In the State of Illinois, non-home rule units of government located in counties subject to the Property Tax Extension Limitation Law (PTELL) are limited in the size of their annual property tax extension to 5% or the increase in the Consumer Price Index (CPI), whichever is less. However, the limitation is subject to some exceptions and can be increased by referendum. The Forest Preserve District…
Click here to read the full report. Click here to read the press release for this analysis. SUMMARY The Civic Federation supports the City Colleges of Chicago FY2020 Tentative Annual Operating Budget totaling $447.5 million, but has concerns about the future fiscal stability of the District. The District is still recovering from the two-year State budget impasse that severely underfunded…
After several years of study and discussions, the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago (MWRD) approved an intergovernmental agreement with Cook County for the MWRD to share services of the Cook County Office of the Independent Inspector General. The intergovernmental agreement allows for the Cook County Inspector General to serve as the Inspector General for the MWRD for a…
Click here to read the full report. The Civic Federation supports the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago’s (MWRD) proposed FY2019 Tentative Budget of $1.09 billion. The District continues a proactive plan to fund the MWRD Retirement Fund annually at a level that is projected to reach 100% funding by 2050. The District also follows a number of other best…
Click here to read the full report. The Civic Federation supports the Chicago Park District’s FY2019 proposed budget of $464.0 million because it continues to reduce reliance on prior year fund balance, implement savings and efficiencies and reduce the size of its workforce. Additionally, despite the Circuit Court of Cook County overturning the remaining pension reform provisions of Public…
2019 Civic Federation Legislative Priorities The Civic Federation's legislative priorities for 2019 include public employee pension reforms, consolidation of local government units in Illinois, enacting policies to rationalize the property tax system, creation of a Local Government Protection Authority, requiring the State of Illinois to…
Click here to read the full report. Civic Federation supports the Forest Preserve District of Cook County’s full proposed FY2019 Executive Budget Recommendation of $204.8 million as a reasonable one-year plan. As detailed in the report, the District has worked to control costs in recent years by eliminating personnel positions and outsourcing non-critical activities. The…
Click here to read the full report. The Civic Federation supports the Chicago Transit Authority’s proposed FY2019 operating budget of $1.6 billion. Despite continued shortfalls in state funding, the proposed budget does not include any fare increases or service cuts. While supporting the budget as a reasonable one-year plan, the Federation has significant concerns about the CTA’s ongoing…
The Civic Federation conducts an analysis of the Chicago Transit Authority’s annual proposed budget each year. This analysis includes two measures used to assess CTA’s productivity over time: labor cost per actual unlinked passenger trip and operating expense per passenger mile.[1] The data used to calculate the productivity measures are obtained from the annual budget documents. As discussed in…
Annually the Civic Federation completes an analysis of the proposed budget of the City Colleges of Chicago. The Federation’s latest analysis of the City Colleges budget can be found here. This blog post expands on the Civic Federation’s analysis of City Colleges of Chicago by taking a look at the revenues and expenditures of all the public community colleges in Illinois, as well as a comparison…
