If there ever was any hope that five Chicago city workers pension funds would make any money by investing $68 million with then-Mayor Richard M. Daley’s nephew and one of his key political supporters, it didn’t last long.
Only months after the deals were made a dozen years ago, problems began to emerge.
The nephew, Robert G. Vanecko, and his business partner Allison S. Davis, a developer who gave campaign money to Daley and was appointed by the mayor to head the Chicago Plan Commission, started investing in a series of property deals that, by the time the last of them are unwound by the end of December, will have cost the city workers pension funds 80 percent of the $68 million they put in — $54 million in all. […]
And somehow they even lost money — more than $11 million on the deal that built a busy Mariano’s supermarket in the North Side neighborhood of East Lake View, a location that has 90,000 people living within a one-mile radius.
Hello, this is a very important message. Did you know that you probably received more robocalls per day in November than any previous month in the history of recorded phone messages? […]
There were 5.1 billion robocalls made in November — a record 1,963 per second — meaning that the average person did in fact hear more annoying health insurance, easy-money and interest rate scam pitches than ever before, according to a monthly YouMail survey.
Chicago ranked fourth among cities with more than 164 million robocalls received last month, trailing only Atlanta, Dallas and New York, according to the survey.
* From yesterday…
Attorney General Lisa Madigan today announced she is joining with a bipartisan group of 38 other attorneys general to stop or reduce annoying and harmful robocalls.
“Robocalls are an obnoxious form of consumer harassment,” Madigan said. “I am pleased to be part of this bipartisan group that will provide people simple ways to avoid annoying and invasive robocalls.”
Madigan and the multistate group has had in-depth meetings with several major telecom companies about technological capabilities currently in existence or in development that would reduce robocalls. The coalition of states is pushing the carriers to, among other things, quickly develop and implement technology to help identify and block potential unwanted robocalls for their customers.
Madigan and the coalition will seek to develop a detailed understanding of what is technologically feasible to minimize unwanted robocalls and illegal telemarking. They will also engage the major telecom companies to encourage them to expedite the best possible solutions for consumers, and determine whether states should make further recommendations to the FCC.
All these robocalls are making polling vastly more difficult to do because people aren’t answering their phones. It also has to be hurting campaigns for the same reason.
Illinois Family Action seeks to fortify the traditional foundations of civil society through efforts to educate, inform and influence elected officials in support of the country’s historic ideals of equality under the law, and the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness on which the nation was founded.
Illinois State Senator Jason Barickman (R-Bloomington) has been an outspoken proponent for legalizing high-potency marijuana and he wants a “seat at the table” when Gov.-elect JB Pritzker and other Chicago Democrats move the bill in 2019.
Take ACTION: Barickman will be the featured speaker Dec. 4 at the McLean County Chamber of Commerce’s BN The Know event in Bloomington, titled “Recreational Marijuana and the Business Community.” You can register to attend HERE. […]
The chart below is from a new report released this month put out by the Centennial Institute titled Economic and Social Costs of Legalized Marijuana. It is the first of its kind to calculate the negative costs associated with legalization. For every dollar spend on legalization, it’s costing Colorado residents $4.50. They claim this is a low estimation. Can Illinois afford more bad public policy that will cost the taxpayers in the end? […]
Please plan to attend this event and bring up this timely report. Point all in attendance to the www.NoWeedIllinois web site to get the facts for themselves.
Hey, what happened to liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
Also, Kathy Valente happens to be the author of every, single article at NoWeedIllinois.
A new report from Colorado Christian University’s Centennial Institute claims that “for every dollar gained in tax revenue, Coloradans spent approximately $4.50 to mitigate the effects of [marijuana] legalization.” That factoid is already showing up in arguments against legalization, even though it is plainly fallacious.
Centennial Institute Director Jeff Hunt, who is also the university’s vice president of public policy, takes the approach favored by anti-pot polemicists, conflating correlation with causation and counting every purported cost to which a number can be attached, no matter how implausibly, while ignoring every benefit except for tax revenue and the increased value of Colorado homes since legalization (which suggests the state has not turned into the drug-addled dystopia predicted by prohibitionists).
Most glaringly, as Paul Danish notes in the Boulder Weekly, Hunt et al. make no attempt to isolate the impact of legalization, which is supposed to be the subject of the report. Instead they tote up supposedly marijuana-related costs without regard to whether they were caused by the change in policy the authors claim to be analyzing.
The study, which was carried out for the Institute by a research firm named QREM, is a dog’s dinner of statistical scraps that run the gamut from misleading to dishonest, irrelevant and embarrassing.
The assertion that “for every dollar gained in tax revenue, Coloradans spend approximately $4.50 to mitigate the effects of legalization” is the first sentence of the study’s executive summary.
In order to arrive at this conclusion, the study’s authors had to tote up all the supposed costs of legalization they could think of, including some that are pretty silly. Like the $54.8 million cost of stoners’ “physical inactivity” due to marijuana turning them into couch potatoes.
Other “costs” are not so silly, but are much more dishonest. Like the alleged $423.4 million in lost income over a lifetime of the kids who dropped out of high school in 2017 supposedly due to their marijuana use. The latter figure is the single largest “cost” in the study’s laundry list. […]
The figures, even if accurate, represent the economic and social costs of marijuana use in 2017. But the study’s supposed purpose is to identify the economic and social costs attributable to marijuana legalization, which are different than the overall costs (real, imaginary or theoretical) of marijuana use generally.
Marijuana use in Colorado didn’t begin when pot became legally available at the beginning of 2014. Coloradans used marijuana illegally for decades before then, and it’s reasonable to assume that if pot was producing stoner sloths and stoner school dropouts in 2017, it was also producing them prior to legalization.
And that means that the only economic and social costs that can be attributed to legalization are those that occurred incrementally after marijuana became commercially available at the beginning of 2014.
But in most cases the Institute’s study doesn’t include cost estimates for the years prior to the beginning of legal sales, so it’s not possible to calculate what costs, if any, are attributable to legalization.
Chicago mayoral candidate Bill Daley unveils a proposal to freeze homeowners’ property taxes in a television ad his campaign is set to start airing Thursday. […]
After the spot shows Daley talking to various people of different ages and ethnicities, the narrator gets to the big promise: “Bill will put a moratorium on tax hikes to keep families in their homes.” The words “PROPERTY TAX FREEZE” appear on the screen in large letters next to images of Daley speaking to a Hispanic woman in a store and a white man with a young child. […]
He previously had stressed the need to get away from raising the taxes on homeowners, but had not proposed an outright freeze. In a speech to the City Club of Chicago last week, he vowed that any property tax increases would be met with “dollar-for-dollar” cuts to city government. […]
While Daley is calling for a moratorium on property tax hikes, he previously has advocated for City Hall to consider a wide range of new taxes and fees to deal with the city’s ongoing pension crisis, which will require the next mayor to come up with nearly $1 billion in new annual retirement fund payments by 2023. In his City Club speech, Daley opened the door to a commuter tax on suburbanites who work in the city to help fill the pension gap while also saying an increase in real estate transfer fees and taxes on legalized marijuana and a long-sought Chicago casino “must be on the table.”
Refusing to raise property taxes while waiting on Springfield to give the city a casino or whatever pie in the sky idea Richard M. Daley had at the moment is what got the city in trouble in the first place because it didn’t adequately fund its pension systems (or even pay a dime into some of them).
And now Bill Daley thinks that the General Assembly is gonna pass a commuter tax? Does he not know that a record number of suburban Democrats were elected to the legislature last month and that they will be highly resistant to a possibly unconstitutional tax on their own constituents to benefit Chicago, on top of any graduated income tax plan? Or is he just being a Daley?
Daley said that should include considering an amendment to the state’s constitution, deleting a provision that says current public employees cannot have their pension benefits “diminished or impaired.” […]
Many legal scholars question whether changing the constitution would allow the city to reduce the retirement benefits of current city employees, and changes already have been made to lower benefits for new city employees. As a result, it’s unclear what changes a future mayor could make with state lawmakers to save additional money, and Daley did not outline any specifics.
The Illinois Department of Corrections continues to flounder in its efforts to care for inmates with mental illness, according to a new report authored by Dr. Pablo Stewart, a psychiatrist and court-appointed monitor on a 2016 settlement agreement on a class-action lawsuit. […]
The report singles out Pontiac Correctional Center for having a “culture of abuse and retaliation” against mentally ill inmates.
The monitoring team found both an “informal use of force and retaliation system” and “evidence of intimidation of the mental health staff at Pontiac by the custody staff”—problems that have persisted since the lawsuit was settled 30 months ago.
“It is my opinion as Monitor that the Department has not done anything to effectively address this ongoing problem at Pontiac,” wrote Dr. Stewart, adding that he is “absolutely convinced” that staff are physically assaulting mentally ill inmates there.
We as a state don’t provide decent mental health care for our residents, then we turn jails and prisons into de facto mental health centers, then we abuse the mentally ill inmates and people trying to help them. Wonderful.
I have also encountered the presence of an elaborate system of retaliation perpetrated by the custody staff against the mentally ill offenders at Pontiac. These retaliatory acts include, but are not limited to:
1. Withholding of food/visits/phone calls.
2. Not allowing certain mentally ill offenders to attend required structured or unstructured activities.
3. Setting up certain mentally ill offenders for assault by labeling them “snitches.”
4. Providing mentally ill offenders with the means for them to perform self-injurious behaviors (i.e. staples, paperclips, or other sharp objects.)
5. Planting incriminating evidence in the cells of mentally ill offenders, such as weapons or other forms of contraband.
During my site visits, I often encounter mentally ill offenders who present with injuries to their heads and face. I have even encountered mentally ill offenders with newly missing teeth and physical exam evidence of recent trauma to their faces. If I had encountered these types of injuries with my own patients, I would be obligated to report them to the police.
* The 2018 Golden Horseshoe Award for Best House Secretary/Admin. Assistant/District Office Director goes to Mika Baugher…
I don’t know how she stays on top of everything but she does. There’s no way I could ever do what she does!
Agreed. Joann Sullivan had been with Speaker Madigan for several decades. Stepping into that job couldn’t have been easy, but she makes it look that way.
* The 2018 Golden Horseshoe Award for Best Senate Secretary/Admin. Assistant/District Office Director goes to India Hammons…
There are all kinds of great people doing great work behind the scenes in this category.
I’d like to honor India Hammons for her outstanding work during her tenure in Senator Lightford’s Capitol Office.
She juggled a lot of responsibilities in deftly managing everything that came her way.
India recently moved on to a different job, but she is missed.
She really was great at her job.
* OK, let’s move on to our next category…
* Best State Senate Staffer - Non Political
* Best State House Staffer - Non Political
As a reminder, this category also includes folks who work for the Clerk of the House and the Secretary of the Senate. Please try to nominate in both categories, but I’ll give you a pass if you mostly deal with one chamber. Also, please make sure to explain your votes or they won’t count. Thanks!
With nearly a decade having passed since lawmakers approved Illinois’ last major capital program, billions of dollars worth of deferred maintenance has racked up. […]
“We’re behind, to be perfectly frank,” said IDOT Secretary Randy Blankenhorn, one of the panelists. “We are not funding transportation as well as some of our neighbors and as our competitors. … I spend $250 a month on my phone. I spend $50 a month for water. This is the infrastructure of my life. It’s what I need to make things happen. And we’re spending 50 cents a day on transportation. And, honestly, it’s inadequate.”
To help fix the chronic funding problem, an increase in the state gas tax, which has not been raised since 1990, and vehicle registration fees will be inevitable, Blankenhorn said.
Blankenhorn said such an increase would provide “revenue necessary to maintain, enhance, modernize our system. That’s the conversation that we need to have.”
Five years after the conservative think tank criticized lawmakers for passing a pension bill it once called “grossly inadequate,” the group has changed its mind. “It turns out it was pretty darn good,” John Tillman, CEO of IPP, told POLITICO. His organization recently revisited SB1, the bill that passed in 2013 but was found unconstitutional in 2015.
Tillman said the measure would have saved somewhere between $1.1 billion and $1.4 billion a year in 2016, 2017 and 2018. “It would have put the state on a much better path to fully funding pensions,” he said, crediting Democratic state Rep. Elaine Nekritz for shepherding the bill and the bipartisan nature of it.
IPI’s turnaround signals an olive branch toward Democrats and the state’s new administration. And it follows a tumultuous four years working with Gov. Bruce Rauner. The anti-union, anti-tax group appeared aligned with Rauner when he first took office. That changed when the governor signed the controversial HB40 abortion law—after he said he wouldn’t. Tillman called him a “failed” leader. Their relationship spiraled downward. […]
He insists pension reform is still possible, but only with bipartisan support. Tillman hopes to talk to Gov.-elect J.B. Pritzker about creating a two-pronged pension system that would protect already-earned current retirees and current workers’ benefits (possibly with a 401K system) and also those of retirees.
Tillman is indeed on a mission here. We had a long off the record conversation in Springfield this week.
And while he is trying to position himself as extending an “olive branch,” I doubt that the governor-elect is all that interested. Pritzker has talked a lot about the CTBA plan to reamortize the pension debt, but has rejected all other reform ideas. Tillman claims the CTBA plan is unworkable because it won’t contain costs.
…Adding… The group’s opposition to SB1 was a lot harsher than described above. From 2013…
Government workers and taxpayers should call out Illinois’ pension bill for what it is – a farce. […]
Workers and taxpayers will need to say no to fake reforms and call for the only sustainable solution going forward: giving state workers control over their retirements through defined contribution plans that workers own and control.
…Adding… And the group knew the projected savings back then as well, but dismissed them…
The pension bill saves only $1.3 billion in its first year
…Adding… Tillman also says in that Politico piece that he hopes to meet with Madigan, but his group just published a cartoon comparing Madigan to Satan. I kid you not. Click here.
Tillman admits he was wrong about SB1. It would have been good if it stayed in place, he said.
“It turns out it wasn’t just one good step, maybe it was five or six very good steps. If you look at what would have happened since that bill was passed and if the Supreme Court had not ruled it unconstitutional,” Tillman said.
So, now, the controversial think tank, at the center of some turmoil under Governor Rauner, is suggesting a bipartisan effort under JB Pritzker to change the Illinois Constitution and create a two-option pension system that, he said, won’t affect benefits earned by current workers or retirees. He is not expecting an easy sell.
“The most important thing to do is to fix the problem now and that’s why we are using the anniversary day of the 2013 reform to hold ourselves accountable and to encourage the General Assembly to look back at what they did in a bipartisan fashion and say hey there’s a lesson there,” Tillman said.
* And the Illinois Policy Institute’s Austin Berg kinda/sorta explains what they want to do via an op-ed for the Illinois News Network, which is based at the same address…
That’s why a constitutional amendment is so necessary. And it doesn’t have to eliminate the pension clause in order to allow cuts.
A solid amendment simply needs to allow for changes in future benefits, while protecting what has already been earned by public employees. Voters could approve the amendment as early as 2020, and lawmakers could pass specific reforms that trigger the morning after Election Day.
Those changes need to be a bit more substantial than in 2013, because the problem has grown tremendously since then. But the principles can remain the same.
A constitutional amendment allowing reductions in the growth of future benefits could be followed with legislation that essentially reintroduces the 2013 reform concepts with differences in degree, including the following:
Increasing the retirement age for those not currently close to retirement
A cap on the maximum pensionable salary that grows at a rate pegged to inflation
Replacing Illinois’ 3 percent guaranteed benefit increases with a cost-of-living increase tied to inflation
Potentially suspending COLA increases for certain years to allow inflation to catch up to past raises
* But even Gov. Rauner told Crain’s this fall that a constitutional amendment was futile…
He wants pension reform, but said the idea of amending the Illinois Constitution to reduce such benefits likely is a political and legal non-starter.
If I recall correctly, Rauner specifically said he doubted that voters would approve such an amendment even if you could get it out of the House and Senate.
* And changing the state’s Constitution won’t help with this clause in the US Constitution…
No State shall… pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts
For instance, while the unemployment rate in the region dropped from 9 to 7.6 percent overall, among blacks it dipped just four-tenths of a percentage point, or 0.4 percent. That’s significantly smaller than the drops among Latinos, Asians and non-Hispanic whites, even though the unemployment rate was and remains far higher among blacks, more than 17 percent.
Similarly, median household income among blacks is still off nearly a tenth—9.4 percent—among blacks. In comparison, among whites, the drop was 1.5 percentage points; among Hispanics, 4.2 percentage points, with Asians gaining a bit. And while the drop-off in labor force participation rates was smallest among blacks in the 2010-17 period compared to other groups, blacks already had and still have the lowest rate, with just over 60 percent holding a job or actively looking for one.
Among non-Hispanic whites, Asians and Latinos age 16 to 64, a clear majority of 53 percent to 64 percent, respectively, of those leaving the region already hold jobs. But among blacks, only 42 percent are employed. The remaining 58 percent of those moving either are unemployed or out of the workforce and not looking at all.
CMAP Associate Policy Analyst Aseal Tineh said there could be various reasons for the latter distinctions, such as more rapid aging among white residents. But overall, it’s likely that African-Americans here are having a harder time finding jobs, and a harder times getting jobs that pay well, she said. Beyond that, the report itself notes previous research that black commuters tend to have a longer trip to work than other area residents.
