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Tribune: FBI raids Kevin Quinn’s house

Wednesday, Jun 26, 2019 - Posted by Rich Miller

* Big scoop

Federal agents have raided the Far South Side home of Kevin Quinn, a former top political operative for House Speaker Michael Madigan and brother of the 13th Ward alderman, the Tribune has learned.

The FBI executed a search warrant in mid-May at Quinn’s home in the 10300 block of South California Avenue in the West Beverly neighborhood, according to three sources familiar with the investigation.

It’s unclear what information the agents were seeking or whether the raid stemmed from Quinn’s past work with Madigan’s powerful political organization. One source, however, told the Tribune federal agents had shown interest in computers and electronic equipment.

No charges have been filed against Quinn, 43, who could not be reached Wednesday. Messages left for Madigan’s spokesman and lawyer were not returned.

  26 Comments      


Question of the day

Wednesday, Jun 26, 2019 - Posted by Rich Miller

* We talked the other day about the advice various folks gave new Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot via the Center for Illinois Politics. They were also asked about their own personal “mantras” while they were serving in public office. Here’s DuPage County Board Chairman Dan Cronin’s mantra

I try to figure out how we can advance a cause every day, and so I try to put aside the politics and the pettiness and the personalities which can be very hard. I try to keep my eye on the ball and make sure we’re moving down the field.

* Former AG Lisa Madigan

Use your power for good. And always remember that you are a public servant.

* Former Cook County Assessor Jim Houlihan

What would my mother think?

* The Question: What’s your personal “mantra”?

  74 Comments      


How the expungement/pardon process will work

Wednesday, Jun 26, 2019 - Posted by Rich Miller

* Tribune

He emphasized that the law provides for automatic expungement of arrests for marijuana possession under 30 grams, and that he will pardon those with convictions for possession up to 30 grams.

Individuals and prosecutors may go to court to seek expungement of cases involving up to 500 grams.

“Today we are giving hundreds of thousands of people the chance at a better life,” Pritzker said.

The governor noted that no one with a violent crime conviction will be eligible for expungement or pardon.

* Excellent story from Hannah Meisel

Expungements and pardons will available under the new law for approximately 700,000 arrest and conviction records belonging to approximately 315,000 people. […]

In the next 180 days, the state police will identify all eligible convictions based on criminal history records within the state police’s database and provide the convictions to the Prisoner Review Board, which will review the records for eligibility to ensure that the convictions in the dataset are indeed eligible for pardon and not associated with a violent crime.

After that, the board will notify local state’s attorneys of felony convictions being considered for clemency, and those county prosecutors will get 60 days to file a written objection to a pardon based on evidence that the conviction record is ineligible for clemency. The board will then provide the group of convictions eligible for clemency to the governor, who will then be able to pardon them all at once.

From there, Attorney General Kwame Raoul will file petitions with each individual circuit court around the state to expunge the records of those who were pardoned.

“We wrote in the law an expedited process,” [Deputy Gov. Christian Mitchell] said of the Prison Review Board’s role in expungement. “I’m circumspect to give you a date now because I just don’t know. This is a new thing, it’s a rather large-scale thing. It’s going to take time, but it’s going to take much less time than it was otherwise.”

The Prison Review Board, a 15-member board responsible for hearing the pleas fromr incarcerated people to get out of prison earlier than their sentence dictates either on parole or for good behavior, usually takes time with their decisions. Mitchell compared that intensive fact-finding mission with the board’s responsibility in marijuana clemency, and said board’s role here will take much less time.

* Background…



  16 Comments      


*** UPDATED x1 *** Reformer criticizes Pritzker for not using tax money to fly to public events

Wednesday, Jun 26, 2019 - Posted by Rich Miller

* NBC 5

Gov. J.B. Pritzker has made four out-of-state trips for official business since taking office in January. Each time, he has traveled on private chartered jets but he has not charged taxpayers, according to documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

On Feb. 21, Pritzker, a Democrat, headed to the National Governor’s conference and a black-tie dinner at the White House. At Chicago Executive Airport in Wheeling, he and his wife M.K. boarded a private jet en route to Washington’s Dulles Airport. Four staffers plus a member of the governor’s security detail also boarded a G200 private jet along with a three person flight crew for the two-and-a-half hour flight, according to travel documents obtained in a public records request.

In all, Pritzker has made three official trips to Washington and one to New York.

The governor’s office in a written response noted “The Governor does not charge his travel expenses to the state of Illinois” and said personal and campaign funds were used to rent the jets. […]

When asked about the privately funded trips, Susan Garrett, a co-founder of the Center for Illinois Politics, said “it’s never been done before in Illinois.”

A former Democratic state senator, Garrett acknowledges the unusual move saves taxpayers money, but she said, “There’s something to be said for public servants who have to work within budgets and rules and guidelines.”

It’s never been done before? Really?

Gov. Bruce Rauner used a helicopter, apparently owned by a campaign donor, to get him to a public event on Friday.

“He covered the cost personally, so it would not be at the taxpayers’ expense,” said Rauner spokeswoman Laurel Patrick.

The helicopter landed at Aurora University so Rauner could go to an assessment of flood damaged areas in nearby Lake County. Federal and state emergency management agencies and the Small Business Administration were involved.

That took all of three seconds to find on Google.

…Adding… As noted by commenters, using campaign money to pay governmental and public policy travel is perfectly legal in this state

10 ILCS 5/9-8.10)
Sec. 9-8.10. Use of political committee and other reporting organization funds.
(a) A political committee shall not make expenditures:
(6) For the travel expenses of any person unless the travel is necessary for fulfillment of political, governmental, or public policy duties, activities, or purposes.

That was done to help cut down on governmental travel expenditures. It was, in other words, a reform.

*** UPDATE *** Back in 2003, then Sen. Susan Garrett was the chief sponsor of a bill that, in part, did this

Nothing in this Section prohibits the expenditure of funds of (i) a political committee controlled by an officeholder or by a candidate or (ii) an organization subject to Section 9-7.5 to defray the ordinary and necessary expenses of an officeholder in connection with the performance of governmental duties.

  54 Comments      


Our sorry state

Wednesday, Jun 26, 2019 - Posted by Rich Miller

* Right of Center Square

Illinois is the only state in America that has yet to release its official report from fiscal year 2018 and state officials don’t yet know when it will be released.

Every state, most cities, and other forms of government must have a comprehensive annual financial report, or CAFR, done as a way for not only citizens to better understand their local government finances, but also to give officials a better idea on the baseline costs for upcoming budgets.

Illinois is often one of the last states to finish its report and this year, state officials have yet to do it, making it the latest since 2011 when Comptroller-turned Deputy Gov. Dan Hynes released it on June 30, 2012, a full year after the fiscal year ended. […]

A 2011 report from the Governmental Accounting Standards Board, which dictates best practices for many functions in public governance, found the average amount of time it took for a state to release a CAFR was less than 7 months.

In surveys, GASB found that the information released via these reports “diminishes quickly” in value after six months. Bondholders often use the information found in CAFRs to gauge the creditworthiness of a unit of government before bidding on an offering, which Illinois plans to do soon.

According to the Auditor General’s office, the latest a CAFR was ever released was August 24, 2006, for the previous fiscal year that ended June 30, 2005. The CAFR for fiscal years 2008, 2009 and 2010 were all issued in July of the following years. So, as mentioned above, this isn’t new.

* Comptroller Mendoza…

State Comptroller Susana A. Mendoza Wednesday declared her continued displeasure with the pace of release of the State’s Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR). Monday marks the beginning of a new fiscal year, and we are still without the fiscal year 2018 CAFR.

The Illinois Office of Comptroller compiles the CAFR from reports submitted to the Office from individual state agencies that are required to be audited by the Illinois Auditor General. If any of those audits are not complete, the Comptroller cannot publish the CAFR.

The timeliness of the issuance of the CAFR has been an issue that spans back since fiscal year 1999, marking the last time the report met its reporting date. In six of the last 12 years, the CAFR has come out in June or later, a year after the end of the fiscal year. In 2009, it came out in July. The state appears on-track to match or beat that dubious record this year.

The lateness this year does not fall on the Comptroller’s Office, the Auditor General or the current leadership of the state agencies. It appears there are issues from this audit period dating from the previous administration’s management. The current administration and leadership of those agencies are working to resolve them and account for them in their reports to the Auditor General.

The Comptroller’s Office stands ready, as it has been since December, to publish the CAFR as soon as the remaining audits are completed.

“My first year in office, we got the CAFR out in February. Last year, the CAFR was issued in early March,” Mendoza said. “I am highly concerned and disappointed that this process is taking so long. My hands are tied until we get the final audited reports from the Auditor General.” [Emphasis added.]

CAFRs are hugely important, but Illinois, as usual, is so backwards that we lag behind the rest of the country. We are the only state that doesn’t have a single financial reporting system. And despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent on new systems, way too many agency systems are one-offs that can’t communicate with anyone else.

The auditor general has to put together an audited financial report by going through each individual agency, and if some big agencies are found not to be in compliance, that can really mess things up.

Auditor General Frank Mautino told me today that these problems are especially acute “when you have dysfunctional government, dysfunctional agencies.” He couldn’t be more specific because the audit process is confidential.

  25 Comments      


*** UPDATED x1 *** Fun with numbers

Wednesday, Jun 26, 2019 - Posted by Rich Miller

* John Tillman on the Fox News website

Many public-sector workers in Illinois have indicated they don’t want to continue paying dues. In fact, more than 8,000 public employees stopped sending money to AFSCME Council 31 – that’s at least 12 percent of employees represented by AFSCME, the largest and most powerful government union in the state.

Each of those 8,000 workers had their own reasons for choosing to stop paying the union. Maybe they wanted to keep more of their hard-earned money to spend on their family. Maybe they didn’t like the union’s demands on taxpayers. Or maybe they didn’t like the union’s politics.

Notice that clever use of the phrase “stopped sending money to AFSCME Council 31.” He didn’t claim that 8,000 union members had dropped out. What he’s mainly talking about here are former fair share fee payers who are no longer required to pay their, um, fair share.

The union suspects Tillman’s 8,000 figure was derived from a January federal filing about December union membership which was incomplete due to a paperwork snafu with one of its largest employers. That filing made its membership look about 3,000 smaller than it actually was at the time. AFSCME says it had about 5,000 fair share fee payers at the time of the Janus ruling.

“Despite IPI’s direct-mail and paid advertising campaigns, only a relative handful of former members has dropped out,” a union official said.

And, according to AFSCME, the union has added 1,100 members since the Janus ruling and another 800 new signups are in the pipeline.

Keep in mind that former Gov. Bruce Rauner believed union members would leave AFSCME in droves after Janus. That apparently hasn’t happened even though the Policy Institute has been mailing members urging them to drop out of the union.

I asked the Policy Institute for a response an hour ago and didn’t hear back.

*** UPDATE *** From the Institute…

The number is based on the 2018 and 2017 LM-2s (comparing membership numbers between the two years). The 2018 LM-2 covers the preceding fiscal year (which runs Jan 1 - Dec 31 for AFSCME Council 31) and was filed with the federal government on April 1, 2019. That was the second filing for 2018 (AFSCME also filed one on March 27, then re-filed this on on April 1 with the same membership numbers).

I can’t speak to the ’snafu’, but AFSCME didn’t correct it in its April 1 re-filing of its LM-2 (attached).

The 2017 LM-2 showed AFSCME had 57,995 members. The latest 2018 form showed 57,000 members.

* And here’s a bit of news I missed

The U. S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to review a petition from Illinois home health workers seeking to recover “fair share fees” they once paid to cover the costs of collective bargaining. That leaves in place a Seventh Circuit decision not to certify the proposed class of more than 80,000 health workers who want the roughly $32 million they’ve paid in fair share fees to the Service Employees International Union Healthcare Illinois & Indiana since 2008 to be repaid in full.

  33 Comments      


What’s next for cannabis?

Wednesday, Jun 26, 2019 - Posted by Rich Miller

* Tom Schuba takes a look at the future of cannabis legalization here. As the sponsors noted yesterday, the General Assembly has passed new laws related to alcohol just about every year since Prohibition ended and cannabis will likely be the same

Anyone over the age of 21 can already order up pot products for delivery in California, Nevada and Oregon, according to O’Keefe.

Deliveries of recreational marijuana will also kick off when sales start next year in Michigan, the first state in the midwest to legalize recreational pot, as well as the following year in Colorado, O’Keefe said. Meanwhile, the Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission delayed voting last month on regulations related to the delivery and social consumption of weed, according to The Republican.

While home cannabis deliveries came up during Illinois’ last legislative session, Cassidy said she and fellow lawmakers wanted to wait until the initial legalization bill had passed to address those types of sales.

“That opens up a layer of issues that I don’t think we were prepared to address,” said Cassidy, who was deterred by reports of medical marijuana delivery drivers being robbed in Michigan. “That’s something that is likely another bill for another time.”

Dan Linn, executive director of the Illinois chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, echoed some of Cassidy’s safety concerns but also noted that the delivery business would likely be easier to crack into than other aspects of the legal pot industry that require hefty, non-refundable application fees and other barriers to entry.

They have smart phone apps for weed delivery service in California. You can be sitting at an outdoor cafe sipping on a pink lemonade and, poof, just like that, the delivery person arrives with your order.

…Adding… I somehow forgot to include this…



* Related…

* Pot to be legal here in 2020: On Tuesday, Rep. David Welter, a Morris Republican, applauded legalization. “Today is an affirmation of individual liberty. Adult use of cannabis should be a personal choice,” he said. “Beyond that, I am proud of our commitment that 20 percent of the revenue generated by legalization will go toward funding for mental health and substance-abuse services in Illinois. An additional 10 percent will go to pay down the state’s backlog of unpaid bills, which directly benefits hospitals, health care, and social-service providers in every community across the state.”

  22 Comments      


President Preckwinkle wants another term

Wednesday, Jun 26, 2019 - Posted by Rich Miller

* Rachel Hinton

Nearly three months after a blowout loss to Lori Lightfoot in the April mayoral election, Preckwinkle on Tuesday kicked wide open the door to seeking another term as Cook County Board president.

“Yes, she’s running again,” Scott Kastrup, Preckwinkle’s political director, said at a fundraiser held at the Chicago Cultural Center. “We’re pleased to be doing this [fundraiser] again, and she’s definitely running for re-election for the County Board.”

Tuesday’s event left little doubt that that was the plan.

A jazz band played tunes such as Dave Brubeck’s classic “Take Five” as supporters filed into the room. At the sign-in tables, donors were encouraged to take buttons emblazoned with Preckwinkle’s face.

The messaging was simple: Re-elect Toni Preckwinkle President of Cook County Board.”

* Tribune

Preckwinkle, who is chair of the Cook County Democratic Party, previously said this would be her last term.

But she backed off the idea in an April interview with the Tribune, saying she was thinking about running for re-election in 2022.

“I think there’s a lot to do,” she said at the time, “and in particular, frankly, we’ve got to do something about what’s happening in the south suburbs.”

  40 Comments      


*** LIVE COVERAGE ***

Wednesday, Jun 26, 2019 - Posted by Rich Miller

* Follow along with ScribbleLive


  Comments Off      


« NEWER POSTS PREVIOUS POSTS »
* Reader comments closed for the weekend
* Showcasing The Retailers Who Make Illinois Work
* Isabel’s afternoon roundup
* Uber’s Local Partnership = Stress-Free Travel For Paratransit Riders
* UIC testing lab accused of providing flawed results in 1,600 cannabis DUI convictions
* Today's must-read
* COGFA: Illinois job growth rate is about a tenth of national growth rate since October of 2019
* Question of the day: Golden Horseshoe Awards
* Roundup: Madigan trial delves into political fight over Chinatown land deal
* It’s just a bill
* Open thread
* Isabel’s morning briefing
* Live coverage
* Selected press releases (Live updates)
* Federal appeals court stays Downstate federal judge's gun ruling (Updated)
* Yesterday's stories

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