The Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA) of the U.S. and Canada has awarded the Hoffman Estates Park District (HEPD) with a Certificate of Achievement for Excellence in Financial Reporting for its comprehensive annual financial report (CAFR). The certificate is the highest form of recognition in the area of governmental accounting and financial reporting and represents a significant achievement by the HEPD and its management. In addition, an Award of Financial Reporting Achievement was granted to Craig Talsma, deputy director/director of finance, as the person primarily responsible for the preparing the award-winning CAFR.

CAFR recipients are determined by an impartial panel of GFOA representatives that selects organizations that meet the high standards of the program and demonstrate a constructive “spirit of full disclosure” to clearly communicate their financial stories. GFOA is a nonprofit professional association located in Chicago and Washington D.C. that serves 17,500 government finance professionals.

HEPD adds this achievement to its impressive list of national and state-level awards. In 2013 HEPD was accredited by the Commission for Accreditation of Park and Recreation Agencies (CAPRA). It has been recognized as an Illinois Distinguished Park and Recreation Agency by the Illinois Park and Recreation Association and is the recipient of the National Gold Medal Award for Excellence in Parks & Recreation Management by the National Recreation & Parks Association; the highest national honor in the public recreation category. In 2013 and 2014 HEPD received the “Illinois Sunshine Award” from the Illinois Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research organization, for its efforts toward online transparency and government openness. The Park District Risk Management Agency awarded HEPD Excellence Level A in its Loss Control Program each year since 2010.

In a pair of cases in March, the Illinois Supreme Court unanimously struck down the state’s eavesdropping law. Illinois was a two-party consent state, meaning both parties had to consent to the recording. As interpreted by the court, however, the law’s fatal flaw was that it also applied to speech made even in a place where people had no privacy expectation — like out in public.

Apparently not one to say “no,” both houses of Illinois’ legislature passed a new version of the law that critics say suffers from the same constitutional defects as the old one.

Reasonable Expectations of Privacy

The old law was overbroad, the state supreme court said, because it prohibited “a whole range of conduct involving the audio recording of conversations that cannot be deemed in any way private,” like recording a public speech or — especially — “interactions of police officers with citizens.”

By history’s frequently brutal dialectic, the good that we call progress often comes spasmodically, in lurches propelled by tragedies caused by callousness, folly or ignorance. With a New York grand jury’s as yet inexplicable and probably inexcusable refusal to find criminal culpability in Eric Garner’s death on a Staten Island sidewalk, the nation might have experienced sufficient affronts to its sense of decency. It might at long last be ready to stare into the abyss of its criminal justice system.

It will stare back, balefully. Furthermore, the radiating ripples from the nation’s overdue reconsideration of present practices may reach beyond matters of crime and punishment, to basic truths about governance.

Garner died at the dangerous intersection of something wise, known as “broken windows” policing, and something worse than foolish: decades of overcriminalization. The policing applies the wisdom that where signs of disorder, such as broken windows, proliferate and persist, a general diminution of restraint and good comportment takes hold. So, because minor infractions are, cumulatively, not minor, police should not be lackadaisical about offenses such as jumping over subway turnstiles.

You’re probably going to be hearing a lot about a “retirement crisis” over the next few years. And Democrats think they know just what to do about it.

Some academics are convinced that Americans aren’t saving enough, or being provided enough by the government, to sustain themselves in old age. Many Democrats think their party hasn’t adequately addressed the economic anxieties of middle-class voters. Put the two concerns together, and you get a simple plan: Offer people more generous Social Security benefits. Senator Elizabeth Warren is already on board, enthusiastically throwing around the word “crisis.”

The good news is that there is no retirement crisis, as my American Enterprise Institute colleague Andrew Biggs has been carefully explaining. Americans have among the highest retirement incomes in the world, both in terms of absolute buying power and relative to the incomes of the working-age population.

One candidate for Chicago mayor says it might be time to get rid of the city’s winter overnight parking ban. More than 200 vehicles were towed Dec. 1, the night it went into effect.

Ald. Bob Fioretti introduced a resolution in the city council on Wednesday to take a hard look at the 34-year-old ordinance.

He says it might be unnecessary now because of improvements in forecasting major snowstorms and getting the word out.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has pledged to reopen the shuttered Kostner Avenue Blue Line station and provide an array of other city support if the University of Illinois at Chicago’s North Lawndale proposal is selected for Barack Obama’s presidential library.

In a letter to be included with the university’s proposal due Dec. 11, the mayor said he would work with the City Council to donate a 23-acre, city-owned property at Kostner Avenue and Roosevelt Road, a former headquarters and distribution center for Sears Roebuck.

While Emanuel’s hopes for a unified Chicago bid never materialized, the letter puts the public university on a similar footing with the University of Chicago, which received a letter of support from the mayor in June. Both universities are competing with each other as well as the University of Hawaii and Columbia University in New York.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s surprise announcement on November 7 that it would hear King v. Burwell struck fear in the hearts of supporters of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). At stake is the legality of an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) rule extending tax credits to the 4.5 million people who bought their health plans in the 34 states that declined to establish their own health insurance exchanges under the ACA.1 The case hinges on enigmatic statutory language that seems to link the amount of tax credits to a health plan purchased “through an Exchange established by the State.” According to the plaintiffs in King, that language means that consumers who buy insurance through federally run exchanges don’t qualify for subsidies. The Court’s decision to hear the case without a split between appellate courts suggests that at least four justices harbor serious doubts about the IRS rule’s validity.

Not long after the announcement, however, some voices began questioning whether a decision inKing invalidating the rule would matter all that much. Those voices included both proponents of the litigation trying to minimize the chaos it would cause and financial advisors hoping to calm jittery investors. They have argued that the states that refused to create exchanges would, under intense political pressure to restore large tax credits to middle-class citizens, move quickly to do so, and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) would help them by relaxing any applicable rules.

We are not so optimistic. If the IRS rule is invalidated — and absent effective contingency planning — a state that has declined to create its own exchange probably won’t be able to stave off the immediate destabilization of its insurance market. The Court will probably release its opinion in late June; its decision will take effect 25 days later. At that point, if the challengers prevail, the U.S. Treasury will probably have to stop issuing tax credits to users of federal exchanges. Enrollees who are unable or unwilling to pay the full cost of their insurance premiums could see their coverage terminated, perhaps as soon as 30 days after they fail to make a payment. Those who retain insurance are likely to be sicker than those who drop coverage, which will skew the risk pools and expose insurers to large, unanticipated losses.

Municipal debt investors are watching the appeals process that will decide whether or not Illinois’ pension reform bill ends up in the wastebasket, a decision that would send the Land of Lincoln back to square one in its attempts to battle its pension funding crisis.

“There’s so much uncertainty there,” Daniel Solender, the lead portfolio manager for municipal bonds at investment manager Lord Abbett & Co., said by phone Wednesday. “It’s hard to know what the right valuation is [for the state’s bonds].”

So far, investors are waiting and watching. Solender noted that there hasn’t been much trading in Illinois’ bonds in response to a Nov. 21 Circuit Court decision that said the reform bill was unconstitutional. If the Illinois Supreme Court upholds that decision, Solender expects a negative effect on the state’s bond values.

On May 23, 1957, three police officers arrived at a house in Cleveland and demanded to enter. They wanted to question a man about a recent bombing and believed he was hiding inside. A woman who lived there, Dollree Mapp, refused to admit them.

It was a small gesture of defiance that led to a landmark United States Supreme Court ruling on the limits of police power.

Ms. Mapp told the officers that she wanted to see a search warrant. They did not produce one. A few hours later, more officers arrived and forced their way into the house. Ms. Mapp called her lawyer and again asked to see a warrant. When one officer held up a piece of paper that he said was a warrant, Ms. Mapp snatched it and stuffed it into her blouse. The officer reached inside her clothing and snatched it back.

Joshua Gotbaum doesn’t like telling retirees that their pensions are about to be cut. After all, until August he was the director of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), the federal insurance fund that’s supposed to safeguard pensions. But yesterday Gotbaum interrupted a vacation in Madrid to return my call asking about a bill working its way through Congress that would allow multi-employer pension plans to cut benefits. He’s a huge supporter of the legislation.

“The alternative is that the plans would collapse. It’s reorganize rather than die,” says Gotbaum, a former Lazard investment banker who is now a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution.

On Dec. 9, lawmakers agreed on pension reforms as part of a $1.1 trillion spending bill to keep the federal government from shutting down. Inclusion in that bill almost ensures the provision’s passage. The bill applies to roughly 10 million participants in multi-employer pension plans, typically found in construction, trucking, and other industries in which several employers, often small businesses, negotiate collectively with unions to cover a group of workers in a region. They tend to be in much worse condition than single-employer plans, because many of the companies in them have gone out of business, leaving the survivors to pick up the slack for workers who never even worked for them. About 1.5 million of those participants are in plans that could run out of money in the next two decades if nothing is done.