Civic Federation offers revenue, cost-cutting options to confront Chicago’s financial challenges – Chicago Sun-Times

The federation’s 65-page report includes many of the same ideas the watchdog group, the inspector general’s office and others have long championed, to no avail. Still, Acting Civic Federation President Sarah Wetmore argued it’s important to get controversial ideas “out into the bloodstream” as Chicago grapples with “five major fiscal challenges”: an “enormous,” $33 billion pension shortfall; a rate of violent crimes markedly higher than other major cities; a “chronically-high liability burden;" a continued structural deficit; and the end of an avalanche of federal pandemic relief funds.