Chicago Sun Times: College of DuPage fails Good Government 101
Why do public agencies so love to throw around the taxpayers’ money — your money — just to send some executive off into a rich, fat and early retirement?
It seems like just yesterday that Metra was so obnoxiously free with other people’s money, shelling out $652,363.10 to make its executive director, Alex Clifford, go away. Now the board of the College of DuPage has trumped Metra in this game of indefensible giveaways, approving $763,000 in severance for its president. As part of the deal, the president, Robert Breuder, will quit his $484,813-a-year job three years early.
This for a guy who already scooped up a $508,000 compensation package when he left his previous job as president of Harper College.
Chicago Sun Times: 4 wireless providers to bankroll $32.5M in 4G coverage to CTA subways
The country’s four major wireless providers have agreed to bankroll a $32.5 million deal to make Chicago home to the largest subway system in North America with 4G wireless coverage in its underground trains and tunnels, officials say.
Dropped cellphone calls, spotty text message transmissions and laggard Internet surfing should be a thing of the past by the end of the year, when full 4G underground service should be completed on 22 miles of Red and Blue Line tunnels and platforms.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel is expected to announce the 4G deal — brokered with help from the city’s Chicago Infrastructure Trust — on Friday. He considers it one of the priorities of his administration, a mayoral spokeswoman said.
Chicago Sun Times: Emanuel embraces countdown clocks at red-light camera intersections
Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Thursday embraced a costly plan to mandate countdown signals at every one of Chicago’s 174 red-light camera intersections and vowed to pay five more tickets issued to his own motorcade for running red lights.
Unlike his mayoral challengers, who want to scrap red-light cameras altogether to appease angry motorists, Emanuel said he’s determined to keep the cameras in place, but “reform” the system.
“I’d rather use technology to enforce traffic safety so our police officers, rather than writing traffic tickets, are actually out there fighting guns and gangs. They can’t be doing both,” the mayor said.
ABC 7: Rahm Emanuel's motorcade caught running red lights- again
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s motorcade was caught running red lights – again.
The city’s website shows Rahm Emanuel’s motorcade racked up five more red light violations since November, after the mayor said last May that “no one is above the law.” On Thursday, as he answered questions about the citations, he defended red light cameras.
“First and foremost, red lights are there for public safety and traffic safety,” Emanuel said.
QC Online: Rauner wants end to public union candidate donations
Government worker unions should be prohibited from giving money to candidates for state office, Gov. Bruce Rauner told the Champaign County Chamber of Commerce Thursday.
The governor said such contributions pose a conflict of interest for public officials who later must negotiate agreements with the unions. His comments came a day after he proposed “right-to-work” zones where local governments could decide whether workers can be forced to pay money to unions.
More than 100 union members demonstrated Thursday outside the I Hotel and Conference Center, where Gov. Rauner spoke.
The Navigator: HomeOpinion Arrogent elected officials could use dose of sunshine
Sometimes elected officials forget who’s the boss.
They think they are accountable only to themselves.
The reality is it’s the voters who put them in office and the taxpayers who pay the bills who are in charge.
Forbes: Gold-Plated Public-School Pension Plans? Most Teachers Never See The Cash
One of the dirty little secrets of teacher contracts is how much they hurt the youngest teachers. In 15 states, teachers have to work 10 years before they vest in their retirement plans. Many are long gone before they are eligible to collect one dollar in benefits, even as they are obligated to contribute a substantial portion to their plans each payday. Yet even though only half of teachers will collect their benefits, teacher-pension debt has climbed up to half a trillion dollars.
“An average of 70 cents of every dollar contributed to state teacher pension systems is paying off the ever-increasing pension debt,” according to a new study by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a research and policy group focused on restructuring the teaching profession. Last year, state teacher pension systems had $499 billion in unfunded liabilities. That figure is up $100 billion in the two years since the group’s last report. On average, that’s about $10,000 in pension debt for each school-age child in the country.
“The funding crisis is staggering, yet the structure of most states’ pension systems isn’t giving teachers what they need,” says NCTQ vice president Sandi Jacobs, a co-author of “Doing the Math on Teacher Pensions: How to Protect Teachers and Taxpayers.”
Wall Street Journal: Bruce Rauner Almighty?
Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner won election in November with a mandate to reinvent Illinois, and this week he teed up some of his plans.
Mr. Rauner took a warm-up swing at the unions with a speech in Decatur, which happens to be the home turf of AFL-CIO President Michael Corrigan. For starters, he wants to do away with project labor agreements (PLAs) “that are basically what the unions have worked out with the politicians” who “they influence with campaign cash and then impose those contracts on the businesses that contract with the state.” Mr. Rauner complained that PLAs, which usually require contractors to pay union wages and benefits on public construction projects, increase costs by about 18%.
Also on his agenda are “right to work zones” that allow local voters and governments to decide whether workers should be required to join a union and pay membership dues as a condition of employment. While the Republican doesn’t intend to make Illinois a right-to-work state—he wouldn’t have the votes in the heavily Democratic legislature—he fundamentally supports “employee empowerment,” which is his preferred term for right-to-work. So cities like Decatur could pass their own right-to-work ordinances without the state enacting legislation.
Bloomberg View: When Bread Bags Weren't Funny
Last week, in her State of the Union response, Joni Ernst mentioned going to school with bread bags on her feet to protect her shoes. These sorts of remembrances of poor but honest childhoods used to be a staple among politicians — that’s why you’ve heard so much about Abe Lincoln’s beginnings in a log cabin. But the bread bags triggered a lot of hilarity on Twitter, which in turn triggered this powerful meditation from Peggy Noonan on how rich we have become. So rich that we have forgotten things that are well within living memory:
I liked what Ernst said because it was real. And it reminded me of the old days.
There are a lot of Americans, and most of them seem to be on social media, who do not know some essentials about their country, but this is the way it was in America once, only 40 and 50 years ago: