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Summary and audio linked here.
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.
Expect no retraction or apology. This what they do.
The state’s existing buyout program for its own pensions is the precedent for Chicago, which should be a warning: Look out for similar exaggerated claims and shoddy analysis.
Full interview and summary linked here.
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Just another opportunity to create another entity with the power to levy a tax. What is one more when our state leads the nation in levels of government already.
“We need a central agency that is going to address safety, reliability, accessibility for the entire region, and that is what is lacking right now,” Villivalam said. “And before we take any vote on funding, we need to see from the agencies what service improvements and expansions will occur, and how will they be implemented, and how can we hold them accountable for all of that.” The paid and pensioned directors of the RTA/Metra/PaceCTA are all political animals with mostly transit or transportation experience. These political animals need to be held accountable for creating the mess they casually refer to… Read more »
If you keep posting incompetent people in these jobs it will not matter what management structure you use. There is no patch for stupid.
This sounds like it would be a great idea except I see another useless agency with a bunch of political hires. If they could get rid of three agencies and 2/3 of the employees and replace it with one that would be an improvement.
Combining three agencies into one should benefit the IL taxpayer through employee headcount reductions. The consolidation should result in a 33-67 percent reduction in the number of overpaid paper shufflers and part-time employees holding full-time jobs. It should, except this is IL, where reducing taxpayer burden never seems to be a priority.
Translation: We’ve run out of free Fed Covid bucks and need political cover to get through this garbage dump we created.
Just another way to fund CTA. Should not be allowed