Get the latest news from around Illinois.
BND: Want more construction jobs? Dump the prevailing wage, study says.
If Illinois didn’t have a prevailing wage, there could have been an additional 14,000 construction jobs during the last 10 years in the state, according to a recent study released by the right-leaning Illinois Policy Institute.
The findings are contrary to a study released in 2013 by the University of Illinois, which said lack of a prevailing wage would lead to job losses in the state.
The prevailing wage is the minimum rates contractors can pay on public construction projects. Each county has its own prevailing wage, which is determined by the Illinois Department of Labor, and based on the prevalent wage paid to workers on similar public projects.
Chicago Tribune: Cook County voters to be asked next year about legalizing marijuana
Cook County voters will get their say on whether recreational marijuana use should be made legal for adults in Illinois, after commissioners on Wednesday voted to put that question on the March primary ballot.
Commissioners voted unanimously to approve the advisory referendum. Board President Toni Preckwinkle also supports it, and the longtime critic of the war on drugs on Wednesday reiterated her support for marijuana legalization. She has said that current drug laws have a disparate impact on minorities — causing them to languish in jail on minor charges for lack of bail money and giving them a record that makes it hard to land a job.
Chicago Tribune: Mundelein approves property tax hike to cover pension payments
Mundelein trustees voted Monday night to raise the property tax levy by nearly $630,000 to cover increased payments to police and fire pensions, but the decision didn’t arrive without debate.
The approved levy of nearly $13.2 million keeps all village operations at the same funding level and only raises the portion for police and fire pensions, according to village documents.
Crain's: Rauner's big health care headache in 2018? Medicaid.
Gov. Bruce Rauner’s move to shake up a major Illinois Medicaid program and further privatize it sent shock waves around the state in 2017.
In managed care, the state pays private insurers to administer benefits to Medicaid recipients, with a focus on preventive care. The idea is to keep close tabs on recipients to improve their health, leading to lower medical costs.
WANDTV: A new law aims to stop "doctor shopping" for getting prescribed opioid
Governor Bruce Rauner today signed into law, legislation that will require prescribers with an Illinois Controlled Substance License to register with and use the Illinois Prescription Monitoring Program (PMP), a database that records patient prescription history.
The PMP allows physicians to check previous patient prescriptions and requests for controlled substances. Increasing the required checkpoints in advance of prescribing controlled substances will cut down on “doctor-shopping,” the practice of patients obtaining opioid prescriptions from multiple physicians.
“This legislation helps us combat opioid abuse by addressing fraud at a critical point of access,” Rauner said. “Too often, users obtain dangerous amounts of opioids by ‘doctor-shopping’ prescriptions for their drugs of choice from prescribers in our health care system. The new PMP registration requirements will help deter this practice by tracking prescriptions and making information available to physicians before they write them.”
Wired: Elon Musk Really Doesn't Like Mass Transit Systems He's Trying to Build
ELON MUSK IS a man of many, many interests. Lately, to go along with cars, space, and AI, he has added mass transit to the pile. After launching the Boring Company last year (via a Twitter musing about terrible Los Angeles traffic), the Teslaand SpaceX CEO began digging an experimental tunnel in his own backyard, the parking lot of SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California.
He plans, he says, to construct networks of tunnels throughout cities with faster, more efficient boring technology. The tunnels could carry individual cars or eight- to sixteen-passenger “pods” on electric skates, traveling up to 150 mph. (Longer tunnels, between cities, would be perfect for hyperloop, another interest.)
Less than a year after its founding, the Boring Company is already talking about taking its mass transit solution to real, live cities. In July, Musk announced that he had “verbal government approval” to build a hyperloop between Washington, DC and New York City, which could carry commuters between the two in less than 30 minutes. (A White House official later suggested that he had, perhaps, given Musk the wrong idea, and that the project had not been approved, verbally or otherwise.) In November, Musk said the company would bid on a project to build a new, faster rail link between downtown Chicago and O’Hare Airport. And in early December, the Boring Company released a map showing a proposed tunnel network in Los Angeles, which could transport both private cars and shared pods between Long Beach Airport in the south, Santa Monica in the west, Dodger Stadium in the east, and Sherman Oaks in the north.
NWHerald: Crystal Lake's property tax rate to fall, but homeowners still could pay more
The city’s property tax rate is expected to decrease 1.28 percent on next year’s tax bill, but projected increases to the equalized assessed value in the area could require homeowners to pay more than the previous year.
It all depends on property assessments.
The Crystal Lake City Council approved the city’s annual property tax levy request Tuesday. With the levy, the owner of a $200,000 home could see an estimated $12 drop in the city portion of his or her tax bills if the home’s property assessment remains the same, according to the city’s finance department.
But if an increase in a property’s assessed value equals the overall 5.61 percent increase in the city’s EAV, then the owner of a $200,000 home – for example – would pay about $46 more in 2018 than in 2017.