The Civic Federation joined with the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago on April 23, 2014 to co-host a conference on ways that municipalities in Illinois can avoid or resolve fiscal stress. Experts, practitioners and academics from around the country gathered to discuss Chicago’s fiscal future and how different state intervention and revenue policies around the country have impacted local governments. Attendees to the sold out conference included civic and business leaders and government officials…
On April 8, 2014, the Illinois House of Representatives and Senate approved Senate Bill 1922, which contains reforms and funding increases intended to stabilize the financial condition of two of the City of Chicago’s four pension funds. The bill awaits Governor Quinn’s review. This blog post is an update to a post from two weeks ago that provided the details of an earlier version of the reform bill. The approved version contains some changes, described below. Amendments made to Senate…
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel unveiled a proposal to stabilize the City’s underfunded Municipal and Laborers pension funds on March 31. The 40-year plan includes successive property tax increases to provide additional pension funding coupled with employee benefit reductions. His proposal does not address the severe funding crisis in the Police and Fire Pension Funds. Legislation based on the Mayor’s proposal was passed by the Illinois House Personnel and Pensions Committee on April 2. The…
Four weeks ago, the Civic Federation blogged about the Chicago City Council granting the City authority to issue general obligation (GO) bonds for the payment of various capital projects and legal judgments, as well as refunding and restructuring debt. As part of that plan, the City is expected to sell $388.0 million in GO bonds on March 6, 2014. In anticipation of this bond sale, Moody’s Investors Service downgraded the City’s credit rating from A3 to Baa1, giving Chicago a lower credit rating…
As noted in many media reports and in the Civic Federation’s analysis of the City of Chicago’s FY2014 budget, the City balanced its budget in part with a number of targeted revenue enhancements. One of these revenue enhancements was a reduction in the cap on the partial exemption of the amusement tax that is issued to cable television providers. The amusement tax rate is 9% and cable providers were exempted up to 5%. As of January 1, 2014, the exemption was reduced to 3%, leaving cable…
This week the Chicago City Council granted the City authority to issue $900.0 million in general obligation bonds and $1.0 billion in Midway Airport revenue bonds. At the Finance Committee meeting on February 3, 2014, the City’s Chief Financial Officer Lois Scott said that approximately $90.0-$100.0 million of the GO bonds would be used to pay for litigation settlements from last year. About $130.0 million would be used to restructure debt by delaying principal payments for ten years, a…
This brief provides a compilation of selected consumer taxes, including rates and descriptions, in place in the City of Chicago as of January 10, 2014. It includes such taxes as the sales tax, gas tax, amusement tax, lease tax, hotel tax, liquor tax, restaurant tax, soft drink tax, wheel tax and parking tax.
Morningstar Municipal Credit Research released a report this month comparing aggregate per capita pension liabilities among the 25 most populous cities in the United States. This means Morningstar analysts added overlapping governments’ pension liabilities to those of the cities themselves to try to get an idea of the total pension burden faced by residents of each of the cities. The Civic Federation performs a similar analysis for the City of Chicago in our annual Status of Local Pensions…
Since the Civic Federation’s last blog on changes to taxes imposed on tobacco purchases, Chicago area local governments have increased tobacco tax rates, which will have an impact on Chicago consumers. As part of the FY2013 budget and effective March 1, 2013, Cook County increased its home rule tax rate from $2.00 to $3.00 per pack of cigarettes. As part of the City’s FY2014 budget, Chicago’s home rule tax rate increased from $0.68 to $1.18 per pack of cigarettes, effective January 10, 2014.…
As a follow-up to the Capital Planning Overview, this blog post summarizes information contained in the Civic Federation’s FY2014 budget analyses to compare how well the capital improvement plans (CIPs) of six major Chicago area governments conform to best practice guidelines. The governments are the City of Chicago, the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), Cook County, the Cook County Forest Preserve District, the Chicago Park District and the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District (MWRD).…
