When Last We Checked In On “One Man’s Legislature”

The Illinois House did not pass public employee pension reform last night:

SPRINGFIELD— — State lawmakers spent the final day of the spring session failing to act on the crucial issue of pension reform, instead approving a major gambling expansion that wasn’t at the top of the agenda.

The turn of events dealt a significant blow to Gov. Pat Quinn, who had pleaded with the General Assembly to focus on issues that were necessary and to skip distracting sideshows.

The Democratic governor had pushed hard to rein in government worker retirement costs that threaten the state’s finances, but his efforts to come up with Democratic support for pension reform fell flat when he asked that the bill not be called for a vote.

The Illinois legislators want to

1. Go home and campaign for re-election.
2. Stock up on contributions from the public employees’ unions.
3. Wait until the whole thing goes away.
4. Make a responsible analysis of the pending legislation before casting their votes.
5. All of the above.
6. None of the above.
7. a-c but definitely not d.

In related new the Chicago Teachers Union is preparing for a strike vote:

The Chicago Teachers Union says it is planning to conduct a strike vote in coming days.

With contract talks grinding along, the union recently took the first step toward a strike by requesting that a three-member panel review proposals for both sides.

Last week, 5,000 teachers rallied in and around the Auditorium Theatre, shouting “fight” and “strike” and booing every mention of Mayor Rahm Emanuel before taking to the streets in a march led by CTU President Karen Lewis and the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

A new state law requires 75 percent of the union’s membership to vote to for a strike.

I’m not sure what they’d be striking against. To the best of my knowledge the negotations are still in mediation—there’s no proposal on the table at this point. Whatever it is, they’re against it! IMO that’s almost the definition of bargaining in bad faith.

For those of you who aren’t Illlnoisans, let me give you some idea of how screwy things are here. The Chicago Public Schools don’t participate in the Illinois Teachers Retirement System—CPS has its own system. Chicago taxpayers do, however, contribute to the TRS in the form of the state’s “contribution” to the fund which comes from general revenues which in turn come from sales taxes, personal income taxes, and corporate income taxes.

All property taxes go directly to the various governing bodies in the areas in which the properties being taxed are located. In Illinois school districts, park districts, sanitation districts, and a variety of other government service providers have the ability to raise property taxes without a by-your-leave from the state legislature, county board, city council or other representative body. The state legislature, however, is empowered to limit the frequency and size of rate increases. Illinois has a vast number of independently taxing entities—6,075 as of 2000.

Generally speaking, property is reassessed in Illinois every four years except in Cook County where it is reassessed every three years. The default assessment value is a third of the fair cash value of the property but many areas of the state have their own formulas for determining the assessment. Just as a general guideline when making any statement about government or taxes in Illinois the sentence should be started with the words “in counties other than Cook”.

There is also something whacky called “the multiplier” or equalization factor that is allegedly used to provide greater uniformity among tax assessments of properties. Equalization is done within counties and between counties. County assessment officers have pay incentives to apply equalization. Equalization does not take place within Cook County but does take place between Cook County and other Illinois counties.

Cook County applies wrinkles of its own to all of this. Commercial is assessed at a significantly higher value relative to its fair cash value than residential property (there are actually 14 different property classifications, each assessed at different rates).

The reason that I’m going into so much detail on the subject of property taxes is that folks who live outside of Cook County and the collar counties often deeply resent Cook County, believing that their tax dollars go to subsidize the layabouts, welfare recipients, and overpaid public employees in Cook County and Chicago. Taxpayers in Chicago (like me) believe almost exactly the opposite—that Chicago pays its fair share and then some and that once you’ve taken the collar counties into account northeastern Illinois is, in effect, support the remainder of the state.

There’s actually some truth in both viewpoints and the subject is so complicated, probably deliberately so, I don’t know that anyone really knows the truth of the matter.