Crain's: Illinois, you haven't touched bottom yet
Illinois’ credit rating could move even closer to “junk” if its already large pension liability and budget deficit grow, Moody’s Investors Service said on Tuesday.
Last month, the credit rating agency downgraded Illinois just three steps above “junk” to Baa1 with a negative outlook in the wake of a political impasse that has left the fifth-largest U.S. state without a budget for the fiscal year that began on July 1.
“As long as those conditions continue to deteriorate, those are the most likely drivers of the next downgrade,” Moody’s analyst Ted Hampton said on Tuesday, referring to the pension and deficit problems.
Sun-Times: Prison 'reform' can't be a revolving door
When inmates are released from an Illinois prison, they are given a bus ticket home and assigned a parole officer.
As for the other basics of a stable, law-abiding life outside prison — a job, a reliable place to live, perhaps counseling services — good luck with all that.
In the name of reform, Illinois is paroling more prison inmates, but doing a bad job of keeping them from coming back. Almost half of ex-offenders return to prison within three years.
Sun-Times: Uber cleared for pickups at O'Hare, Midway airports
A ride-hailing giant whose investors include Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s brother was cleared for take-off Tuesday at Chicago airports — just in time to cash in on the Thanksgiving travel rush.
Two days after Lyft was authorized to make pickups at O’Hare and Midway airports and McCormick Place, Uber got the same green light from City Hall.
Chicago Tribune: As personnel spending rises, what will Toni Preckwinkle tax next?
A marathon Cook County Board meeting last week included some testy exchanges but a predictable result. Commissioners passed a $4.5 billion budget that counts on higher sales taxes, a new tax on hotel rooms, an ammunition tax and some fee hikes. It passed 12-5.
Most of the money the county will raise and spend next year will go toward employees and their benefits. Personnel costs, which consume more than three-quarters of the county’s general fund spending, will go up roughly $60 million in 2016. That rise is largely due to 6.5 percent in salary increases, some retroactive: 1 percent from June 2013, 1.5 percent from June 2014, 2 percent for June of this year and another 2 percent that starts Dec. 1. Nonunion workers will be getting raises, too.
County workers also will benefit from the $474 million annually expected to flow from the new sales tax. Most of that will go toward worker pension costs.
Crain's: Rauner seeks to block anti-fantasy sports rules
In a move loaded with political implications, Gov. Bruce Rauner is trying to put a brick on efforts to regulate and potentially block fantasy sports sites such as Draft Kings and Fan Duel from accepting bets in the state.
The action appears at least partially linked to poor relations among Rauner, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, and her father, Rauner’s arch foe, Mike Madigan, the speaker of the Illinois House. But it also comes after the sports sites retained lobbyist Eric Elk, who hired or supervised several senior Rauner aides when they all worked in U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk’s office.
The Illinois Gaming Board this fall had publicly expressed its intention to seek a legal opinion from Lisa Madigan, the state’s chief legal officer, on whether the sites can legally operate here.AGs in Massachusetts and New York have recently argued that major consumer protections are needed.
Chicago Real Estate Daily: Property tax bills will jump the most in these Chicago neighborhoods
When Mayor Emanuel’s property tax increase kicks in next year, the epicenter will be the intersection of Halsted and Division Streets, in the middle of a neighborhood where the average tax assessment rose by more than 48 percent this year.
That’s by far the biggest average increase in residential property values in the Cook County Assessor’s recently completed re-assessment throughout the city. Coupled with Emanuel’s proposed higher tax rate, which the City Council approved in late October, the new assessments will wallop homeowners who live between the CTA’s North and Clybourn Red Line stop and its Chicago Avenue Brown Line stop.
The area, known in the assessor’s parlance as North Township 013, is one of 184 city neighborhood areas, all of which were re-assessed in 2015 in the every-three-years re-assessment cycle. The median increase among the 184 is about 10.4 percent.
TH Online: Illinois' time bomb growing, ticking louder
In 1994, Illinois Gov. Jim Edgar spearheaded a bipartisan pension bill he claimed would solve the state’s then-$15 billion pension deficit.
“We had a time bomb in our retirement system that was going to go off in the first part of the 21st century,” Edgar told The State Journal Register at the time. “This legislation defuses that time bomb.”
Today, Illinois’ pension debt totals more than $100 billion. That’s because Edgar’s plan didn’t structurally reform pensions. Instead, it simply pushed the state’s pension obligations far off into the future — through 2045 — in the hope that future legislatures would deal with them.
Chicago Tribune: Rauner dishes out first corporate tax breaks under revamped EDGE program
Three small firms have been handed an estimated $1.1 million in tax breaks over the next decade to bring 87 jobs to Illinois — the first EDGE tax credits issued since Gov. Bruce Rauner reinstated a revamped version of the controversial program earlier this month.
McHenry-based Fabrik Industries, Northbrook-based Bell Flavors and Fragrances, and Italian firm Taurus Die Casting will be able to claim the tax breaks once the state’s budget impasse is resolved, according to the Illinois Department of Commerce.
The EDGE incentive program was founded in 1999 to attract jobs to Illinois that might otherwise have gone elsewhere and to keep jobs that were at risk of leaving. But it has come under fire for being a billion-dollar giveaway after the Tribune revealed how many companies collected the tax credits despite failing to add or retain jobs.