Pritzker: So, let me be clear about this, we followed the rules.
Question: And the rules are to get a break when you can?
Pritzker: We followed the rules.
Question: What are the rules? What are the rules?
Pritzker: I can’t relay them to you, I’m not a real estate lawyer. What I can tell you is…
Question: There are rules that let you take the toilets out of your home?
Pritzker: We’re in the process of that paying that back. But the fact is, the reason we’re paying it, for the last 34 days of this campaign we should be talking about the real issues. The real issues…
Question: But why are you taking so long?
Pritzker: 14 people died. There are people who are seriously, negligence is causing…
Question: You’re deflecting, the question is about your home.
Pritzker: Negligence is causing, negligence is causing the the deaths of our veterans. That is what were here to talk about.
Question: People want to know, who would also love to have a property tax break, what are those rules?
Pritzker: I’m not a real estate lawyer, I couldn’t elaborate.
Question: You said that this is nothing new, that there was nothing new, and yet the inspector general’s report or presentation of the affidavit, the presentation of the inspector, there were things that were new in that, and there were things in there that alleged that your wife wanted the toilets pulled before the inspector.
Question: And you received a proactive tax break.
Pritzker: There were a lot of mistakes in that report, but let me…
Question: What are they?
Pritzker: We are talking today about a criminal probe…
Question: Talking about one for you as well.
Pritzker: Just like…but there isn’t one.
Pritzker: Bruce Rauner is now under investigation, with his administration, there is a criminal probe into that administration to see what it is that caused the deaths of these family members, truly criminal negligence is what seems to be at stake here.
Question: Cook County States Attorney Kim Foxx is also reviewing whether or not laws have been broken in your property tax appeal. So there is also…
Question: A criminal investigation.
Pritzker: I’m pointing out there is a criminal probe into the Rauner administration.
Question: Well their office also says there is a review.
Pritzker: You should focus on the fact that people died here, the criminal probe could lead to, like we talked about in the Flint case, there are people who have been charged, there are people who have been, now even, involuntary manslaughter, this is very serious.
Question: Do you wish that you had not asked for that property tax break?
Pritzker: The veterans in Illinois, the veterans in Illinois, their lives are at stake when you have an administration that has ignored them, that has mistreated them, that does not understand how to care for them.
Question: Why does a billionaire need to rip out toilets to save $330,000?
Pritzker: Well, that was not obviously what happened. We renovated the home, renovated the home, I stopped that renovation, we restarted it, we paid the taxes that were assessed on that property.
Question: You took action to make the house look like it wasn’t worth as much, so you could take a cut, correct?
Pritzker: No. No.
Question: Then what was it? Then explain what it was? [crosstalk]
Pritzker: A renovation project.
Campaign: Final question, last question.
Question: Who rips out 5 toilets?
Pritzker: When you’re renovating, and literally gutting, when you’re renovating a home…look, let me remind all of you that this gradual situation that occurred at the Quincy veterans home…
Question: Wait a second, we’re talking about the house, why are you…
Priztker: Because we’re talking today about the Quincy veterans home and I want to remind you that gradual situation which could have been dealt with all along. Someone should have stood up for those veterans, someone in the Rauner administration. But they didn’t, and people died as a result. That’s the fact, those are the things that happened to the service men and women at the Quincy veterans home that Bruce Rauner should have stood up for and he didn’t and people died. It’s criminal.
Question: You told us last night at the debate that parts of the IG report are not accurate, can you tell us what’s not accurate?
Pritzker: I’ve said all along, I said this last night, that we followed the rules. And I’m telling you now what’s important to recognize is that this was a renovation project that literally didn’t know, and the reason it was halted was because as we said, we didn’t know whether the home would be sold, didn’t know whether the home would be rented out, the project was restarted.
Tronc, the parent company of the Chicago Tribune, is changing its name back to Tribune Publishing.
The Chicago-based company, which also owns the Baltimore Sun; Hartford Courant; Orlando Sentinel; South Florida’s Sun Sentinel; the New York Daily News; the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Md.; The Morning Call in Allentown, Pa.; the Daily Press in Newport News, Va.; and The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va., announced the decision Thursday. It ends a more than two-year run with the much-derided corporate moniker of Tronc.
The name change will take effect after the market closes Tuesday. Beginning Wednesday, the company’s stock will trade on the NASDAQ under the new ticker symbol TPCO.
The Tronc name was unveiled in June 2016, four months after technology entrepreneur Michael Ferro became nonexecutive chairman and the largest shareholder of the newspaper chain. The name, which stood for Tribune Online Content and was intended to be written in all-lowercase letters, quickly was ridiculed.
The monosyllabic, lower case moniker was meant to stand for “tribune online content” and underscore the company’s shift from newspaper publisher to a “content curation and monetization engine” under then-chairman Michael Ferro. The rebranding also was intended to differentiate Tribune Publishing from Tribune Media, the broadcasting company from which it spun off in 2014.
Ferro stepped down in March, just hours before Fortune magazine published allegations of sexual misconduct against him by two women. (He remains the company’s largest shareholder.) CEO Justin Dearborn, who succeeded Ferro as chairman, moved to change the name back to Tribune Publishing with approval of the company board after the sale of the Los Angeles Times and San Diego Union-Tribune earlier this year.
“We announced today our decision to return the parent company name to one that’s which [sic] is rich in history, prestige and a recognition of our journalistic foundation – The Tribune Publishing Company,” Dearborn told employees in a memo.
Looks like whoever wrote the memo was undecided on “that’s” or “which is” and then forgot to go back and fix it. /s
Despite running ads calling Pritzker “the Porcelain Prince of tax avoidance,” and his campaign printing “Pritzker Plumbing” T-shirts and featuring toilets at events, Rauner said Pritzker’s tax break is “no joke.” […]
“This is not about toilets. It’s not about toilets. This is not about bathroom humor. This is not a joke. This is not funny. This is not about pink toilets versus purple toilets. You know what this is about? Corruption,” Rauner said.
Did Democratic House candidate Lance Yednock take an illegal campaign contribution from Michael Madigan?
A Peru attorney alleges that Yednock, running against state Rep. Jerry Long (R-Streator), improperly took $55,400 from the House speaker — and she wants the state Board of Elections to look into it. […]
“It is my belief that the Friends of Michael J. Madigan laundered a $55,400 campaign contribution to Friends of Lance Yednock through Friends of Marty Durkan,” she wrote.
As Ajster described it, Madigan gave $55,400 to Durkan, a commissioner on the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, on March 19 — a day ahead of the election Durkan won.
An identical sum was later deposited Aug. 19 from Durkan’s committee into Yednock’s.
The attorney is basing her claim on two parts of the state’s Election Code: The contribution cap limit (which is $55,400 this year from a candidate committee) and this…
No person shall make an anonymous contribution or a contribution in the name of another person, and no person shall knowingly accept any anonymous contribution or contribution made by one person in the name of another person.
Basically, she’s arguing that since Madigan has already given Yednock $1,582 he laundered the money through Durkan to get around the cap “in the name of another person.”
* Madigan does this a lot. His 13th Ward committee, for instance, gave Durkan another $55,400 on March 19th. But it’s not mainly from his own account. He appears to direct others to give his members big checks and then they transfer the $55,400 to candidates in need.
Madigan’s lawyers basically wrote the election code, so they know where the loopholes are. But he’s currently facing a federal civil suit for putting up a couple of sham candidates in his own primary and I never thought it would get this far because nobody figured that was against the law, either.
A State Board of Elections spokesperson said this afternoon that the board had not yet received the complaint.
*** UPDATE *** Lance Yednock…
Now that his own party has called on him to resign over his inappropriate conduct with a female staffer, Rep. Long has resorted to simply making things up. Marty and I are both members of Operating Engineers Local 150, and he is supporting my campaign because Jerry Long has proven that he will not stand up for working families and his treatment of women shows he is unfit to represent us. I look forward to serving our community with honesty, independence and integrity which Republicans and Democrats alike agree Rep. Long is clearly lacking.
Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner’s administration says it needs up to two more months to produce a plan to provide three years’ back pay to union workers.
A lawyer for the Republican governor told the Illinois State Labor Relations Board in a letter Monday that determining how much is owed to 20,000 workers is onerous.
Monday was the labor board deadline on the issue involving so-called step increases shut off in July 2015.
The letter says transferring money from other funds could jeopardize feeding prison inmates, providing utilities to the poor or medical care at state facilities.
We’re talking maybe $400 million that wasn’t put into the budget.
The administration stopped awarding step increases after AFSCME’s last contract with the state expired in June, 2015. Step increases are automatic raises given to workers in the first seven to 10 years of their careers.
A compliance officer in August asked the state to document who is owed what for the step increases, including people who no longer work for the state or are deceased. Administration lawyers said computing the information is enormously complex and that more time is needed to comply.
“This foot dragging is taking place despite clear direction from the courts and independent arbitrators to identify costs associated with the contractually established state employee salary adjustments and step increases long overdue to employees,” Illinois Comptroller Susana A. Mendoza said.
“Governor Rauner cannot use his own ineptitude as an excuse to ignore court orders and trample basic worker rights,” Comptroller Mendoza said. “His pursuit of an extreme anti-worker agenda that underlines his irresponsible and illegal delay in estimating the contractual liabilities that continue to grow is fiscally unsupportable. The critical issue of basic fairness aside, this information needs to be incorporated into the state’s financial statements and the lack of data complicates budgetary and cash management planning for the current fiscal year and beyond.” […]
“It’s particularly ironic that this Administration has expended hundreds of millions of dollars for Information Technology consultants with the goal of improving administrative functions at the same time he whines that basic payroll costs can’t be calculated because it’s too difficult,” she said.
(T)he administration said it’s got three different reports it’s running: Report 1: assumes step progressions are owed through January 8, 2016, which is the date that impasse occurred; Report 2: assumes step progressions are owed through December 13, 2016, which is the date that the Board ruled on impasse; Report 3: assumes step progressions are owed through the time the report was produced, as if no impasse occurred at all.
The AFSCME union says there’s no impasse and said Gov. Bruce Rauner is playing games.
…Adding… Governor’s press office…
We responded in detail to requests for information from the Labor Relations Board’s compliance officer. The compliance officer did not order the state to start paying employees step increases by October 1st. The state was ordered to “provide information” that the compliance officer believes may be relevant “to obtain the record” of what employees were owed by October 1st.
The process of calculating current steps and backpay is complex and requires many hours of manual labor. The state has supplied voluminous materials to the compliance officer in accordance with his requests. The state is working diligently to calculate the remaining information. Prior experience from the 2012/2013 wage increase case, which predates the Rauner administration, shows how both the state and AFSCME employees can lose when the calculations are rushed and mistakes are made. In addition, the compliance officer recognized that legal disputes remain regarding the amount of step increases that are owed, and that those issues must be resolved by the Labor Relations Board or a court. To aid in resolving those issues, the compliance officer noted that a hearing with an Administrative Law Judge would be scheduled.
We look forward to resolving the remaining issues promptly so we can bring this process to a close and make all the necessary calculations as quickly as possible.
* A pro-life, pro-gun Republican male incumbent vs. a pro-choice, “gun safety” Democratic woman…
Much of [GOP Rep. Tom Morrison’s] campaign literature tries to tie [Democrat Maggie Trevor] to longtime House Speaker Mike Madigan.
“What I remind voters is look, ‘Maybe you vote for Hillary Clinton for president or Dick Durbin for senator, but if you vote for a Democrat for state rep, whether in Palatine or Park Ridge or Schaumburg, you are essentially handing another 2-year term over to Mike Madigan as speaker,’” Morrison said.
Trevor, who runs her own market research and business consulting firm, said she knocked on 5,000 doors to get her name on the ballot and wasn’t slated by party bosses. She’s now focusing her campaign efforts on Democrats, independents and “soft R’s” — those who vote occasionally in Republican primaries.
“I hear a lot of things you’re hearing,” she told Morrison during the interview. “But I’m also hearing the flip side. I’m hearing parents who are afraid to send their kids to school because of guns. I’m hearing women who are terrified of losing their reproductive rights. I do hear people who are upset at Madigan. I hear people who are upset at (Gov. Bruce) Rauner,” Trevor said.
Some Republicans are running as “gun safety” candidates, too. But, other than that, this is pretty representative of everything I’ve been hearing.
* WGEM doesn’t mention it in the report, but Adams County State’s Attorney Gary Farha is a Republican…
A day after a WBEZ report claimed Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner’s office contributed to a six-day lag between when state officials knew of a Legionnaires’ Disease outbreak at the Illinois Veterans’ Home and when the public, including residents of the home and their families were told about it.
Wednesday, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan launched an investigation. Adams County’s State’s Attorney says Madigan asked him to use a local grand jury.
“There are sixteen people that sit on the grand jury,” said Farha. “Nine of them have to vote for a true bill. They’re presented with the evidence by one witness and all they have to do is find that it’s more likely true then not true that a crime was committed.”
Farha’s office is not involved in any part of the investigation but he believes the timing of the investigation is questionable.
“In no way do I know anything involved in this investigation,” said Farha. “I do feel this is politically motivated.”
Hold everything. Jeanne Ives just weighed in on the governor’s race and boy is she mad. The state rep who lost to Gov. Bruce Rauner in a bitter GOP primary wants the Illinois Department of Revenue to investigate how Democrat J.B. Pritzker got a tax break by pulling toilets out of his second home, thus lowering the property value.
Is this a gift to Rauner? Nope. Ives hasn’t even talked to the governor. “This is my hot-button issue,” Ives told POLITICO.
“It sticks in my craw big-time. Who does that? M.K. grew up in South Dakota, the same state I did,” Ives said, referring to Pritzker’s wife. “No one does this. I don’t know where she learned these kinds of shenanigans. But normal people don’t do it. I’m angry. You don’t cheat this way. If the damned Democrats don’t prosecute this, then why would anyone stay in this state just to be treated unfairly by the political ruling class.” Hiding property wealth, says Ives, just shortchanges schools and leaves taxpayers holding the bag.
No one hides wealth in South Dakota? You mean the notorious tax haven for the rich South Dakota?…
Forget Switzerland; South Dakota is actually one of the best places in the world for the wealthy to stash their cash in secret.
The state’s role as a prairie tax haven has gained unwanted attention since the release of the Panama Papers, an investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. […]
Great Plains worked with SDTC to learn the ropes, but last year leased a windowless office in a brick and glass building for its two employees. Down the hall is Maroon Trust, which manages the money of Chicago’s Pritzker family.
In 2010, the Pritzker family, whose members include Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, revealed in a securities filing that one branch had moved $360 million of Hyatt Hotels stock to trusts overseen by a native South Dakotan named Thomas Muenster. Muenster, whose sister married [JB] Pritzker, maintains an office in the Kresge building.
Thomas Muenster. Hmm. Where have we heard that name before?
Pritzker’s name isn’t mentioned in the documents the assessor’s office released for the mansions. Both are owned by a limited liability company managed by Thomas Muenster, whose sister is Pritzker’s wife. But the Pritzker campaign acknowledges that the LLC is owned by a trust for Pritzker. Muenster and the law firm Schmidt Salzman & Moran filed the appeals with Berrios.
Muenster signed the property tax appeals document, not JB or MK. And he inserted a very lawyerly claim about how the vacant house “has” no functioning bathrooms. He never actually claimed that this had been the case for years, as the IG report stated. A contractor claims MK said she wanted to put one of the toilets back in after the reassessment, but that didn’t happen. I’m guessing her legal counsel told her it was a big no-no.
Distasteful? Yes. Illegal? I just don’t see it yet. But if it is, you can bet your own house (uninhabitable or not) that the South Dakota brother-in-law is going straight under the bus.
JB Pritzker to hold media availability on the new criminal investigation into Bruce Rauner’s fatal mismanagement in Quincy.
WHEN
Thursday, October 4 at 11:30 AM
* Media advisory…
Governor Rauner will hold a press conference to address JB Pritzker’s “scheme to defraud” Illinois taxpayers. This follows a letter from seven Illinois Congressman to the U.S. Attorney’s Office calling for an investigation into Pritzker’s scheme. […]
WHEN
Today - Thursday, October 4th
Press Check-In at 12:45 PM
Event will begin at 1:00 PM
Predictions?
*** UPDATE *** Pritzker campaign…
“The story of the Legionnaires’ Crisis at the Quincy Veterans’ Home is the story of a failed governor who cost people their lives,” said JB Pritzker. “Bruce Rauner cared more about headlines than heroes. We’ve seen this before. In Flint, Michigan, the Attorney General launched a criminal investigation into the contamination of the water. Now, 15 government officials have been charged and one is facing involuntary manslaughter charges. Here in Illinois, there’s now a criminal probe into the Rauner administration’s mismanagement in Quincy. When 14 Veterans and their family members die, when nearly 70 people get sick, when you wait days to tell people on the ground what’s going on, you better believe crimes were committed. This is criminal negligence that cost people their lives and it’s time we have a grand jury get to the bottom of this.”
Credit should be given to Rep. Stephanie Kifowit for this move by AG Madigan. From this week’s WBEZ piece…
“All aspects of this need to be looked at through the criminal process, whether it be manslaughter, neglect, you name it,” said state Rep. Stephanie Kifowit, an Aurora Democrat and chief House sponsor of the disease notification bill.
Kifowit told me yesterday that she’s been pestering the attorney general since late August.
Third-quarter fundraising totals will be released by the FEC in mid-October. On Wednesday, Casten’s campaign said he raised $2.6 million, compared to Roskam’s campaign haul of $1.3 million.
Wow. You’d think a member of the House Ways and Means Committee in a tough reelection fight would raise a lot more money than that.
The House Majority PAC aligned with U.S. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi is pouring more money into the suburbs’ two pivotal Congressional campaigns in an effort to flip two Republican-controlled districts. […]
And the same group is spending about $1.9 million for a new commercial targeting U.S. Rep. Peter Roskam in the neighboring 6th District, where Democrat Sean Casten is challenging the incumbent in an expensive duel drawing significant national attention. […]
The DCCC spent nearly $400,000 on advertising in the last two weeks of September. The [Congressional Leadership Fund, backed by Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan] spent about $214,000 during the same period. The Casten campaign also benefited from about $75,000 in spending by Planned Parenthood Votes.
* Roskam, Casten disagree on lifting payroll tax cap for Social Security: Casten says solving the Social Security problem will require lifting the payroll tax cap on income that is levied to support the program. The cap now stands at $128,400. Roskam says that change would hurt many 6th District taxpayers, who are far from extravagantly wealthy, and could harm entrepreneurs the most. He says the move would simply be a tax increase, and “a bad idea” at that.
* In some ways, the post-debate press conference was more interesting than the debate. Check this out…
MALDONADO: Will you continue with your strategy, attacking Mr. Madigan and the status quo that is in there? That is going to continue if you’re re-elected? How can assure the voters that we’re not going to go into a next gridlock and no passing a budget and we’re going to be in the same situation we were in for four years?
RAUNER: So Erica that is a great question and the answer is we can now build on the progress and the success we’ve had. We now have a balanced budget. When I became Governor the state was in a $2.7 billion deficit at that time. We fixed that. Now it didn’t get done the way I’d like, but it got done.
Now we have a balanced budget and now all the changes can be incremental. We can take small steps of reform and improvement. We got this done with Speaker Madigan in place. We got education funding reform, criminal justice reform, healthcare reform, the Future Energy Jobs Act. We got tax relief for adoption services, for our veterans.
We can do incremental changes. And I’ve already agreed with Democrats in the General Assembly, not yet Mike Madigan, but many of the Democrats on pension reform using a consideration model. We can do that in my second term and we’ve already proven we can do it. We got it done already. Now we can make incremental change every year going forward.
So… he talked about the 2015 stopgap budget deal (accomplished with no “reforms” and lots of Rauner reticence), skipped over the long impasse and his killing the grand bargain and his 2017 tax hike veto and “Now we have a balanced budget and now all the changes can be incremental.”
Unreal.
Also, he vetoed education funding reform and spent months traveling the state to blast it as a “Chicago bailout.” Had it not been for House Republican Leader Jim Durkin and Senate Republican Leader Bill Brady dragging him to the finish line, he would’ve vetoed it again.
And, by the way, that’s how the budget deal got done this year. Durkin and Brady used the same playbook. Rauner was never in the room with the Democrats after some initial meetings went nowhere and Rauner demanded an official revenue estimate before he’d agree to talks. The two leaders handled him and made sure he signed it - without an official revenue estimate, by the way.
* A few months after Comptroller Susana Mendoza took office, the Illinois Republican Party dispatched a tracker to follow her around Springfield. Click here if you don’t remember it. That unprecedented move is necessary context to yesterday’s Sun-Times editorial board meeting…
But it was a question on whether or not the job of comptroller is a political one — and the tough financial choices that come with being comptroller — that set off the most spirited debate between Senger and Mendoza.
Senger argued that Mendoza often made the office too political by lobbing criticisms at Rauner. There have been some real concerns about turning that office into a politicized office versus keeping it independent, the Naperville Republican said.
“There’s no question that it’s been taken to a level it hasn’t been taken before, and you don’t see Treasurer [Mike] Frerichs or Secretary of State Jesse White do the same thing that you were doing,” Senger said, addressing Mendoza.
“If you’re trying to go out to say ‘I’m being transparent, I’ve got good information for you to share’ you do your 9-to-5 job, but then after your 9-to-5 you’re totally politics on everything, people are going to start thinking ‘hey, are these numbers political?’”
Mendoza argued she felt her approach was necessary when looking at the state’s finances and after meeting with people who were “on the verge of being disconnected from their life-saving medical services.”
Does Mendoza sometimes go over the top? Heck yes, she does. Should she tone some of it down? Yep. But politics ain’t beanbag.
…Adding… Abdon Pallasch sent along this Mendoza quote that didn’t make it into the story…
“The unanimous vote totals on my legislation show how bipartisan I am and I’ve been about as hard on Rauner as I was on Blago and neither of their parties had anything to do with it. I just don’t suffer lying governors no matter what their parties are.”
After days of dramatic, damning headlines, Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner and Democrat J.B. Pritzker came to their second debate Wednesday evening prepared to argue whose week was going worse.
They haggled over a report calling Pritzker’s property tax savings a “scheme to defraud” and a newly launched criminal probe into Rauner’s handling of a Legionnaires’ disease outbreak at a Downstate veterans’ home.
And they exchanged insults about being rich men.
“He is trying to buy political office,” Rauner said of Pritzker. “He’s trying to buy the governorship to be something for the first time of his life because if he wasn’t a trust fund baby he would be nothing.”
With just 34 days before the November election, Rauner dubbed Pritzker a “fundamental part” of corruption and a tax cheat, while Pritzker repeatedly blamed the governor for the budget impasse — calling him the “biggest deficit spender in the history of Illinois because of his unwillingness to work with people.”
Gov. Bruce Rauner, left, and Democratic challenger J.B. Pritzker, right, before their televised debate at the ABC 7 studios, in Chicago, on Wednesday Oct. 3, 2018. (Nuccio DiNuzzo/Chicago Tribune via AP, Pool)
That trust fund baby thing made it into a lot of headlines. If you missed last night’s debate, click here to watch it today.
Rauner attacked Pritzker over the accusations of sexual harassment that have been leveled against officials and operatives aligned with Speaker Madigan’s government and political organizations.
“He (Madigan) has been caught condoning sexual harassment, hiding sexual harassment and abuse of women in his administration, his power structure,” Rauner said. “Mr. Pritzker has not called out Speaker Madigan on it.”
Pritzker praised a report from three Democratic women that recommended state parties withhold funding from campaigns that don’t adopt certain anti-harassment policies.
“I have called out Speaker Madigan and said that he took too long to follow up on the stories that were told to him of sexual harassment within the organization,” Pritzker said. “I’m glad that there were some changes made but it was too long in coming.”
He attacked Pritzker for ripping the toilets out of a home to get a $330,000 property tax break — a move the Cook County inspector general recently called a “scheme to defraud taxpayers.” Rauner said it was corrupt and “may involve criminal behavior.”
“This is the fundamental self-dealing that’s rotted our state at its core,” Rauner said.
Pritzker said he’s repaying the money and that the confidential report was leaked for political purposes.
Rauner also worked to distinguish his wealth and background from Pritzker’s, noting several times that the Democrat inherited his fortune, while he was a “middle-class kid” who worked his way through school and built his own wealth.
Both Rauner and Pritzker found themselves on the defensive due to Pritzker’s trouble with toilets and tax breaks, and a new report showing the Rauner administration delayed releasing information about the legionnaires’ disease deaths at the Quincy Veterans home.
The governor denied a cover-up.
“The team determined the right time we needed to get all the facts, make sure that there was no panic or misappropriate information put out, and again what our focus was, was protecting or veterans, protecting our staff,” Rauner said.
“Well this was a cover-up all along, remember Governor Rauner knew about this, his administration knew about it, days went by without notifying people, people got sick as a result of that,” Prtizker rebutted.
“Mr. Pritzker, shame on you for politicizing the health challenges of our veterans,” Rauner shot back.
Taxes remain a crucial issue and the candidates have a different approach. Rauner vows to fight against raising taxes while Pritzker is proposing a graduated income tax rate, asking top income earners to pay more.
“He’s defending the most unfair tax system in the nation,” Pritzker said.
Rauner interrupted and said, “I pay my taxes and you don’t even pay yours…If Mr. Pritzker gets in office there’s going to be a giant sucking sound and it won’t be from his toilets. It will be the sound of businesses going down the drain in this state.”
Rauner blames House Speaker Mike Madigan for the two-year budget stand off. Pritzker would not answer questions as to whether he thinks Madigan should retire. As for the property tax break Pritzker received, he is in the process of returning the cash.
“I didn’t want to, in the last 34 days, this distract people,” he said. “We followed the rules here.”
Rauner warned not to make light of the toilet controversy.
“This is white collar crime,” he said. “This is not a joke. This is not funny. This is not about thrones and humor. This is serious.”
Taxes continued to dominate part of the debate. The governor says he wants to roll back income and property taxes to grow business and keep more jobs from leaving Illinois. Pritzker wants a graduated income tax where wealthier residents pay more. He claims the middle class will get a tax break, but like in the last forum, Pritzker.. still won’t give a specific rate.
“I believe we need to work out what those rates are with the legislature, Republicans at the table too,” Pritzker said.
“It’s a green light to raise taxes on everyone,” Rauner responded. “The reason Mr. Pritzker doesn’t want to answer the question is because he knows it’s gonna crush the middle class and he doesn’t want to admit it before the election.”
“The city of Chicago has been determined to be the most corrupt city in America, and Mr. Pritzker is a fundamental part of that corruption,” Rauner said, repeatedly trying to link Pritzker to House Speaker Michael Madigan as his “puppetmaster,”
I dont’ recall Pritzker saying before that he wanted Republicans at the table for the tax negotiations.
* You’ll recall that the Illinois Economic Freedom Alliance new TV ads attacking Sen. Sam McCann claim the gubernatorial candidate “voted with Mike Madigan to raise taxes $3 billion.”
I asked the alliance for documentation about that tax hike claim. Click here to read their full response. They sent me news stories which reported that McCann voted against the tax hike, but also voted for the budget that spent all the tax hike’s revenues. You could use that same logic to claim that Gov. Rauner supported the tax hike, too. But I doubt that the alliance, which appears to be run by the Illinois Manufacturers Association, would ever say something like that.
* From the McCann campaign…
Today, Conservative Party gubernatorial candidate Sam McCann delivered cease and desist letters to downstate networks that began airing attack ads this week paid for by the Illinois Economic Freedom Alliance, a “super PAC” linked to the Rauner-allied Illinois Manufacturers Association.
McCann’s letter centered around the ad’s false claim that he voted for a $3 billion tax increase. Vote results provided by the Illinois General Assembly prove that McCann voted “no” on Senate Bill 9, which increased taxes, and also voted “no” to override Governor Rauner’s veto of the bill.
McCann issued the following statement:
The claim that I voted to raise taxes is a bold-faced lie. That the Governor’s allies would spend more than $1.5 million to spread lies on television shows the desperation they feel as voters continue to distance themselves from four years of Bruce Rauner’s catastrophic attempt at leadership.
After consulting with counsel, I delivered cease and desist letters to all stations airing these ads with evidence of their falsehood and am urging them to stop airing the ads immediately.
…Adding… Oops, I forgot to note that McCann’s campaign just got $265K from the Fight Back Fund, which is connected to Local 150 of the Operating Engineers. McCann said this week that he’s spending about $275K on his own TV ad.
