Commentary: This time around, don’t give Jerry Reinsdorf a win over taxpayers – Chicago Sun-Times

Andy Shaw: "Funding for the stadium, in Jerry’s shrewd, risk-averse business mind, would mirror the vehicle that helped build Soldier Field for the Bears and the current White Sox stadium at 35th and Shields in Bridgeport, now called Guaranteed Rate Field: Revenue from the city’s hotel-motel tax and the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority’s bonding power to raise the estimated $1 billion price tag for new stadium construction. ... In other words, all public and no private dollars, and that’s the rub: $400 million in new tax revenue that wouldn’t be available for other pressing needs like education, health care, law enforcement, homelessness, social services and neighborhood development."

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Mark Glennon on AM560’s Morning Answer: Chicago pension buyout plan mostly shifts debt rather than eliminating it, property tax surge doubles inflation over three decades

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.

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