Only 28 percent of Illinois residents trust their state government, the lowest rate in the country by far. Since the days of Al Capone, the words “Illinois” and “Chicago” have been synonymous with government corruption. In order to change the narrative and restore trust in our state and local government we must fight public corruption head...
One of the best protections against government corruption is transparency. And in today’s digital age, one of the easiest ways for government to be open and accountable is through posting public documents on the Internet. Illinois needs to strengthen online transparency standards to fight government corruption and wasteful spending practices, especially given its troubled history...
Fourteen Illinois counties face higher sales taxes if referendums pass at the ballot box this fall. The tax is called the Illinois County School Facility Occupation Tax, or County School Facility Tax (CSFT) for short. The law authorizing the tax, which passed in 2007, allows school boards representing 51 percent of a county’s student population...
Starting in July, Illinois Policy Action has conducted enhanced voter ID canvassing across 20 key districts throughout Illinois. After 37,762 house-to-house door knocks by a team of 122 canvassers, followed up by over 430,000 automated and live phone calls to those homes not reached in person, we’ve produced a powerful barometer of Illinois’ political climate....
On Sunday, the HBO comedy news program “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” took a biting yet humorous look at civil asset forfeiture – a procedure that allows police in Illinois and other states to take your property without ever convicting or even charging you with a crime. The video gives a great explanation of...
With great fanfare, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently announced an executive order requiring city contractors and concessionaires to pay their employees no less than $13 per hour. The move was highly touted in both the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune, as well as a number of other publications and television news broadcasts. None of these...
The Chicago Tribune released findings from their ongoing investigation into the city’s red-light camera program on Thursday, revealing that with the city’s transition to a new camera vendor came a “subtle but significant lowering of the threshold for yellow light times.” The new vendor, Xerox State & Local Solutions, took over the program in 2013...
Illinois’ second-largest college was revealed on Oct. 2 to have hidden more than $95 million in spending since 2009, according to data from American Transparency’s openthebooks.com. The waste therein has cost students and taxpayers dearly. Illegitimate spending at the College of DuPage, or COD, included $13,800 in membership dues to a private shooting club for...
On Oct. 2, the Lake County Federation of Teachers, or LCFT, began a public-employee union shutdown of Waukegan Unit School District 60 schools, which serve 16,138 students. In the wake of the strike, the Waukegan community is dealing with a dramatic disruption to their lives, with closed schools and parents struggling to find childcare and...
Chicago officials announced Wednesday that dozens of drivers will receive refunds from the city for wrongfully issued red-light camera tickets. But thousands more were left in the dark regarding the cause of their tickets and the overall soundness of the city’s red-light camera program, which has been mired in scandal for months. The city reviewed...
The village of Wilmette is a leader when it comes to online transparency of local governments in Illinois. It recently became the seventh local government in Illinois to score a perfect 100 percent on the Illinois Policy Institute’s 10-Point Transparency Checklist. With nearly 7,000 local governments in Illinois, Wilmette’s score places the village in the...
Illinois is known for its culture of government corruption, fiscal mismanagement and cronyism. That reputation is backed up by hard statistics that say Illinois is the third most corrupt state in the country and the Chicago region is the most corrupt area in the country. Illinois’ citizens deserve better. Illinois’ government culture on the state...
Here’s an interesting argument against term limits: Government business is hard. That’s why we need politicians to hold office for a long time – so they can gain the experience they need to understand how to govern effectively. That’s effectively what Christopher Mooney, director of the institute of government and public affairs at the University...
The towns of Addison, Algonquin and Mundelein earned high marks for online government transparency in a recent survey of Illinois municipalities. The current project evaluated 25 towns with populations ranging from Oak Forest’s nearly 28,000 to Calumet City’s 37,000 residents, the 51st– through 75th-largest municipalities in the state. The towns were graded using the Illinois...