Chicago’s political leadership is floating a pension buyout program as evidence it is seriously addressing the city’s thirty-six-billion-dollar unfunded pension liability, but Mark Glennon, founder of the Illinois policy research organization Wirepoints, said that the proposal moves debt from one column to another rather than reducing it, and that the broader fiscal picture facing the city continues to deteriorate across every measurable dimension. Audio here.
Nothing will change, no one enforces the law, NO ONE.
And few want to go downtown any more. The EL is designed to primarily transport people from the neighborhoods to downtown and back, and most el stops are no destinations in and of themselves. Who wants to travel to the Addison or Montrose blue line or Montrose Red line stop from another part of the city? No one. And few do.