by much more (10.2 percentage points). The top two categories on which Illinois spent more were the change in pension liabilities (4.6 percentage points more) and employee retirement (2.8 percentage points more). Pension-related spending, then, makes up almost three-quarters of the difference between Illinois’s spending and that of the typical state.
Illinois also spent 1.3 percentage points more of its revenues on general debt interest than the average state—a sign that Illinois was accumulating debt outside of its pension system as well.
In response to an immediate need for solutions that will decrease the number shootings in the City of Chicago, State Representative Sonya Harper, DChicago, will hold a press conference to announce the introduction of a bill that will require the stamping of serial numbers on all ammunition sold in the state of Illinois. The press conference will be held on Tuesday, August 30, 2016 at US Bank, 815 W. 63rd St., 4th Floor Community Room, Chicago, IL, from 10am to 11am CT.
“Since we are having such a hard time tracking the flow of illegal guns into our communities, let’s start tracking the bullets.” Harper said. “More than 2,600 people have been shot in City of Chicago so far this year, many of them children in my own community. Being able to track fired bullets directly back to the seller will help law enforcement agencies target those who are distributing ammunition illegally.”
Attendees will have the opportunity to ask Representative Harper questions about the proposed legislation. Joining Harper will be national security analyst Dimitri Roberts and CEO of Ammo Coding Systems, Dr. Matt Harrington. Roberts will explain the practicality and possible timing of implementing the solution that will result from passing the bill. Dr. Harrington will be on hand to address the technical aspects of this legislation and how the tracking systems works and can result in decreased homicide rates.
“Ammo Coding Systems exists to track ammunition from creation to the point of sale, leaving a precise footprint of everywhere the ammunition travels,” said Dr. Matt Harrington. “By implementing this system that identifies individuals, who illegally sell weapons that sensibly take lives, will ultimately and quickly save lives.”
Chicago police officers’ emails discussing the Laquan McDonald shooting can’t be kept secret even though they were transmitted privately, a state official has decreed in what open-records advocates say is a solid step toward transparency on an issue that has roiled Illinois and reached as high as Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
The binding opinion last week by Democratic Attorney General Lisa Madigan follows quickly on a May Cook County Circuit Court ruling that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s emails about separate issues aren’t automatically exempt from disclosure even though sent on private devices.
The opinion has the force of law, requiring the police to search officers’ private accounts and turn over relevant emails — although the police department can ask a judge to overturn it. The dictum also fuels an ongoing national debate about access to discussions of public business on privately held cellphones and computers under decades-old disclosure laws which didn’t anticipate such an explosion of electronic communication. […]
“This binding opinion will hopefully make clear that public employees cannot evade FOIA by using private devices when conducting public business,” said John Costello, a Chicago public-access lawyer.
* This was the Chicago Police Department’s original defense…
Because the communications sought, if any exist, would have been prepared by or sent to individual officers and employees rather than the City, they are not communications “prepared by or for” a public body. And because the communications would not be stored on a City server or account, they cannot be “used by,” were not “received by,” and are not “in the possession of, or under the control of,” a public body. Thus, the requested communications, if any, do not fall within the FOIA’ s definition of a “public record” and are not subject to production under the Act.
When an individual public employee such as a CPD officer acts in an official capacity, he or she transacts public business as a member of a municipal police department, which clearly is a public body subject to the requirements of FOIA. CPD’s interpretation would undercut the principle that public bodies act through their employees, by excluding from the definition of “public records” communications sent or received by employees of a public body on personal devices or accounts, regardless of whether the communications pertain to the transaction of public business. Such an interpretation erroneously focuses not on the content of a communication but on the method by which it is transmitted.
There’s lots more, including a mandate to search e-mails more broadly. So, go read the whole thing if this subject interests you.
Citizens to Protect Transportation Funding is launching its public education campaign seeking support for a proposed state constitutional amendment to put state transportation spending in a “lockbox,” safe from other uses.
The group is a coalition of business, labor and construction groups, and it has raised almost $1.2 million for its push for what it calls the “safe roads amendment,” which voters will face on the Nov. 8 ballot.
The group has launched a website and will be following up its campaign with television and radio advertising. It contends the amendment to keep transportation funds from being swept for other government uses will mean “safer roads, a stronger economy and is the only way to hold Springfield accountable for future spending.”
But equally interesting is the list of political and legal hotshots steering the effort on behalf of the proposed constitutional amendment. Included: former Rauner chief of staff Mike Zolnierowicz, top Democratic strategist Eric Adelstein and Eric Madiar, former chief counsel to Illinois Senate President John Cullerton.
None of those figures would be involved without approval from bigger pols. And, since Speaker Mike Madigan’s House voted to put the “safe roads” amendment on the ballot, the speaker apparently is aboard, too.
“If you look at the vote in the General Assembly, it was nearly unanimous,” says Zolnierowicz. “This is an area on which people agree.”
The amendment specifically would mandate that all money that goes into the road fund be used for transportation needs—in a lockbox of sorts. And through the “road fund,” public transit in the Chicago area traditionally has received a fair-sized cut of annual fund spending.
The fund has been starved for cash lately—in part because state gasoline and license taxes and fees have been frozen for so long and in part because of what the group says have been $6.8 billion in diversions to other state needs over the past 12 years; $500 million was siphoned off just last year.
* This is a good idea. We have a lot of large agribusiness interests in this state which haven’t stepped up to back the Illinois State Fair. And the facilities could certainly use a sprucing up, to say the least…
Governor Bruce Rauner today, on Agricultural Day at the Illinois State Fair, applauded the launch of a new not-for-profit, Illinois Fairgrounds Foundation, to emphasize capital improvements at the Springfield and Du Quoin fairgrounds.
“The State Fair is the best place for Illinois to show off its products and accomplishments, and to ensure we can continue to do that, so that our children and grandchildren can continue on with this same tradition, we must preserve the State Fair experience and the legacy of its entertainment for generations to come,” said Governor Rauner. “A foundation is the best way to ensure that the fairgrounds get the upgrades and renovations necessary for these important assets. And it allows the fairgrounds to be less reliant on state money while putting no additional costs on the taxpayers. This is a win for taxpayers and the agricultural community as a whole.”
The Illinois State Fairgrounds in Springfield includes more than 170 buildings spanning 360 acres of land, with buildings as old as 124 years. The Du Quoin State Fairgrounds includes more than 20 buildings spread across more than 1,200 acres of land, with buildings as old as 93 years. Many of the buildings on both fairgrounds are in dire need of restoration, including paint, plumbing, roofing, and structural repairs. Combined, the fairgrounds carry $180 million in deferred maintenance costs.
“As a life-long Springfield resident, I’ve had a front row seat to the deterioration of our state fairgrounds,” said Dept. of Agriculture Director Raymond Poe. “Years and years of deferred maintenance has taken a toll on our fairgrounds. The facilities in Springfield and Du Quoin are used 365 days a year, not just the 11 days of each fair. We need to stop ignoring these problems and start planning for the future.”
Leaders in the agricultural community established the Illinois Fairgrounds Foundation to promote, support, assist, and sustain the Springfield and Du Quoin State Fairgrounds. The foundation will be led by a volunteer board representing a diverse cross section of the agriculture industry. Board members will engage with private sector business organizations and individuals to develop strategies to raise private funding, coordinate with the Department of Agriculture to plan projects and determine the Fairgrounds’ needs, and serve as ambassadors for the revitalization and improvement of the Fairgrounds and their agricultural heritage.
“I have had the privilege of working with Illinois companies and Illinois agri-businesses that support Illinois agriculture,” said board member John Slayton. “Over the years, these companies have contributed large chunks of money to help our youth exhibitors through the Governor’s Sale of Champions. There are companies in Illinois who are passionate about our state, our state’s number one industry, and our state fairs. Many of these companies currently donate to state fairs in other states because these states possess a vehicle to accept such donations. Now, with the Illinois Fairgrounds Foundation, we can keep Illinois dollars in Illinois supporting Illinois agriculture.”
“In past administrations the maintenance of the fairgrounds has been neglected, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in unmet infrastructure needs in Springfield and Du Quoin. I am pleased the agriculture community has created a foundation that will enable our private sector partners to help modernize and restore the greatness of these facilities,” said State Sen. Bill Brady (R-Bloomington).
“I fully support the Illinois Fairgrounds Foundation and its mission to raise private funds to help improve the infrastructure as well as promote the fairgrounds,” said State Rep. Tim Butler (R- Springfield). “I anticipate the foundation will prove beneficial to the taxpayers, Springfield and the State.”
A power outage has hit the Illinois State Fairgrounds in Springfield even as cleanup continues from days of heavy rains.
“We do have some buildings and tents without power,” spokeswoman Rebecca Clark said in an email Tuesday. “Not all buildings are impacted. We are working to restore power.”
* Interviewing Speaker Madigan’s press secretary isn’t ever an easy task because he’s done this so many times before and his motto is: Just because they ask a question doesn’t mean you have to answer it.
Proft: After 30 years at the helm, do you think Mike Madigan has any regrets about political or policy choices given where Illinois finds itself?
Brown: I’m sure he probably does. I don’t think I’ve ever had that conversation with him, so I wouldn’t be able to enumerate. But I can’t imagine that he stands here today and thinks that everything was terrific all along, given some of the things that have gone on.
“It’s understandable that the Republicans, as they will do, are attempting to make different political issues. I understand that. They ought to look at their own house though. They seem to have some problems inside their own house and they ought to work on that,” longtime Illinois House Speaker, Democrat Michael Madigan, said recently in an interview with public radio.
“I think it’s appropriate that there would be an inquiry, which is happening. Certain issues have been raised. Frank Mautino has been responding to those issues. He will continue to respond to those issues,” Madigan said. “My expectation is that at the end of the day, after there’s been a full inquiry, and a full level of knowledge as to what happened, that Frank will be vindicated, and he’ll continue to serve as the auditor general.”
Illinois social services agencies have struggled for the past year to communicate the message that state spending cuts are more than just a problem for poor people in Chicago and the Democrats who represent them.
Now they’ve got some new data to back it up.
Illinois Partners for Human Service, a group of 850 organizations operating in the state, released Monday an interactive online “Heat Map” to identify the specific effects of state spending reductions.
Instead of relying on anecdotal stories to make its case, the group crunched information provided by the state Department of Human Services and Department on Aging to calculate the impact by county and state legislative district.
Judith Geithner, the organization’s executive director, said the numbers show that the fallout from the spending cuts has been “totally bipartisan” with losses landing on suburban and Downstate areas represented by Republicans as well as the Democratic areas more commonly associated with social service needs. […]
For example, one of the biggest hits from the Department on Aging’s spending reductions was in the district of Sen. Matt Murphy, R-Palatine. Murphy, who announced his resignation last week, saw his district experience a steep $54 million drop in spending by the department — or 41 percent — from 2015.
There’s one caveat about this study. Spending is based on “the location of the headquarters of the organization receiving the payments, not where the services were necessarily performed.” Even so, it’s good stuff. Click here to see the data.
* The governor’s office sent another statement yesterday about Rauner’s Friday veto of the automatic voter registration bill. I asked Abe Scarr from Illinois PIRG to respond point by point and his comments are indented and in italics…
The National Voter Registration Act lays out three specific requirements for voter registration at driver’s licenses facilities (DMVs). Each voter registration application must “(i) state each eligibility requirement (including citizenship); (ii) contain an attestation that the applicant meets each such requirement; and (iii) require the signature of the applicant, under penalty of perjury” (42 USC 1973gg-3(c)(2)(C)).
Under SB 250, a driver is given a choice to register at the DMV. If the driver declines, the Secretary of State is directed to process the voter registration application anyway – “regardless of whether or not the individual attested to his or her eligibility to register to vote.” In that case, how will the driver attest to meeting the requirements to vote or sign the application under penalty of perjury?
Federal law does not require an attestation at the DMV. It requires the opportunity to attest. If the individual does not attest in this circumstance, they will only be registered if they have shown documentary evidence of their eligibility.
During discussions, proponents indicated that the Secretary of State will post a copy of the eligibility requirements at the facility, and that those requirements will be stated in a “script” used by DMV employees. That is not adequate to protect our election system and falls short of the basic requirements of the NVRA.
That is not quite right. Individuals will be directly provided with the eligibility requirements in writing as part of their interaction. This fulfills the requirements of the NVRA.
An individual who does not attest at the DMV will -only- be registered if they provided documentary evidence of their eligibility. And if they attest but show documentary evidence of their ineligibility, they will not be registered. This is more secure than our current system. In fact, two of the three examples of non-citizens being accidentally registered at the DMV would have been prevented were the provisions of SB250 in place.
SB 250 also requires the source agencies (e.g. the Secretary of State, Department of Healthcare and Family Services, Department of Human Services, Department on Aging, and Department of Employment Security) to share citizenship information with the State Board of Elections to enable the State Board to screen the data for noncitizens.
This is inaccurate. SB250 only requires this of the SOS -not the other sources agencies. SB250 was written with a different process for SOS and for other agencies. The other (non-dmv) agencies would only pass along applications for individuals who do attest to their eligibility, and does not require those agencies to share records of citizenship information shown.
The bill provides: “After each transaction, the agency shall electronically transfer to the State Board of Elections personal information relevant to voter registration, including all records of documents relating to identity, address, and citizenship.” The State Board is then tasked with screening the registrations and removing any noncitizens.
This is true for SOS, not other agencies.
But various federal laws prohibit this information sharing. For example, HFS advised us that federal Medicaid rules and data sharing agreements prohibit HFS from sharing this data with the State Board. For that reason, we suggested that agencies filter the data before sharing with the State Board of Elections. Proponents indicated that this was their preferred course originally, but that they modified the draft of the bill because the Secretary of State did not want to conduct this screening.
This is correct - we did originally propose that the screening occur at the source agencies. And we are OK in principle with this process — which should be easier now at the DMV because of changes made as part of real ID.
Proponents note that five other states have moved to automatic voter registration, but those states provide additional protections that SB 250 does not. For example, the Oregon DMV screens its records and processes automatic voter registrations only for persons for whom the DMV has verified citizenship; and voters are required to attest to meeting the qualifications to vote at the time of voting. In California, a person must attest to meeting the qualifications to vote at the DMV and may opt-out. SB 250 does not incorporate these protections.
In private discussions, proponents have conceded that the bill does not clearly reflect the process they envisioned. We appreciate that they are willing to make many of the changes that we believe are necessary. For that reason, the Governor remains willing to work with them to pass a bill later this year that accomplishes their goals, expands voting opportunities, and protects the integrity of our voting system.
Because we wrote the bill in an open process that included input from impacted agencies and legislative leaders from both parties, and because we made tweaks as we went, portions of the legislative language are not as clean as if we started from scratch. That’s how this sausage was made. The bill does reflect the process we envision.
* More from Scarr…
The bill treats Drivers Services and other agencies differently. Drivers Services is the only agency that would share the data for all individuals (besides TVDL applicants). Beyond the basic information they already share with the State Board for voter registration applications, they would also share a record of what specific documentation the individual presented in getting their driver’s license or state ID. That would allow the state board to “screen” that data and pass along applications to local election officials of those who have documented they are eligible, and not pass along information for those that have documented they are ineligible.
Other agencies would only share data for individuals who do affirm their qualifications while interacting with the agency. We wrote the bill to not have the same data sharing and screening process at the other agencies a) to fully comply with the NVRA which requires a yes/no question at those agencies b) because many agencies lack the relevant data, which would make the process inefficient.
So yes it is true that federal law does limit what information some agencies can share, but that is irrelevant as the bill does not ask them to share that information.
Tuesday, Aug 16, 2016 - Posted by Advertising Department
[The following is a paid advertisement.]
Last week, the Independent Map Amendment presented its final brief to the Illinois Supreme Court. In this brief, attorneys for Independent Maps argued that the lower court ruling against the redistricting reform amendment is contrary to both the intent of the 1970 Constitution and the plain language of the constitution’s provision allowing voters to propose amendments.
Independent Maps citied the record from the 1970 Constitutional Convention, which shows that the delegates who drafted and approved the initiative provision regarded redistricting as one of the “critical areas” the initiative process was intended to address because legislators are unlikely to propose needed reforms on their own.
A delegate to the 1970 Convention also weighed in with an Op-Ed in the Chicago Sun-Times earlier this week. Here’s what he had to say:
The 1970 Constitutional Convention intended the initiative provision to open up the redistricting process and provide a way for citizens to act directly in proposing a specific constitutional amendment for voters’ ratification.
The Illinois Supreme Court should reject the numerous technical objections conjured up against this initiative by self-interested advocates and allow the voters to give the proposal and up or down vote in November.
