Get the latest news from around Illinois.
Fox Illinois: State Leaders Spar Over How To Continue Negotiations
Governor Bruce Rauner and leaders are at a stalemate on how to even proceed in their meetings.
Governor Rauner says he wants to see appropriation levels from the Democrats. Democrats say they need to know what he wants a budget to look like.
NBC 5 Chicago: What Happens If a Budget Deal Isn’t Reached By Year's End?
With budget negotiations stalled, it’s becoming more likely that Gov. Bruce Rauner and the state’s top legislative leaders won’t reach an agreement before the end of the calendar year, when the state’s current stopgap spending plan expires.
If a budget deal isn’t reached before then, the state will lose spending authority for a variety of important services, like public colleges and universities and grants for health and social services. These are areas the state’s ongoing budget impasse has already adversely affected.
Chicago Tribune: Expect nothing from Springfield: Rauner had 44 agenda items. Madigan's Democrats had 1.
Halfway through the four-year term of Gov. Bruce Rauner, House Speaker Michael Madigan has demonstrated he has no intention of working with Rauner. Even some of Madigan’s Democratic members have admitted as much. They have no agenda, other than to make Rauner a one-term governor.
Hard-core Democrats will applaud, of course. Madigan and Senate President John Cullerton haven’t had many recent successes in Springfield, but they have managed to typecast the governor as a ruthless rich guy whose policy ideas would hurt the middle class. Class warfare at its worst. They’d love to isolate Rauner as the problem, then drive a wedge between him and his loyalists.
Courier News: State budget impasse worries U46 administrators, school board
With Gov. Bruce Rauner and the General Assembly showing no signs of reaching a deal for a new state budget by the end of the year, it comes as no surprise as what worries School District U46 administration and school board the most.
“I really thought we would have a clearer picture of the state’s finances by now, but I don’t know anymore,” CEO Tony Sanders told members of the U46 Citizens Advisory Council, or CAC.
Fox Illinois: Cullerton: Rauner's Union Fight Holding Up Pension Reform
The contract negotiations between AFSCME and the Rauner Administration are making their way into budget talks.
In the last few weeks, we’ve heard Speaker Madigan request an update on the negotiations because the contract impacts the state budget.
City Journal: How House Speaker Michael Madigan helped ruin Illinois
In Illinois in late June, the state legislature passed, and the governor signed, a makeshift budget to fund essential state operations for six months. The deal came after the state had gone a year and a half without a budget. The impasse resulted from an ongoing battle between Republican governor Bruce Rauner and Democratic house speaker Michael Madigan. Rauner, a successful businessman, won election in 2014 on a platform to change the way Illinois did business. Rather than betray his voters, Rauner has held firm to his demand that parts of his “Turnaround Agenda”—which includes changes to workmen’s compensation and public-employee unionism, along with tort reform—be part of any state budget. On the other side, Madigan, who represents a coalition of Democrats and unions, wants more tax revenue for his “spending plan” but none of Rauner’s initiatives. Rauner and Madigan faced intense pressure to adopt a stopgap measure and avoid taking the blame if schools failed to open in the fall, enrollment fell at state universities, road repairs stopped, and prisoners in state penitentiaries went hungry for lack of food. Yet as soon as the budget measure passed, both sides returned to the battlefield, raising the question of when, if ever, the state will return to normalcy.
Greg Hinz: Safe Roads Amendment backing pays off
There’s some heartwarming news today on the Illinois Safe Roads Amendment, the ill-considered yet popular plan to ensure all state and local taxes on transportation go for transportation and not other things, such as treating the sick, feeding the hungry or educating the kids.
The proposed constitutional amendment overwhelmingly was approved by voters on Nov. 8, despite warnings that it largely was the work of road builders and their labor allies.
Now comes word the Illinois Road and Transportation Builders Association last night handed out a special “Friend of the Industry Award” to two folks who, in the association’s view, have achieved “truly outstanding achievement.”
Chicago Sun-Times: No end in sight for Illinois’ school funding con game
Freeze property taxes. That is one of two key points Gov. Bruce Rauner is pressing home on Democratic legislators in exchange for negotiating on a budget.
I’m actually amazed Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan didn’t jump all over that one.
Chicago Sun-Times: $3.8M in back pension payments for female black firefighters
Five years ago, the city agreed to hire 111 African-American firefighters bypassed by the city’s discriminatory handling of a 1995 firefighters entrance exam.
Although 13 of those black firefighters were women, the city insisted on using a controversial and now-abolished test of upper-body strength that was being challenged in federal court for discriminating against women.
Chicago Sun-Times: Rahm’s police hiring will barely make up for drop
Even if Mayor Rahm Emanuel manages to add nearly 1,000 cops in the next couple years, his promised surge of new hires would barely make up for the decline in the Chicago Police Department’s ranks on his watch.
There were 6,244 rank-and-file police officers working the city’s 22 police districts as of Oct. 19, records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times show. That’s down more than 800 from the 7,047 beat cops shortly after Emanuel took office in 2011.
Chicago Tribune: Emanuel is ordered to produce index of messages as Tribune presses records suit
A Cook County judge on Friday ordered the city and Mayor Rahm Emanuel to produce an index of certain emails and text messages that the mayor sent and received on personal devices, as the Chicago Tribune and the city continue to battle over the mayor’s electronic communications.
Judge Kathleen Pantle made the ruling in the Tribune’s September 2015 lawsuit, which alleged that Emanuel had violated state open records laws by refusing to release communications about city business that he had conducted through emails and texts on personal devices.
Illinois News Network: Illinois Department of Labor launches effort to streamline services
The Illinois Department of Labor is working to streamline its services used by various groups in an effort to save stakeholders time and taxpayers money.
The department’s assistant director, Anna Hui, said that right now, the streamlining efforts are aimed at annual temporary employment agency certifications.
Chicago Sun-Times: Former state rep no longer at corrections department job
Six months after abruptly leaving the Illinois General Assembly for a six-figure state job, former State Rep. John Anthony is out at the Illinois Department of Corrections.
The department on Friday confirmed Anthony’s employment ended on Wednesday. Officials wouldn’t say what led to the departure. Anthony, a Republican from Morris, worked as executive assistant to the director of the Illinois Department of Corrections, making $10,000 a month. Records show he made more than $82,000 this year — working for the department and as state representative.
Belleville News-Democrat: Illinois fast as lightning to exert power over energy markets
Illinois lawmakers and Gov. Bruce Rauner didn’t agree on much, but the fall veto session did yield a rush job called the Future Energy Jobs Bill. Rauner immediately signed it into law.
You should care because it is likely to do something to your energy bill, or to your property taxes. Which one and how much is a matter of debate, and a matter that is unclear because not enough time was allowed to pass to determine whose analysis is correct.
Rockford Register-Star: Rockford mayor to propose utility tax to close deficit
Confronted with a projected $5 million budget shortfall his final months in office, Mayor Larry Morrissey is proposing the break-glass measure he avoided for a decade – a tax on electricity and natural gas consumption.
Morrissey said he has so far gotten little support for a utility tax from aldermen, who may want to tap the city’s modest cash reserves to close a gap in the proposed $134.4 million 2017 general fund spending plan.