By Benjamin VanMetre
04/08/2014
A key tenet of the current Chicago pension reform proposal, which is headed to Gov. Quinn’s desk, is an Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund-style funding mechanism that seeks to guarantee that pension payments are made to Chicago’s funds each year. The mechanism allows the state to divert millions of dollars away from the city and into Chicago pension...
TAGS: IMRF: Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund
The Illinois Policy Institute recently published a study titled “The crisis hits home: Illinois’ local pension problem.” The audit measured 10 different metrics related to pensions to arrive at a holistic picture of how rising local pension costs are hurting each city’s fiscal health. The city of Springfield performed dismally in the audit. It scored...
TAGS: pensions
The Wall Street Journal’s article “Public Pension Red Alert” foreshadows more municipal bankruptcies countrywide as pension costs continue to spiral out of control. One of the cities facing the most stress nationally is Chicago. The city’s pension payments are set to jump to more than $1 billion as laws that allowed the city to skimp on pension payments...
TAGS: Chicago, municipal pensions
By Ted Dabrowski
02/01/2014
Many of Illinois' local pension funds are nearing insolvency.
By Brian Costin
12/23/2012
Palos Hills Mayor: ‘Cities and villages will go bankrupt if this does not change’ Despite all of the media focus on the state’s troubled pension systems, a Southtown Star column byPhil Kander details the problems many suburbs face with the mounting debt of public employee pensions. Intense lobbying by labor unions to pass costly pension sweeteners have caused...
By Brian Costin
08/11/2012
Ever since the Village of Willowbrook’s participation in the Illinois Policy Institute’s Local Transparency Project, the Mayor and Board of Trustees have been interested in ways of furthering the Village’s transparency efforts.” – Garrett Hummel, Management Analyst, Village of Willowbrook. The Village of Willowbrook previously earned a transparency award from the Illinois Policy Institute for scoring an...
