Gov. Bruce Rauner welcomed a new company to Illinois on Tuesday – something that doesn’t happen enough in a state where the unemployment rate is above the national average.

But a lawmaker questioned whether the governor’s rhetoric pushing his turnaround agenda is helping or hurting.

At the ribbon-cutting for the new Richelieu Foods plant in Wheeling, Gov. Bruce Rauner and Rep. Robert Dold scored political points with a new employer.

Illinois’s lackluster investment gains are making its most notorious problem — pension debt — even worse.

The state with the least-funded retirement system in the U.S. may see next year’s contributions jump by nearly half a billion dollars after its largest pension, the Teachers’ Retirement System, reduced the assumed rate of return on its portfolio. Because states count on such earnings to cover benefits checks, Moody’s Investors Service said the change added $7.4 billion to Illinois’s debt to the fund, a tab that it will have to chip away at year by year.

With a holiday weekend spate of violence that killed 13 people, the homicide toll in the nation’s third-largest city hit 500, a grim milestone that puts the city on track to reach a murder rate it hasn’t seen since the drug wars of the1990s.

The Labor Day weekend murders come after police recorded 92 murders in August, the deadliest month for Chicago since June 1993. With murders up roughly 50% for the year, Chicago has tallied more homicides than the much larger cities of New York and Los Angeles combined.

The city is on pace to record well over 600 murders for 2016, a threshold it has not reached since 2003. Chicago regularly recorded more than 700 murders a year in the 1990s as gang violence, driven by the crack-cocaine epidemic, raged.

Grayslake trustees agree that a $350,000 economic incentive would be worth it to bring a restaurant-pub to a vacant historic building in the village’s downtown.

Village board members Tuesday night voted 6-0 for a tentative agreement that would benefit Mark Khayat and Pete Giannakakis, who plan to open the establishment possibly under the Goose Island Beer Co. banner. The proposed deal still must receive formal village board approval.

The House of Delegates for the Chicago Teachers Union will meet today, and could set a date for a strike.

The union is planning to hold a strike authorization vote.

At least 75 percent of its members would need to vote in favor of a strike, for there to be one.

Some union leaders want teachers to walk off the job next month, if a deal can’t be reached by then.

The ability to see corruption is the strongest weapon against it. But too many public officials try hiding important information from the public eye. Just take Chicago, where 19 Chicago aldermen were recently reported as using untraceable and unsecured private email accounts to conduct city business.

When will Chicago’s elected leaders get the message that it no longer can be business as usual?

There are two primary reasons why sensitive and confidential government work must be kept on government email accounts and servers: transparency and security.

A new Illinois law bars newly-elected members on the state’s county boards from signing up for pensions from the Illinois Municipal Retirement fund.

The law, signed last month by Gov. Bruce Rauner, is a result of a political battle In McHenry County, where a candidate in the November race for county board president found board members were – depending on the county – supposed to work 600 or 1,000 hours a year to receive pensions.