|
North Central Illinois | As a township official, I certainly agree that there's a lot of redundancy. There's some benefit to that and there are benefits to local control, but that does come at a cost. We can debate whether the benefits are worth the cost. My point was that the "influence of Chicago" isn't what is causing our high property taxes.
Back when I was a math teacher, I could see the biggest weakness in the pension system. Contributions were a fixed % of salary, but pension was based on average of last 4 years of salary. Most local government institutions had a policy of significant raises the last 4 years to reward long serving employees. I'm not necessarily saying that the pension payouts were unreasonable for people who worked hard, but that was clearly gaming the system for a local school to essentially pay a "retirement bonus" out of the pension fund.
| |
|
Illinois trying to break free
