* From the AP story about Gov. Rauner’s consolidation task force recommendations…

A task force appointed by Gov. Bruce Rauner recommended more than two dozen ways to shrink Illinois government and cut costs to taxpayers, though many ideas already have faced stiff opposition and the Republican acknowledged getting legislative approval won’t be “just a walk in the park.”

Several of the 27 recommendations announced Monday mirror anti-union measures that Rauner has unsuccessfully pushed since taking office last year, including allowing local governments to opt out of collective bargaining with public-worker unions. Others, such as consolidating school districts, have failed under previous governors. […]

-Allow Illinois voters to consolidate or dissolve local governments through referendum. […]

-Eliminate a 126-square-mile cap on the size of a township, to allow townships to merge.

Everybody says that consolidation will save money. And that could very well be true, although the same services will have to be provided. Reboot took a look at a recent aborted attempt at township consolidation in McHenry County…

At one public meeting in the fall, County Board members discussed the potential impact on taxpayers in the consolidating township with a lower tax levy.

Levies of two townships would assumedly be added together and then divided between their total assessed value, with the lower tax township possibly seeing a tax increase. On that one issue, County Board Chairman Joe Gottemoller of Crystal Lake argued, “We are standing here today looking at something that positively will raise taxes for half our residents.”

I saw the same sort of thing happen years ago when there was an attempt at merging my rural electric co-op into another, debt-ridden co-op.

Not to say there aren’t good ideas in the task force report. There are. I’m just saying we need to look past the feel-good nature of this topic.

* And then there was this…

Allow school districts to use third-party contractors, rather than union employees, for services such as transportation and building maintenance.

Privatization is pushed by those who say it’s cheaper. And it can be. But it has to be done well, and that just hasn’t been the case in Chicago, where school janitorial services were privatized…

On Saturday, a handful of parents of pre-kindergarten students packed yellow rubber gloves and spray bottles of vinegar and baking soda solution and headed to Suder Montessori Elementary Magnet School, 2022 W. Washington Blvd., on the Near West Side, where they spent the morning cleaning their children’s washrooms.

The parents felt they didn’t have a choice: Upon entering the bathrooms, they found pools of day-old urine on the floor, feces smeared on the walls and clogged, stinking toilet bowls. In the past few weeks, the school had an E. coli outbreak, and more than half of the kindergarten students missed school because of various illnesses, including a stomach bug, diarrhea or vomiting, said Michelle Burgess, head of the school’s parent-teacher association.

“These are preschoolers. They go to the bathroom and miss. The boys play in the urinals. And sometimes can’t get to the toilet fast enough. It’s understandable,” said Angela Morales, the parent of two children who attend the school. “But they need to clean. We can’t have our kids be in this filth.”

Parents claim the unsanitary bathroom conditions, overflowing garbage cans and soiled napping cots are the result of inadequate custodial care following the Chicago Board of Education’s decision last spring to award multimillion-dollar custodial management contracts to two firms, Aramark and SodexoMAGIC.

That outsourcing deal has been a disaster since Jump Street.

[I fixed some broken links. Sorry about that. It’s been one of those days. The password isn’t working either. Sheesh.]