CN May 1, 2014

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Ken

 

Did you watch Chicagoland on CNN, which just concluded its eighth and final episode last week?  Well, if the ratings are to be believed, not too many people did. But the panel of journalists and bloggers we assembled this week certainly did watch it, and they had plenty to say.

Bill Rutthart wrote an important story in this week’s Tribune derived from more than 700 emails he obtained through an open records request. The emails seem to demonstrate a high level of coordination between the series’ producers and the Mayor’s staff.

“When they’re asking for these things, they’re saying things like – want to present the Mayor as the star that he really is – and – we think the school closings is a great opportunity to display his leadership,” Rutthart explains. “So certainly when you read the emails there seems to be a clear intent to make the Mayor look good.”

This wasn’t particularly surprising to our panel.

“When he agreed to do this,” says WBEZ’s Richard Steele, “Does anybody sitting here think that Rahm Emanuel would give them access like that without knowing the outcome at the end of the day?  This is a guy who’s as politically astute as anybody you can think of. And he’s not gonna take a chance on some image thing that’s gonna come out not in his favor”.

“It pulled the curtain back about how much of media is manipulative,” adds the Tribune’s Rick Kogan, who wrote reviews for all eight episodes. “This is Hollywood, oh, we love you. You’re the hero of the show.”

But teacher and author of the White Rhino blog Ray Salazar,  was concerned about the story it told of Chicago’s demographics.

“They took on a superficial look at our neighborhoods. If people living outside of Chicago watched this show they would think that our city is made up of a white neighborhood, and a black neighborhood, and there’s some Latinos kind of in the middle, who apparently have a pretty good life in Little Village.”

“Any native Chicagoan knew that something was just not right with the show from the beginning,” Salazar continues. “I remember the first time I saw the posters, they started putting up the posters and you saw the three heads, McCarthy and (Fenger principal) Liz Dozier and Emanuel, and they looked like some type of superheroes, and you thought, OK, something is not going to be natural about this.”

Kogan says the time the producers spent following the three “heroes” robbed time from other stories. They might have visited some other school or some other interesting place, he says. But “They glommed onto those story lines and they stuck with them, and frankly, I’d had enough of them by about the fifth episode.”

When Ruthhart asked the Mayor later in the week for a comment, Emanuel told him he hadn’t watched the show.

“I find that either disingenuous or ridiculous,” says Kogan. “If he didn’t see the show, I would ask, where is your sense of curiosity? This crew was here, this is a national show. Focusing on the town of which you are the Mayor? And you didn’t find the time to see the show (or be debriefed by your people?) I think he did it so he didn’t have to address anything.”

Will the series have legs? Will it have impact in ten or twenty years? Probably not, the panel agrees. But it may not have been a good PR vehicle for the Mayor.  “I don’t know what someone in Omaha is thinking, but it shows a guy who doesn’t have a clue about what Chicago is,” says Kogan. “It shows him, peeking in the classroom door and laughing with the children.”

Is “Chicagoland” journalism?  Well, it might be, but it’s a newer kind of “journalism”, according to Salazar. “When I explain it to young people we have to think about it in old-school terms, here’s both sides, let the reader make up his or her mind,” he explains. “We have editorials, and now we have this mesh of, it can be a little bit of everything. It can be editorial, it can be both sides, it can be a little bid made-up, apparently. So I think Chicagoland is a representation of what 21st century journalism can be, and it shows us why we need to be careful about the information we get in this century.”

But Ruthhart is clear. “To me it’s not journalism. When you’re writing emails o the major subject of your show and you’re telling them how great you’re gonna make them look, and we need you here at this time and we need you to do this and that, that’s not journalism. Flat out.”

 

 

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CN April 24, 2014

Posted on April 24, 2014 by Ken

 

 

If you’ve ever felt confused about how we all got into this pension mess and how the fixes will affect you, this show might help you understand it.  Spoiler alert: you’ll pay more if you’re a taxpayer and you’ll get less money in your pension check if you are, or plan at some time to become, a retiree.

“This is one of those little public charades that’s been going on for decades”, says Crain’s Chicago Business columnist Greg Hinz. “We’ve known for a very long time that we, the state the city, the county, the CTA, the Board of Education, have not been putting enough money into retirement systems to pay the promised benefits.”

Hinz tells the story of how,  in the early 2000s, there was about 75 cents available for every dollar needed. But benefits kept rising, the stock market crash took away value, no additional money was invested, and suddenly the crisis is real. Today, there are pension plans before the Legislature and the City Council, but the question remains about their constitutionality until the Illinois Supreme Court weighs in. Only then will the rules be clear about whether pension benefits can be cut.

“That’s the threshold question,” says Hinz. “Can you reduce benefits as part of the bigger package. If you can’t, then you’re back to square one, and we the taxpayers are gonna take it.”

“The Mayor’s plan, that he says is the fair plan, is going to raise property taxes, a vote that the City Council will have to take – and they just can’t wait to take that vote,” explains Tribune City Hall reporter John Byrne. “And at the same time he’ll be cutting benefits for the laborers and municipal pension funds, freezing COLAs and things like that down the road. This is just clearly a drop in the bucket compared to the stuff he’s still facing with fire and police pensions and the teachers’ union.”

Mark Brown, Sun-Times columnist, says the Constitutional amendment supposedly guaranteeing pension benefits was really important to union leaders.

“For one, they always thought that this constitutional guarantee was their backstop,” Brown explains. “So…if they let it slide, well, in the end they’ll have to make us whole. There are actual situations where the unions said, OK, skip the pension payments. Or we’ll go along with, – Daley put in this reduced formula for paying in. They didn’t stop paying, they changed the law. It’s all very legal. They changed the law so they didn’t have to pay in as much every year under the fiction that that would be enough. Well, it wasn’t enough.”

“The unions didn’t start talking about it because in part, they wanted the money for raises,” Hinz claims. “Some money that could have gone to pensions went to raises. And now the due bill’s being presented at a time when everybody in the private sector has, for the most part, waved bye-bye to their pensions. So the question is – how long can the public sector hang on to a pension, and if they can hang on, how bad is the deal gonna be?”

And, says Hinz, the unions didn’t fight the “pension holidays” and contribution reductions aggressively. “All this was in public.” he says. “Everybody knew about it. Do you remember outraged press conferences by union leaders in the early 2000s demanding that the situation be reversed and that the money go here? No. The unions kind of tacitly winked at it.”

“There’s gonna have to be some sort of new revenue, clearly, and the Mayor is putting all his eggs in the property tax basket,” he continues. “He is saying an income tax is a no-go as far as he’s concerned, and of course Governor Quinn is saying the property tax is a no-go.”

Then, of course, there’s the role our former Mayor played in creating this mess.

“Daley set a time-bomb trap for (Emanuel),” Brown asserts. “He set hundreds of them actually. But he set this one that you’ve gotta take care of the police, fire and  teachers’ pensions before the end of this year or get the Legislature to let you put it off. And he tried that last year and the Legislature said, no way, man.”

So if there’s to be additional revenue, it likely has to come from property taxes. Proposals for garbage collection fees, income taxes, transaction fees and the like have all met with fierce opposition. Even a proposal to close many of Chicago’s TIF funds really wouldn’t have much long-term effect, according to Byrne.

“The TIF, because of the way it’s got to be distributed after you pull stuff out of it, it’s almost like a one-time thing, because it will go to schools, it’s gonna go to other things, and it’s gonna get sucked up pretty quickly.”

Even a casino, the panel agrees, won’t bring in a significant amount of money, since consumers have many casinos to visit today, and under the present proposal Chicago would split any profits 50-50 with the State.

So it’s back to property taxes.

“We in Chicago, whether we want to admit it or not, pay relatively low property taxes,” says Hinz, a sentiment that’s echoed by Brown, who lives outside the City and pays far higher taxes.

The takeaways? Greg Hinz says that you can count on your property taxes to go up if you live in Chicago. Citing Loius XIV, he explains that “The art of taxation is to pluck the goose that squawketh the least.”

And finally: “Nobody here is a saint. Everybody here is wearing grey.”

On other topics, can Toni Preckwinkle beat Rahm Emanuel? Yes, all the panelists say.

“She could,” says Byrne. “There’s a lot of dissatisfaction with the Mayor. The African American community in particular is deeply dissatisfied with the Mayor. And there are lakefront liberals who are also unhappy with the Mayor who Preckwinkle would certainly appeal to…I think if things broke the right way she could beat him. She certainly has a better opportunity than anybody see I could come up with.”

However, Hinz cautions, “She’d have to depend on the African American Community as her base and there simply isn’t the black vote in this city that there was in Harold Washington’s days.”

Should Illinois, which often describes itself as “broke”, pony up $100 million for an Obama Presidential Library? “No”, say all three panelists.  But politics is a contact sport, and Byrne says taking the vote without Republicans present may have seemed like a foolish move on the part of Democratic leaders, “Unless the Speaker wants the Republicans to now come out and shoot this down to anger African Americans.”

 

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CN April 17, 2014

Posted on April 17, 2014 by Ken

 

The Sun-Times made some news this week as it announced that it was, for the time being, shutting off its comment boards. Editor Craig Newman said that the boards at his own newspaper  “too often turn into a morass of negativity, racism, hate speech and general trollish behaviors that detract from the content.” Community Media Workshop’s Thom Clark agrees with Newman. There are, he says, “a lot of comments about that socialist, Muslim Kenyan thrown in for good measure even if the story had nothing to do with the President.”

Clark points out that the Sun-Times is struggling without many resources and, as he sees it, “the problem is they don’t have someone to moderate the discussion. And because it’s so off-the-wall, they’ve decided to take the discussion down.”

NPR’s Cheryl Corley dismisses the public criticism that the Sun-Times is stifling free speech. “There’s nothing that says that the Sun-Times, which is a private enterprise, has to have this forum for people to say whatever they want to say. So the argument about free speech is like, well, it’s not a public entity.”

But BGA investigative journalist Andrew Schroedter says comments also serve an important journalistic purpose. “I think as a journalist, it can be very difficult sometimes to gauge how much of an impact your story may have. And often I’ll find myself referring to the comment board. It’s interesting to see how people react. It can be very rewarding – it can be very humbling. But nonetheless, I think it’s important.”

Schroedter also takes us through the report he wrote in a BGA/Sun-Times collaboration about the surprising bottom-line cost of police officers breaking the law. “What we found is that over the last decade police misconduct has cost over a half-billion dollars,” he explains.

“For a cash-strapped city, what could you do with that money? We came up with 30 libraries, 5 new high schools, 500 miles of roads, this kind of thing.”

It’s entirely reasonable to expect that policing will raise charges of misconduct, and that some charges will be sustained. But the last decade has been far out of proportion with what should be expected, Schroedter says.

“New York, their spending on these cases outdistances Chicago, But basically they have three times the police force and three times the population,” he tells us. Los Angeles has a similar-sized police force. And their spending in the most recent year was a fraction of ours. Twenty million as opposed to eighty-some million dollars we had last year.”

What makes the situation more serious is that there are still about 5oo cases in the pipeline, so this won’t end quickly. Many of these are “legacy cases and they’ve been slowly snaking their way through the system,” he says.

Mayor Emanuel has made the disposal of these cases, some many years old, a priority.  So that accounts for some of the expenditure. But this is still far more money than was expected, according to Schroedter.

“What a lot of the experts told us was that it seemed to be this small core of (officers) -names that keep popping up,” he explains. “They call them repeat abusers, and they think the City needs to do a better job of rooting those guys out and identifying these problems.”

If your house gets ripped off its foundation by a tornado or inundated in a flood, there are two ways that FEMA can help, according to Corley. There’s an individual payment for your specific losses that aren’t covered by other means, but there’s also a general payment to the community for all of its expenses, such as trash pickup, damage to municipal equipment and facilities, etc. When the devastating tornadoes hit Washington, Illinois and the region last fall, three people died and a thousand houses were destroyed. most residents got individual payments, but the community got pretty much nothing.

“One of the biggest factors is this formula that FEMA uses that says you have to meet a threshold of damage costs. It’s based on your population, and it’s based on what they think a state can handle,” she explains. “And the rate they’ve fixed is $1.39 a resident for cleanup. “So then you take the population and you multiply it. Illinois has nearly 13 million people. Multiply it by a buck thirty-nine, and you get a threshold of 17.8 million dollars. So if the collective damage doesn’t reach that, then more than likely, you’re not gonna get assistance from FEMA.”  Illinois’ problem, she explains, is that the vast majority of its population is in the Chicago area, so that urban population skews the figure for downstate. “Now if you lived in Nebraska, with the same amount of damage, the threshold is much lower because there are fewer people.”

In her NPR report, Cheryl points out that Sens. Durbin and Kirk have introduced legislation to address the “disparity”.

Crain’s reported this week that hyper-local news sites, such as AOL’s Patch and DNAInfo with its Chicago branch, are losing lots and lots of money. And that nobody has really figured out how to monetize this type of local news.

Thom Clark says that after all the handwringing over funding local news, “The new news model seems to be find a guy who made millions somewhere else and let him invest his money into a news operation.”

It’s a reference to the ownership of DNAInfo, which is owned by the wealthy Ricketts family, and while their finances may be wobbly, there was general agreement around the table that the company is producing an excellent product.

“Patch is a shadow of its former self,” he continues. “That was AOL throwing a whole bunch of money in.  They probably lost, or burned through, over a hundred million dollars trying to make that thing happen.”

It was an interesting idea, he says. Each community has its own editor, equipped with a laptop and a digital camera, but it probably wasn’t sustainable.

“It was a gruesome pace, for a single editor to file three stories a day, at least one of which had to be video. There just aren’t that many school board meetings in Burr Ridge.”

 

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CN April 10, 2014

Posted on April 11, 2014 by Ken

 

Those giant piles of black refinery ash, commonly know as petroleum coke or “pet-coke” that have been plaguing residents of Chicago’s southeast side apparently won’t be going away. At least not for a while.  But it didn’t seem that way a few weeks ago.

“Everybody was jumping over themselves,” says Tribune environment writer Michael Hawthorne. “Mayor Emanuel, Attorney General Madigan, congressmen, Senator Durbin, everybody was upset about these giant, dusty, black piles. So the Mayor talked very tough, organized some television interviews…and he talked very tough about how he was going to drive these companies out of the City of Chicago. He was very clear about what he wanted to do.”

So he introduced ordinances to enclose the piles. and he said the City was going to zone them, to make sure they don’t expand. And he made it clear the City wouldn’t allow any new ones.

But Hawthorne gives us an update. “Then the City Council has a zoning committee meeting last week, and they present this little handy piece of paper called a substitute ordinance.”

Substitute ordinances, especially ones nobody in the community knew were coming, usually aren’t introduced to make community protection stronger. This one was introduced by John Pope, the area’s Alderman. Again, Michael Hawthorne.

“Alderman Pope getting up and talking about this is the toughest pet-coke regulation in the country. Then you hear the fine print – oh, by the way, if you burn it in the City of Chicago, you can keep storing it in the City of Chicago. So essentially a giant loophole that you can drive one of these barges through, full of pet-coke.”

Community representatives were of course unhappy, and as of this week “Alderman Pope was forced to pull back, and they’re going to discuss this again later this month.”

But why this unexpected substitute? Did the Alderman decide at the last minute that pollution in his ward wasn’t such a bad thing?

“This is not the Alderman,” explains Hawthorne. “This is the Mayor’s office. They acknowledge that. This is the City. This is their substitute ordinance, they did this.  And it’s like anything else in the city. Nothing happens unless the Mayor wants it to happen, right?”

“What we’re seeing here,” he adds, “is the reality of the old part of the neighborhood. Steel was made, chemicals were made in that part of the city for a long time, and a lot of that went away. There’s been talk of transformation, but some people would rather keep the old ways.”

Complicating matters, says Henry Henderson, Midwest Director for NRDC (and founding commissioner of the City’s Department of Environment) is the fact that the State of Illinois had already issued a permit for the site that allowed storage of eleven million tons of pet-coke.

“It’s what one comes to expect in terms of what goes on on the southeast side – that this is an area that can be dumped on,” he says. “This is an area where the community can be ignored. And frankly it’s time for that to stop.”

So, as of today, this is the status. The pet-coke is coming from the BP Whiting refinery just across the border. At this point, that refinery is almost exclusively processing the heavy, gooey “tar sand oil” from Alberta. It’s what Henderson calls “the dirtiest fuel on earth”. The by-product of this intensive refining is the aforementioned petroleum coke. There’s no City ordinance to control the storage or movement of this product. And BP has just completed an upgrade that will allow the refinery to generate two million tons of petroleum coke every year.

Some have speculated that the reason the City is pulling back is that there are industries that want to burn this material here in Chicago. And journalist/author Kari Leydersen asks whether Mayor Emanuel might be favoring industries that say they’ll create jobs.

“Is it that the Mayor doesn’t want to do something that’s seen as anti-business in general?” she asks, explaining that two  operations may want to burn the stuff on the Southeast side. One is Ozinga, a concrete company that wants to build a processing plant, and the other is a facility that would burn pet-coke and coal to create a kind of artificial natural gas. “It’s my understanding that neither Ozinga or the coal gasification plant would do that much for the city in terms of jobs and taxes,” she  says. But it seems confounding. What really is the deeper motivation for the City pressing for this?”

Henderson, who has a long history of involvement with the southeast side, compares this battle with a decades-long fight over landfills in the area. “In 1990, the laws of Chicago were so lax, that it sucked waste activity into the city to the burden of communities…you have exactly the same thing happening today with the fossil-fuel industry here,” he explains.

Getting the Canadian tar-sand oil to American refineries requires delivery infrastructure, and the Keystone XL pipeline is considered vital to the process. Henderson doesn’t want it.

“It’s a pollution delivery system to the Great Lakes,” he tells us. “This is the sort of thing the President should be looking at when he’s thinking about this pipeline. Is this in the national interest?…This is the community where he began his public career. The people he sat across the table from. You can see the impact of this dirty fossil fuel coming here. The dirtiest fuel on earth – Canadian tar sands – creating a further dirty waste stream fetching up in peoples’ backyards and making it impossible to live where they want to live.”

And Leydersen adds that, no matter what, the pet-coke being created at Whiting will eventually find its way into the atmosphere. “Say this ordinance didn’t pass, but they still kept storing the pet-coke here. A lot of it’s being shipped to China and then being burned in China, so the carbon dioxide’s gonna come out somewhere regardless.”

Henderson ends the discussion on an upbeat note.

“We have the opportunity to invest in alternatives. The investment creates jobs. One of the largest, growing parts of the U.S. economy is clean energy. We need to stay focused on that rather than being amazed by the blank stare of the fossil fuel industry.”

UPDATE: We received the following comment from David Wisniewski, taking issue with this week’s discussion.

The round table discussion appeared to be nothing more than a platform for Mr. Henderson and the two other guests to “cherry pick” only the facts that greatly supported their position. I thought many chances were missed to ask some questions about the positions that Mr. Henderson holds. There are still a lot of industrial jobs in the area. The city had the comments from those businesses that employee people in the area and throughout the state on their website. Not once was Mr. Henderson asked about the severe impact such harsh regulations would have on those businesses or the current workers.

The discussion also talked about a subsidized fossil fuel industry or as Mr. Henderson put it a tax for a gasification plant. The green industry is even more heavily subsidized. There was a $90 billion dollar clean energy stimulus in 2009. While the amount of wind and solar has doubled in the last few years renewable energy jobs have not. Renewables are capital project and do not require much labor. Put up a windmill or some solar panels and for the next 25 years they will produce some energy for us. Outside of some occasional maintenance once they are up and running they are labor free.

Please view the link below. A solar plant was built on the southeast side in West Pullman. No break in energy rates for the residents. The local Alderman was not at all excited about the project because it created very few jobs, one full time to be exact and six other jobs for security, landscaping, and general maintenance. Oh and the utility company was banking a $50 million dollar stimulus loan guarantee from the department of energy.

http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=151773#.Uv_sZ3Px1dk.facebook

I certainly hope my comments will be looked further into. Maybe you could do a show to point out our reliance on industrial industry and how important they are. It seems like environmentalists refuse to accept any balance with industry and are intent on playing the zero sum game. The media appears to only cover their side of the story and there sure seems to be some intellectual dishonesty from them.

Thanks again for taking my comments.

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CN April 3, 2014

Posted on April 3, 2014 by Ken

 

Remember when something called “the Internet” began ripping the newspaper business model to shreds?

Well, there’s reason to believe that mobile platforms, and their associated smart-devices, are about to give broadcast radio its turn in the buzz saw.

In-dash broadband receivers are bringing multimedia into more and more cars. The devices in our pockets are getting faster and smarter. And a new breed of broadcasters is quickly gearing up to provide a different kind of “radio” – one that’s programmable, customizable, localizable and almost completely at the control of the listener.

That kind of listener-driven service has been around for a while in the music world, with services such as Pandora, but now the news-folk are getting into the act.

“The Internet jumped very quickly in bandwidth in the early 2000’s”, Rivet News Radio‘s Charlie Meyerson explains. “From text and photos to being able to accommodate video. And simple audio got a pass because video was the new shiny thing. We’re kinda backtracking now, and media entities large and small are saying – oh, we missed something.”

That helps explain how he and others came to start Rivet, which is a mobile-platform-based audio service that streams, Pandroa-style, to your tablet or smart-phone. It sounds just like radio, but it’s actually hundreds of smaller stories and audio clips, stitched together in real time in an order and priority that you request. So if you want heavy business news or sports, you can get it. And because your phone knows where you are, so does Rivet, and it tailors things like traffic reports just to your location.

Jon Hansen is the newly-appointed News Director at the just-initiated DNAInfoRadio, the companion to DNAInfoChicago. Like Rivet, it’s a 24-hour service, but its focus is very local. And, as with this new breed of audio services, it’s customizable.  “We have 30 reporters out in the streets, in the neighborhoods, telling all the local stories…and they thought, let’s continue to find ways to get our stories out there. So I am the  broadcast filter,” he tells us.

You’ll simply have to watch (at about 9 minutes in) to hear Jon tell how he got that video scoop in the Dearborn subway as a man jumped on the tracks to stop an oncoming el train and save a woman’s life. It’s a great “new media” story.

WBEZ, like many radio companies, has been working hard to find a new digital path, and their Director of Digital Content, Tim Akimoff, tells us that a major thrust for them is specialty podcasts.

“I came to WBEZ because they’re renowned storytellers.” he says. “And right away I discovered that there was no place for making everything text-based. If we were going to play in a digital space we were going to have to play to our strength, which is audio.” So they’ve developed a suite of podcasts about food, beer, music and one that meets popular and nerd culture.  And unlike podcasts of a few years ago, the faster phones and 4-G broadband make them very convenient to listen to on-demand, so they’re gathering sizable audiences.

But Hansen asks an important question. “Where does radio journalism go from here in terms of who’s a journalist?”

Meyerson answers right away:  “This is the promise of the first amendment delivered. The First Amendment doesn’t say journalists have freedom of the press. It says everybody has freedom of the press. And there are some people, some journalists, some professionals, who believe this is a bad thing. I think it’s a great thing that everybody who chooses to be, can be a journalist. ”

But, as we often ask, in this utopian digital future, where is the news shop that hires and nurtures a team of investigators to dog one or two stories for weeks at a time? Who unearths the next Hired Truck scandal, pet coke travesty or Koschman case? Well, says Meyerson, despite the doom and gloom, it’s still happening because the audience wants it.

“A friend emailed me and said – I have someone who’s looking for an investigative freelance reporter, do you know anybody? And I thought long and hard, and it occurs to me that all the investigative reporters I know are still employed.” (If you’re one who’s not still employed, maybe you should give Charlie a jingle).

Despite the the discussion about a potentially rocky future for classic radio stations, all three panelists strenuously agreed that the future for audio as a communication medium is strong, and maybe getting stronger.

“Everybody’s got headphones in,” asserts Akimoff. “I can’t talk to my kids any more. I have to actually text them when they’re doing the dishes, because they’ve got the headphones in, listening to music, listening to podcasts…”

There’s much more, and if you’re in the journalism field, you’ll probably be fascinated by this discussion. And you may learn something about Tim Akimoff. He confesses that he likes to listen to traffic reports just to know that other people are suffering, too.

 

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CN March 27, 2014

Posted on March 28, 2014 by Ken

 

After all this week’s punditry about the primary election, activist/musician/attorney Matt Farmer may have summed it up most succinctly:

“Ultimately we will find it to be a peaceful and seamless transition from Mike Madigan’s old supermajority to Mike Madigan’s new supermajority.”

As we know, Governor Quinn called for making permanent the so-called temporary income tax increase. So it’s technically not an increase, it’s a continuation.  But the Reader’s Ben Joravsky says it will be played by Quinn’s opponents as an increase, and proposing it right before an election took some courage.

“If you view it as an act that is potentially self destructive, it is courageous, if you think of that as courage – doing something that is not in your best interest but is in the best interest of the State.”

But, asks Farmer, if Quinn felt it was critical to make the tax permanent, what were his alternatives?

“It’s to let it die and do what Mayor Daley did – (bring it back) after he’s successfully re-elected.”

“So what does he say in  his budget address?” Farmer asks.

“You get the same speech writers Mayor Daley got. This is how we do it in Chicago. Just steal Mayor Rahm’s stuff, OK? I’ve balanced the budget. I’ve saved the schools. The trains are running beautifully. I the star in a TV show…that’s why I said, I’m so used to people lying, distorting, manipulating, that’s our budget process. So I’m surprised that somebody would be vaguely honest.”

The Reader’s Mick Dumke has a quasi-prediction.

“I still think the Governor is gonna be tough to beat,” he says. “He is the incumbent, there’s enough questions about Bruce Rauner, and I think it’s a bad time to be running as a billionaire for office, especially when your whole campaign is funded essentially by yourself and your other very, very wealthy friends.”

Farmer points out that, whether the voters opt for Quinn or Rauner’s message of cutting taxes and growing the economy, the electorate wants it both ways. “60% or so are against the continuation of this tax increase. But the flip side, though, when the question is asked about having their services cut it’s the same relative majority.”

The Tribune ran an editorial essentially congratulating CPS for the smoothness of the Safe Passage program and for what CPS claims is a modest increase in attendance and reading/math scores for students who were moved from their closed schools. But Matt Farmer isn’t buying it.

“In fact,” he says, ” Sarah Karp over at Catalyst had a piece this morning talking about the lack of meat on that bone in terms of performance data. And when Ms. Byrd-Bennett made that presentation yesterday on those claims to the Board, the Board didn’t ask any questions to drill down and find out what these numbers were, they just congratulated her. Sarah looked at some of these numbers and said, at best, these are incremental changes that, given the short time-frame, you really wonder what they tell us.”

And we began our conversation with the potential unionization of the Northwestern football team. Farmer asks, now that they (almost) have a union, how much money they’ll be giving to the Governor’s race.

But Dumke has his doubts. “I personally am skeptical that we’ll ever see unionization at Northwestern or any other school, but I think the fact that we’re talking about players’ rights and the governance of the NCAA, which is kind of a messed-up operation, That’s significant, and as a fan, I’m encouraged by it. It’s a conversation that’s overdue.”

Will this mean that, henceforth, the players will be defined as Northwestern employees? “Yea,” scoffs Joravsky. “They’re just bad employees. C’mon, one in seven? Couldn’t get that first down against Ohio State?”

And for the record, Ben sidesteps a response to the rumor we’ve started that he might be moving to the press office at Chicago Public Schools. “The only thing that matters is the Children. CPS works tirelessly to make this the best educational opportunity in the Nation,” he responded. No, actually, he didn’t say that.

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CN March 20, 2014

Posted on March 21, 2014 by Ken

Taxes in Illinois aren’t high enough. At least for the wealthiest Illinoisans. That’s the message from Ralph Martire, Executive Director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability.

The problem, he says, is that our tax structure isn’t “fair”, and hasn’t been for decades. We keep hearing that Illinois is “broke”, but our real problem is that we aren’t raising revenues the way most other states are. He offers so many provocative and thought-provoking ideas about how to get Illinois moving that we really want to encourage you to watch this show. Martire’s thoughts are worth considering before the simplified, bumper-sticker slogans glut every minute of our TV watching. To make it easier, we’ve also included time posts for key points, so you can jump in anywhere.

“The bottom line is: every year, our tax revenue growth, after you adjust for inflation and changes in population, isn’t enough to maintain the same level of services we provided the prior year,” he begins.

And he recruits to his side the “father of capitalism,” Adam Smith: “‘For taxes to be fair in a capitalist economy, you need your taxes to remedy inequality of riches as much as possible by relieving the poor and burdening the rich.’ That’s an exact quote. So I guess he was the first Class Warrior.”

Martire divides modern history into two distinct periods: WW2 to 1979 and 1979 to present. In 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan, America’s tax structure was radically revised in an effort to stimulate a sluggish economy.  (4:55)

“From 1979 through 2011 the wealthiest ten percent in America got 139.8% of all income growth. For the math challenged, all of it is a hundred percent. That would be all. So for more than all of it to go to the top ten percent, that means the bottom 90 percent have to, on average, be earning less today than they did in 1979 after you adjust for inflation. And that’s the truth. Almost 40% less.”

Illinois, as you’ve probably heard, is the most-heavily taxed state in the union. “Yeah, that’s absolutely wrong, and it flies in the face of all the data,” he tells us.

“Illinois has ranked in the bottom six or seven states in the nation in total tax burden as a percentage of income for decades,” he points out.

There was, as we all know, a tax increase in recent years, but it doesn’t seem to have had much effect.

“Even with that tax increase we went up from 46th in total state and local tax burden to I think 37th. We’re still in the bottom 13.” And that’s had a long-term dragging effect on our economy, he asserts. “Illinois’ economic growth has lagged the much-higher-taxed remainder of the midwest, and the much higher-taxed rest of the nation. For decades.”

So do higher taxes mean fewer jobs? “If you look at all the peer-reviewed analyses out there, that look at the correlations between a state’s tax policies and its economic growth, you know what they find? There’s none.” (12:30)

Ralph Martire on taxes and education funding: “Getting back to what states can do to make a difference in growing their economy over time, there’s really only two things that show a strong correlation…investments in education, K-12, and investments in infrastructure. And states that do a really good job with that, irrespective of their tax policy, tend to grow at rates faster than other states.”  (14:30)

“Because the State does such a poor job of funding education from state-based resources, Illinois is the most reliant state in the country on property taxes to fund schools…so what that does, is it ties the quality of public education  a child receives in Illinois to the property wealth of the community in which the child lives.”    (25:00)

And finally, what about the pension crisis? Did it have to happen?

“By law, in 1995 they passed a pension ramp bill if you remember. They grew the State’s unfunded liability from 17 billion dollars in 1995 to $46 billion in 2008. That was the law. That was the design of the law…And then we all know what happened in 2008, we were in the middle of the great recession, a bunch of assets the state did purchase lost their value just like everybody else’s assets lost their value, and overnight we pretty much went from $46 billion underfunded to 92 billion. It has nothing to do with the benefit levels payable to public sector workers like teachers…in fact the weighted average benefit across all five public employee systems in Illinois is about $32,000.” (18:00)

And a final note. Shortly after we taped this program, Mike Madigan announced his support for a Constitutional amendment that would raise taxes on those earning more than a million dollars annually. That’s different from Martire’s argument, which is that the tax structure should be graduated rather than flat. 

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CN March 13, 2014

Posted on March 13, 2014 by Ken

 

Marty Oberman didn’t know much about railroads before Mayor Emanuel asked him to serve on the Metra Board. But he was undaunted. “I’m a professional question asker,” he says, referring to his training as an attorney. “I’ve asked a lot of questions, I’ve learned a lot.”

One of the first things he learned? Metra is a huge, ridiculously complicated operation. Because it runs some of its own trains, but also purchases service from other railroads, and owns very little of the track over which it operates, some of its problems are beyond its control.

“There are 753 Metra trains that run every day. On a typical day there are about 500 freight trains and about 100 Amtrak trains,” he explains. They’re all trying to use the same over-burdened tracks. And despite the fact that his passenger trains are supposed to have priority right of way during rush hour, it just doesn’t always work out that way.  There isn’t one central tower, as in aviation, that coordinates the landings and takeoffs of hundreds of planes.

“The UP is dispatched out of Omaha, the CN is dispatched out of Minneapolis, the BNSF dispatcher is in Dallas, and then we have our own dispatchers for Metra.,” he tells us. “and all these people have to function together so the trains don’t run into each other. No other metropolitan region in the country, including the New York area, has anywhere near this complex of a relationship.”

Further complicating matters are the approximately ten billion dollars Metra needs just to catch up with its deferred maintenance and infrastructure needs. Old rolling stock, sub-standard stations and inadequate track all conspire to delay the trains.

But there’s another problem that Oberman, the political animal and lifelong patronage critic, understands well. It’s the agency’s political legacy.

“Going back many years, Metra, and certainly the CTA (I know that first hand from when I was in the City Council) were very heavily dominated by patronage hiring and political interference,” he says matter-of-factly. “My perception is that when the whole system was created thirty years ago, the Legislature said, OK, the City Democrats, you get the CTA and all their contracts, and the suburban Republicans, you get Metra, and that’s how we’re gonna cut up the pie.”

But in the short few months since Metra’s most recent CEO was fired and half its board resigned, he insists, “That culture has clearly changed at Metra.”

In fact, it’s changed significantly enough that he finds himself largely in agreement with the findings of recent studies that are recommending the dissolution of the RTA.

The RTA, he says, had roles in planning and oversight of the CTA, Metra and Pace, and the planning function is always important.

“There should be some centralized prioritizing of how we’re gonna spend money on mass transit. First of all you don’t want the agencies duplicating themselves.” But there are other existing planning agencies that can take over that function, he tells us.

 Governance, he says, is a different matter.  “The RTA has some oversight function for the operating agencies. But if you put the right people in charge of the operating agencies – I mean the Metra Board should be charged with the oversight of Metra. If the Metra Board needs oversight, I think we have the wrong people on the Board. And I think I would say the same thing of the CTA.”

In addition, Oberman questions recent proposals to have one central board operate all three agencies.  Because the CTA and Metra are so radically different in the way they operate, it would be almost impossible to constitute a board with the expertise in all the unrelated areas, he says.

But in conclusion, Marty Oberman has an optimistic view about the whole idea of regional mass transit.  “There’s an ancient political schism between the City and suburbs. I think as we’re moving into this modern era there are more and more voters and political leadership who are trying to put those issues behind us,” he explains.

“The transportation issues for our region are regional. What’s good for DuPage County is actually good for the city and vice versa. And we actually have a very good cooperative relationship with the CTA now.”

 

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CN March 6, 2014

Posted on March 7, 2014 by Ken

 

Bruce Rauner is just nine months away from his inauguration as Governor of Illinois. Want to know how that happens? WLS-AM’s John Dempsey pulls out his scratch pad and runs the numbers.

(For discussion purposes here, the panel essentially assumed that Rauner becomes the nominee on March 18.)

“In 2010, Governor Quinn beat Bill Brady by 31,000 votes,” he explains. “Also on that ballot was Mark Kirk versus Alexi Giannoulias. Mark Kirk, who is a moderate Republican, got 65,000 more votes than Bill Brady. The majority of that difference between Bill Brady and Mark Kirk was in the collar counties in the Chicago suburbs. So if Bill Brady had been able to get half that vote he would be the governor now. But he didn’t, both because he ran a horrible campaign and because of his very right-leaning positions. And we’re not gonna see these kind of numbers when Rauner’s on the ballot because all of those moderates who voted for Mark Kirk, I believe, are gonna put Rauner in office. The suburbs of Chicago are where this election is gonna be decided.”

But if you’re a political animal, this will be the most brutal political street-brawl we’ve seen in a long time, according to Chicago Magazine’s Carol Felsenthal.

“If it’s a Rauner/Quinn election, this is going to be the election,” she says giddily. “It’s going to be so exciting. Joe Biden has promised to come in as much as Quinn wants him to. He’s said he’ll come in several times. Hillary Clinton will be here. Bill Clinton will be here. And Barack Obama will be here, because Quinn says I’m not gonna run away from him as others are doing, I want him to come and campaign for me.”

And Felsenthal says Quinn is ready for the fight.

“He will sling mud with the best of them. And he does it because he believes that he’s right. And he believes that he’s pure. So he’ll get down there and he’ll fight dirty,” she says.

Unions, and unionism, are playing major roles in this election. Unions are putting big money into the Dillard campaign, but they aren’t necessarily enthusiastic supporters.

“It’s not so much a pro-union thing as it is an anti-Rauner thing,” Dempsey explains. “These union people do not want Rauner to win, because I believe that if Rauner wins, he has a very good chance of beating Quinn. They’re hopeful that by getting people out to vote for Dillard a week from next Tuesday, that Rauner will get fewer votes and that Rauner may lose. That’s their strategy. But the question is, how many committed, left-leaning union members are gonna take a Republican ballot. I think some will, but not enough to affect this election.”

But Felsenthal says it’s more than that. “They’re investing in the eventual defeat of Bruce Rauner (in the general election). They’re dirtying him up now so that Quinn can beat him. What they’re trying to do is they’re trying do define Rauner the way the Democrats successfully defined Mitt Romney. There are a lot of parallels.”

We also reserved some time to talk about Mayor Emanuel’s Soldier Field trail balloon and his latest back-handed attack on Rich Daley – that they should have built the stadium right the first time – and the Mayor’s apparent reversal on giving $55 million in TIF money to the DePaul arena.

 

 

 

 

 

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CN Feb. 27, 2014

Posted on February 27, 2014 by Ken

Were you a little confused by the mega-announcements this week that Chicago was about to became a major tech innovation-hub, whatever that means?

Well, Tribune business columnist Melissa Harris explains some of it. The biggest chunk of cash-on-the-barrelhead is $70 million that President Obama has sent to Chicago. A number of corporations and big universities have also agreed to put money on the table for people and research facilities. The possible total investment could top $300 million over time.

“The key customer here is the Department of Defense,” Harris tells us. “DOD has not been a strength of the Chicago economy … so this has the potential to jump-start this region as an actual recipient of DOD dollars (with) the $70 million that’s going to be invested here.”

And that money will, if things go according to plan, buy a lot of military product.

“Lighter-weight armor,” she predicts.  “Quicker, faster robots that are used to de-fuse IEDs….improved communications. They’re working on jamming enemy communications signals.”

And while this design and research work will employ many people, Harris says it has a deeper value.

“It has a convening function. It brings people and scientists, businesses and universities together who have never worked together before, and in fact in some cases don’t have a presence in Chicago,” she explains.

The military’s bid itself falls under the DOD’s sourcing authority and is not subject to FOIA, she tells us, so nobody really knows the details of what they’ll be researching, designing and perhaps ultimately building out there on Goose Island. “But it will help the DOD get materials faster and cheaper. That’s the ultimate goal. And a lot of that is going to be achieved in the virtual world on a computer screen versus in a factory.”

There is a major business that’s been thriving in Chicago for decades, but might have been dealt a significant blow last week. It’s the importation and distribution of heroin and cocaine from Mexico. Chip Mitchell, WBEZ’s West Side Bureau reporter, has been covering the illegal drugs pipeline for a long time. As you may have heard, Joaquin “el Chapo” Guzman, who’s said to run most of Chicago’s operations, was arrested in Mexico on Saturday.

“This fellow Guzman controls 70 to 80% of the heroin and cocaine that reaches our market,” Mitchell says. “And from here it then fans out to other parts of the midwest. So Chicago has been a key retail center for the Sinaloa Cartel, Guzman’s organization, and it’s all been a key distribution hub. So the arrest is a big deal.” 

“This supply chain goes back decades and decades,” he adds. “Almost a century.  For most of the 20th century the main product was heroin. Eventually in the 70s and 80s they inserted a lot of cocaine into this supply chain.”

So the big question is: Does Guzman’s arrest mean that there might be a reduction in drugs flowing through our city?

“The cartels have come and gone,” he tells us. “The people who’ve dominated the supply chain have come and gone. But the drugs have kept going. Purity is up. Seizures are up. Prices have remained at near historic lows for years now, and there aren’t many people around with a straight face who would tell you that this is gonna cause any interruption at all in the supply of either heroin or cocaine into the Chicago area.”

Ironically, the cartels have thrived here for all the reasons our City leaders keep trying to sell to potential investors. “It’s attractive to Guzman for the same reason Chicago worked for Mongomery Ward, for Sears and the Pullman Company,” Mitchell says. “We have all this transportation infrastructure and it’s a hub of the midwest.”

Mitchell has also been covering the UIC faculty strike, and he says something about it is remarkable. Older, more established faculty are expressing solidarity with the”adjunct faculty”.

“They already have tenure or are in line to get tenure. And they’re standing up for a minority in the union that’s making a lot less money,” he says.  “We’re talking about 30 thousand dollars a year for people with PHDs who are teaching full-time…they organized and they’re standing up for these very low-paid faculty members, many of whom get paid half the amount of a CTU teacher, for example, or a cop.”

Of course, as we all know, in the end it’s about pensions. Harris has been writing about the legal team that’s organizing to convince the Supreme Court that taking away pensions is unconstitutional. It’s going before the Court very soon.

“If they decide that these changes are unconstitutional,” she says, “Then I don’t see any alternative other than that the Legislature will have to go back to work and try to get a Constitutional Amendment.”

As a business reporter, she says, she hears very little enthusiasm for raising taxes or finding other revenue streams for pensions. If the police, firefighters, municipal workers, teachers and university faculties all stand together, though, and depending on the outcome of the Governor’s race, it could be a political battle unlike anything Illinois has seen for a very long time.

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