-- Connecting the dots between our economy, government and business --
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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We need to extend the Red Line to Hammond and Calumet City. That kind of foreword thinking will solve all of our fiscal woes.
You’re asking the whole state to pay for Chicago’s transit woes. Now you see why 33 counties want to be called Hoosiers
I can’t find a recent audit of the CTA on the Auditor General’s website. The last one was 2005, and it was very short and barely much written.
(There were other more recent audits for health fund and pension fund.)
It seems logical to me to keep an eye on an agency like CTA, especially one that handles cash transaction for decades IN CHICAGO, and now electronic payments.
It is probably full of the typical Chicago excess of employees (including ghosts), contracts, poor financial controls.
Why no easily findable audit?
They say they’re broke.
Show me, lol.
“Talks and planning on large budget cuts now will have to begin at CTA, Metra and Pace, and RTA hearings as required by federal law,” RTA Chair Kirk Dillard said Sunday.
Begin? Bullschite. Either that or their threatened service cuts were bullschite. How would they be able to enumerate the threatened service cuts without discussing them in advance?
The assumption all along was that the Autopen’s RTA budget bloating Coof revenue would be extorted from Illinois taxpayers. That extortion could still happen. Alas.
The executive director class, an inbreed apart