-- Connecting the dots between our economy, government and business --
But if the money does not come through, Chicagoans would face significant consequences for their daily CTA routes next year — including to four of the city’s eight train lines and 65-70 buses, CTA Interim President Nora Leerhsen said.
Eleven Lyons Township homeowners held up signs of how much money they say Cook County owes each of them – money ranging from about $2,700 to about $29,000. Chanda Davidson, who says she is owed a little over $11,000 is waiting on a previous certificate of error to be certified on a square footage error. “It’s a lot. We could definitely use it,” Davidson said. “So, it was about 700 square footage over what our actual property was, which makes a big difference over time.”
Interim CTA President Nora Leerhsen told aldermen smoking complaints are down compared to last year, and the number of citations issued by police is up.
State Sen. Andrew Chesney said Democrats don’t get it. “They will say, whatever it takes … to get elected. And they don’t care,” he said. “If they cared, they would lower our property taxes. If they cared, they would cooperate with ICE. If they cared, they would start bringing common sense back to the state of Illinois and stop blaming Donald Trump.”
As Pritzker expanded the size and cost of government – boosting taxes $1,237 per Illinoisan – the relative security offered by the rainy-day fund shrank. That’s a real threat to programs Illinoisans rely on during extreme economic downturns.
The pace of U.S. home-price growth fell for the fourth month in a row in May, dipping to its slowest rate since July 2023 as markets continued “the slow unwind” of pandemic-era appreciation, S&P Dow Jones Indices said. But in Chicago, home prices rose 6.1% year over year in May, up from a 6% gain in April.
Unlike two earlier efforts that were struck down by the courts, the current proposal, lead by former White House chief of staff William Daley and former congressman and U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, is more streamlined and designed to fit through the very narrow window that previous Illinois Supreme Court rulings have left for a constitutional amendment by citizens’ petition to appear on the ballot.
“But given how contentious tax policy is, there will no doubt be posturing from some that the grocery tax should be allowed to expire — even though that decision was neither made by nor debated in the City Council. To be at all credible, anyone making that case should identify exactly what other tax they’d propose increasing or exactly what services they’d propose cutting to make up for the $80 million being lost.”
Jack Lavin, of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce; Katie Reilly, of the Illinois Coalition for Legal Reform; Mark Denzler, of the Illinois Manufacturers’ Association; and Rob Karr, of the Illinois Retail Merchants Association: “If signed into law, SB 328 would make Illinois an outlier as just the second state in the nation with such a statute. Other governors recognize the dangers associated with a law like SB 328.”
Attorneys general Keith Ellison of Minnesota; Letitia James of New York; Peter Neronha of Rhode Island; and Nick Brown of
Vallas: “Ultimately, the greatest obstacle to balancing the city’s budget and ensuring vital services are the CTU’s intransigence and unsustainable pension burdens. The CTU is no longer a conventional labor union advocating solely for teachers; it’s a political machine, often at odds with broader public sector labor and the interests of the city.”
Rep. Dave Severin filed legislation last week to create an Illinois regional generation reliability task force. He filed a separate plan to repeal nearly all of the clean energy laws Gov. JB Pritzker has signed since taking office. He argues Illinois will never be able to meet the demand for energy without bringing coal and natural gas plants back online.
The question remains: when will those Cook County tax bills be ready to go? The consensus was, thanks to those technical problems, “we just don’t know.”
Ald. Ray Lopez said he and other aldermen wanted to go back to pre-COVID budgets and adjust for inflation. “(W)hen we look at all the new positions, programs and expenditures that we’ve seen over the last five years, those were not meant to be in perpetuity,” Lopez said. “The mayor and his allies only know two things when it comes to government, borrow more or raise more taxes. They don’t know what it means to reduce spending because they’ve never seen a taxpayer dollar that they didn’t want to spend.”
A caseworker for an Illinois foster child who later died had orders of protection filed against her by eight women for allegedly harassing, abusing and threatening violence against them. The caseworker, who was employed by Lutheran Child and Family Services, is now employed by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.
Teachers spend hundreds – and some over a thousand – on union dues each year. But their unions don’t prioritize representing teachers.
Mark joined Dan Proft to paint a grim picture of Illinois’ financial trajectory, focusing particularly on the state’s spiraling property taxes, unsustainable public spending, and a lack of political accountability.
“Illinois is the only state where the state government does not have any ability to prevent indiscriminate rate hikes. Special interests in Springfield have lobbied for years to keep it this way. Momentum was already building for Illinois to change this policy and join the rest of the nation even before State Farm’s rate hike. The company’s actions now have pushed this commonsense consumer protection into the spotlight for the General Assembly’s fall session.”
Head taxes are a rare “home rule” levy, meaning the city would not need state approval to issue one. Johnson’s efforts to win support in Springfield for other new taxes has so far largely failed. Progressive groups like the Chicago Teachers Union have praised the head tax idea, but critics argue it provides a disincentive for companies to hire more employees.
The Trump administration has asked Illinois election officials for a copy of the state’s voter registration database, including sensitive data about individual voters and detailed information about the state’s efforts to scrub ineligible voters from the rolls. Lawyers from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division also asked for a list of all the election officials in Illinois who were responsible for carrying out federally mandated efforts to keep state’s voter rolls accurate and up to date during a two-year period leading up to the November 2024 elections.
State Rep. Will Guzzardi of Chicago, who has worked on legislation aimed at regulating car insurance rates, said he is optimistic there’s enough will in the legislature to take on high costs of auto insurance, but acknowledged the need to do so without harming the insurers doing business in Illinois.
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