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Consumers may foot the bill for concessions City Hall may squeeze out of utilities with its newfound muscle. Asked about what she'd like to see in the negotiations, Lightfoot recently said she supports an end to shut-offs for those delinquent on their electric bills. She said the same for Peoples Gas and its rising heating bills as well. Both utilities pass along to paying customers the cost of customer debt they write off.
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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This article is full of all kinds of gems. For those that can’t access it, the basics are what you think (my editorializing): 1. The city wants to clandestinely socialize the cost of utility bills by ending all disconnections and ‘extracting’ further concessions from the utilities. 2. However, any bad debt is paid by…yes the people who actually pay the bills, not the utilities. 3. This, some sages worry, will lead to further bad debt, as people realize there are no consequences to not paying for their utilities. 4. The utilities are “a-ok” with it all, because they are just… Read more »
And the progressives point to the Chicago Water Dept. as an example of government controlled utilities. We live next to the largest deposit of freshwater in the world yet our water rates are exorbitantly high, and continue to increase, and the infrastructure to deliver it is crumbing. The water dept. is subsidized, in part, by Chicago selling its water to suburbs for exorbitantly high rates, to gloss over the expense of its corruption and incompetence. Unfortunately for the neo-socialists in the Chicago City Council, Chicago does not and cannot sell it’s electricity to neighboring towns to cover over its losses.… Read more »
If one cannot read the story without subscribing, it shouldn’t be posted on Wirepoints a free site.
check the reader mode button in the address bar of your browser, or, quickly reload and stop the reload after the article shows up but before the paywall appears.
KM, we wrestle with that, but most sites like Crain’s do allow a certain number of free pageviews per month. So, we link to them when they are particularly good or when the topic is not covered somewhere else.
I respectfully disagree.
I subscribe to Crain’s, and since they don’t allow comments any longer, I like to see what Wirepoints readers have to say.