Totaling the unsustainable tax increases and windfall revenue during Pritzker Administration – Wirepoints
May 26, 2026
23 Comments
With $162 billion more from taxpayers, couldn’t you deliver a few bond upgrades, too
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A largely unasked question is becoming glaring: Is Illinois doing all it should to use artificial intelligence to make government cost less and work better? So far, the evidence says no.
I re-read the story and looked up this ‘warehouse’. I remember visiting that Wickes furniture store eons ago. I believe it later became a laser tag facility, then the laser tag part of it morphed into a strip club iirc (or the nudie bar was next door, I never visited that). The building was a POS when Metra bought it, ostensibly to prevent layoffs. A case study in mismanagement? How about the entire agency as a case study in mismanagment. Metra needed to lay people off. In a wanton act of criminal mismanagement, they didn’t. Now, none of these political… Read more »
A minor point, but are locomotive and railcar parts adversely affected by cold temperatures? The money pissed away on nine unconnected gas heaters for this fiasco. Oversight was non-existent. With the amounts being tossed around for this mess, that could only be intentional. I can’t wait see the stooges run for the tall grass when an examination of the money wasted on the Climate Religion finally happens. The battery locomotives will be making rust outlines in the ballast in a couple of months, give it five years until the hand wringing oversight report on that expensive failure comes out. But… Read more »
Locomotives and rail cars are affected by cold weather in various degrees, the most common issue is when temperatures drop into the single digits and that affects the air brakes. Air does not flow easily in sub-zero temperatures. Most trains that are put together today are aired in the yard prior to departing. Locomotives are usually run in the 3rd or 4th notch on the control console to keep the diesel engine from freezing up, and alcohol is sometimes added to the diesel fuel to keep it from jelling up,just a little insight to your beginning comment.
Excellent points. Everything slows down on the railroad when it gets cold. For our non-RR readers, if you’ve never had the ‘pleasure’ of hand throwing switches in January-March, you might not understand what Fed Up and I are referring to.
I was referring to the cash spent on nine gas heaters for an indoor warehouse full of railcar and locomotive parts. Does a combo (motor and wheelset) or a pallet of power assemblies (pistons and cylinders) really need tepid temperatures?
It was trying to get into the weeds regarding the ludicrous spending on this warehouse.
Ya I missed your point, but it’s great to comment with a former/current Railroader, and yes switches can be a you know what at that time of year.
If you couldn’t navigate the purchase and subsequent manangement of this warehouse because it was your first time purchasing property you have no business running this agency.
Metra, CTA and RTA are all operating with unsustainable budgets. They haven’t been forced to address this fact due to Inflation Joe and the Progressives pumping $4.3 trillion into the US economy. It’s all over for these three money wasting entities. Time to face the music.
Brown demanded, “This board needs to know how did we get into this fiasco, this cluster.”
In the words of a line from Animal House: “You f-ed up, you trusted us.”
The report also stated it could not identify which Metra staffer initially brought the Harvey warehouse property sale option to the Executive Leadership Team prior to its board approval. – Was that a serious report or a whitewash. Nobody can pin down the origins of a $7M purchase. Sounds like this needs to be looked into to see if there’s anything illegal that went on.
That smells of bull-schite. Not buying that one. These political animals know precisely whose bright idea this was.
They were facing massive layoffs and saw purchasing the warehouse as a way to repurpose employees to work on refurbishing the warehouse? He offers this as if avoiding public union layoffs is of course a valid justification for wasting millions of taxpayer dollars. Unbelievable.
My thoughts exactly. We don’t want to lay people off, so we’ll waste taxpayer money. And he says it as if it was a logical thing to do! This type of thinking is the root of government malfeasance and needs to be stopped.