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Any meaningful property tax reduction, such as matching rates for neighboring states, would require reforms that our political establishment won’t consider.
“All but the hopelessly gullible can see that this envisioned extra $3 billion a year from the fat cats is just a first grab. The big money is further down the income ladder. Yet Democrats have to keep asking for voters’ trust that they’ll spare the middle class — despite the sorry history that animates this series of editorials: ‘When taxpayers trust Springfield, here’s what happens.'”
Between 2013 and 2018, the cost of utility distribution paid for by ComEd customers in Illinois grew by $730 million. That’s a price increase four to seven times more than the average annual rate of inflation for the same period, according to a study commissioned by AARP and conducted by the independent Power Bureau. But all this has gone on without question, thanks to inexplicable backroom deals and masterful public relations spin. Until now.”
The trifecta of an FBI probe, Lightfoot’s standoff and the state House bill could finally be what is needed to force ComEd to come out of
Margaret Houlihan Smith in October added ComEd to her lobbying clients, and listed dozens of city departments she might lobby on the utility’s behalf, including the mayor’s office, according to city records.
The arrangement has raised questions about the kind of information Houlihan Smith might be privy to and the kind of access she could promise. But the mayor’s office said it saw no issues with her security chief, James Smith, being married to a lobbyist for ComEd.
“I’m not the target of anything,” he recently told reporters.
“You backing the Russians, boy?”
Chicago is still waiting for the federal approval Mayor Lori Lightfoot claimed was imminent for a $163 million increase in ambulance fees, but it will come, averting the need for a “midyear correction” in her $11.6 billion budget, top mayoral aides said Friday.
It argues that children living in Chicago’s most gun-ravaged neighborhoods suffer disabilities as a result of the violence and that Illinois is violating both the federal Americans With Disabilities Act and state civil rights laws by not tightening regulations on the flow of the illegal weapons that are contributing to the carnage.
Q4 of 2019 marks 10 years since the low-point of the national housing crisis. Nearly one in four mortgaged homes had negative equity, meaning the market value of the property is worth less than the value owed in mortgage.
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