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Belleville News-Democrat: Illinois lawmakers quitting before voters get to fire them
Sometimes chickens come home to roost. Sometimes they fly the coop.
There are 25 Illinois state lawmakers getting out, and 19 of them voted for saddling taxpayers with the 32-percent income tax increase that no one believes really fixed anything.
Illinois Homepage: Bill backlog hits all-time high
A new record hit an all-time high this week for the state’s finances. The bill backlog reached $16 billion; the largest it’s ever been.
It fluctuated to $15 billion for a few reasons. School aid payment just was distributed as well as pensions, so it was lowered to about $15.5 billion.
Crain's Chicago Business: Time for Preckwinkle & Co. to answer questions on soda tax
I wonder if the outrage over Cook County’s sweetened beverage tax is any less intense than the anger in 1773, when colonial rebels dumped tea from British ships into Boston Harbor to protest England’s imposition of the dreaded Tea Act.
Maybe not, but times change, and today’s activists are more likely to stage quotidian demonstrations and vent on social media than dump cans and bottles of soda in the Chicago River. And local pundits would rather inundate us with imagery than incite insurrection.
Rockford Register-Star: Rockford alderman eyes new regulations for dog owners
Championed by Alderman John Beck, R-12, the proposal is intended to keep dogs safe and improve the lives of dogs that he said might otherwise be mistreated.
Bloomington Pantagraph: City street resurfacing tops $3.8 million this construction season
While the condition of Bloomington streets is a chief gripe of residents, the city’s Public Works Department is trying to make a dent in the backlog of work.
The city will spend $3.8 million to resurface 18 streets and six alleys and about another $1 million for sidewalk improvements by the end of the current construction season.
The Southern: After 32 years of HUD oversight, problems persist in East St. Louis public housing, residents say
In the face of historical governmental failings at all levels, political indifference and a lack of real solutions where they are needed most, the poorest residents of East St. Louis have slid further behind on almost all socioeconomic indicators. That’s the ostentatious way academics describe what is known by those living it as the hard life.
The purpose of the occasion was for Carson, on HUD’s behalf, to officially transition the city’s housing agency to local control after 32 years of federal administrative receivership. With the stroke of his pen, he ended the first and longest federal receivership of a local public housing authority in HUD’s history to the sound of applause.