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.
If I’m not mistaken the Willis Tower is in a TIF with $400M or so as the tif base. The rest is going somewhere else like a slush fund. Does anyone know if my numbers are close?