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.
I have to respond humorously. Alton had to sell its water monopoly to a private company to fund its pensions. has anything changed? Ask any riverbend individual about it all and they will look to the sky with rose colored glasses telling you how great things are.
That’s how life is in Alton and will not change till the final hammer drops. Until that happens people like me are branded naysayers and life goes on.