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.
Yet the school district’s budget increased year after year. The superintendent salary is now over $195K and in 2015 was $169K and plus 9.89% for pension contribution. No cuts of furloughs that I am aware of while property tax’s there are astronomical.