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.
Center Square posted this a couple of days ago, regarding a report that the State Auditor General released in June. It’s sort of interesting. Some of them actually completed their work but for some reason are still listed. The “Property Tax Relief Task Force” released a “draft final” report which (if I understand how wirepoints’ site works now) is posted here. It contains no surprises, but notes that ” The state has created property tax study commissions in the recent and not-so-recent past, including in 1982, 1996, 1998, and 2009. None of them solved the problem. A new study is to… Read more »