After passing an unbalanced budget in 2017, Decatur will have to address its declining population and revenue as it looks ahead to crafting future budgets.
While major headlines broke over news that Chicago was the only one of America’s largest 20 cities to shrink from July 2015 to July 2016, most of Illinois’ other cities with 50,000 people or more also lost population.
Our recent comprehensive report, “The crisis hits home: Illinois’ local pension problem,” reviewed the fiscal health of Illinois’ 114 largest cities to measure the impact of pension costs on taxpayers, city services and the security of city-worker pensions. Decatur received one of the lowest scores as a result of out-of-control pension costs. Here’s why: Taxpayers...
Chicago’s $1.15 billion projected budget gap is the latest in a decades-long string of structural deficits. Making Chicago’s high taxes worse is not the solution.