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Comment: This is about Indiana. In Illinois, Governor Pritzker said Thursday that a pay increase for state employees will proceed.
The anticipated filing of a temporary restraining order in Cook County circuit court follows an unsuccessful lobbying effort by the Arlington Heights-based dispatch system and elected officials in some of its 11 member communities.
The ordinance also dictates that any service fees charged to customers would go directly to delivery drivers.
“McConnell has rejected a “pension bailout” – but deferred the question of aid to states and localities more generally speaking. Yet how would the federal government fine-tune any funding to states and cities to only fund reasonable spending, not obligations due to past severe mismanagement? And what about Pritzker?”
“Ideally, especially in an economic downturn, you tax where the money is growing and try to ease the pain where income is declining. That’s the way things are supposed to work. How can anyone argue against that?”
The judge will make a decision Monday following four hours of testimony from detainees at Cook County Jail about whether the jail is following orders regarding PPE and social distancing
In the county’s first virtual board meeting since the coronavirus pandemic started, commissioners voted 17-0 in favor of appointing Otis Story to a seat on the Cook County Health and Hospitals System board of directors. Story, Preckwinkle’s deputy chief of staff since February, previously was chief executive officer of East Orange General Hospital New Jersey.
“This newspaper, like news organizations across the country, recently received money through the federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program for small businesses. We welcome this, and we’re grateful for it. But our share, $2.7 million, won’t be nearly enough.”
Several Republican state senators filed public records requests with the Illinois Department of Corrections after they say the governor didn’t respond to a formal letter for more information about the release of prisoners during the COVID-19 pandemic.
State Rep. Darren Bailey, R-Xenia, filed a lawsuit in Clay County Circuit Court on Thursday challenging the governor’s stay-at-home order beyond April 9. The lawsuit alleges that “as a direct result of the April 1 Executive Order, Pritzker has acted to restrain Bailey within his residence, as well as limit his travel, for a period of time.”
A Sangamon County Judge has granted a temporary restraining order halting a state edict that assumed any essential worker who came down with COVID-19 got it from their workplace.
A bipartisan coalition of 10 Illinois mayors, including Aurora, Champaign, Springfield, Joliet and Waukegan, sent a letter to members of the state’s congressional delegation asking them to “fight for flexible direct funding for municipalities to help limit the crippling economic damage to our cities.” Aurora will face a $30 million budget deficit if the city is not allowed to reopen its economy by early June, Mayor Richard Irvin said.
Preliminary projections show Cook County expects to have a shortfall of least $200 million this budget year, a ripple effect of the COVID-19 pandemic. The biggest loss in revenue is in sales tax — the largest moneymaker for the county, Chief Financial Officer Ammar Rizki told WBEZ. A dip in hotel and amusement tax dollars isn’t far behind, he said.
A handful of aldermen and community leaders are still trying to drum up opposition to expanding the mayor’s emergency powers, arguing she shouldn’t decide on her own how to spend millions of federal stimulus dollars.
North Side Ald. Andre Vasquez noted a section of the municipal code stipulates the City Council should meet on the second and fourth Wednesdays of each month unless another date and time is set for the next meeting. For decades, the council has set its regular meetings for just one Wednesday per month. “It’s right there in the code, so let’s do what the code says,” Vasquez said.
City spokeswoman Mary May said the now-canceled summer festivals and events are “funded entirely with revenue generated from events and tourism collected in the current budget year.”
Though it is lower than the week prior, new claims for unemployment insurance were elevated well above normal levels in Illinois for the fifth week, coming in at 102,736 for the week ending April 18, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
“We’re looking at an extension, but I don’t know – I can’t tell you right now how long that extension should run,” Pritzker said during his daily coronavirus press briefing. He lifted some restrictions on the order, opening up state parks, new essential businesses and changing restrictions for non-essential retail beginning in May.
Comment: This article contains new information about new projections and data the Pritzker Administration says it is using. Why was it released only to the Sun-Times as an exclusive? We’ve been asking to see this for over a month. Shouldn’t it have been made generally available?
“If we create a situation where anything goes, or everybody gets a pass, what we’re seeing is there’s uneven, right now, implementation of remote learning.”
The National Restaurant Association estimates 15-20 percent of restaurants nationwide will close for good as a result of the pandemic. Pritzker suggested Wednesday restaurants could face longer closures than other businesses, though he hasn’t said yet when the stay at home order will be lifted or when he could ease up on other restrictions.
“We’re hoping many of these job losses aren’t permanent and post-pandemic they can come back,” said Bart Watson, chief economist at the Brewers Association. “Small and craft breweries employ 160,000 people nationally. That job loss is significant.”
Ralph Martire, who directs the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, explained that amounts to the state being dealt a one-two punch: less money to go around, and more time for some of it to be collected.
Two decades of fiscal mismanagement have left state finances ill-prepared for the COVID-19 pandemic. Congress should condition any additional aid for troubled states on taxpayer protections that ensure pensions are solvent, accounting is realistic and budgets are balanced.
In April 2019, the city sued Smollett seeking reimbursement of more than $130,000 paid in overtime to police officers who were involved in investigating the alleged racist and homophobic attack on Smollett, who is black and gay. Smollett countersued in November, saying the city couldn’t recover costs because it accepted $10,000 from Smollett “as payment in full in connection with the dismissal of the charges against him.” The lawsuit said Smollett had been the victim of a malicious prosecution that caused him humiliation and extreme distress.
Arwady believes that Chicago is in relatively good shape should a second or third wave come, with most hospitals equipped and staffed to handle a new surge. She has already ordered syringes for a future COVID-19 vaccine, and boxes to keep the vaccine cold, while thinking about whether technology platforms that track coronavirus cases could also be used to monitor and treat socially transmitted diseases. “You hate the outbreak, but you never want to let the work of this go to waste.”
“The Amendments at issue are clearly substantive in that they create new rights for employees and new obligations for employers,” the business groups argue in a brief accompanying the complaint. “Employers have a protectable interest in being free from invalid lawmaking that blatantly requires employers to carry the healthcare load of a public pandemic.”
Ted was on this week with Tom Miller of Newsradio WJPF. He talked about how Illinois Senate Democrats have asked the federal government for what New York Times and others call a “bailout”. The response: “No, you can’t use the pandemic as a cover to try to get funding for previous problems.”
“I would certainly be in favor of allowing states to use the bankruptcy route,” he said Wednesday in a response to a question on the syndicated Hugh Hewitt radio show. “It’s saved some cities, and there’s no good reason for it not to be available.”
The host cited California, Illinois and Connecticut as states that had given too much to public employee unions, and McConnell said he was reluctant to take on more debt for any rescue.
“Or take Illinois, where Gov. J.B. Pritzker in February proposed a $40.8 billion budget that included $9 billion for public pensions…. They’ve long bet on a federal bailout, and they see Covid-19 as their main chance.
“Bailout conditions should include cuts in nonessential spending, immediate and permanent reductions in public pension benefits, and other reforms to put states on a path to fiscal recovery. Lawmakers will protest, but they are the ones asking Americans for help. If states want more money, they need to show it won’t merely go to sustain unaccountable, one-party political machines.
The three-week furloughs, which will be taken in one-week increments from May through July, will be for nonunion employees making between $40,000 and $67,000 per year. “Despite strong engagement with our journalism, the impact on advertising has been profound,” CEO Terry Jimenez said in a memo to employees.
“As damaging as this pandemic has been, a second round of infection in Illinois that could have been avoided would make this crisis exponentially worse. The need to revive our economy is urgent. But Illinois must tread carefully on deciding how and when that should happen. Driving those decisions should be a reliance on science and data that show us the COVID-19 menace has been safely subdued.”
“One of the pillars of great leadership is the ability to provide hope and a vision for the future to those you lead. So far, Gov. Pritzker has failed to adequately discuss what would need to happen to reopen Illinois… All states are struggling to keep up with claims, but unlike Illinois, other states have owned their mistakes and creatively addressed the problem, instead of just dismissing critiques as partisan sniping.”
In the “Impact and Access to Resources” category, the state received a rank of 46th; for “Small-Business Financial Conditions,” 16th; and for “Business Environment and Workforce Support Conditions,” 40th.
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