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Chicago Gets Googled
Cook County Board President and local punchline Todd "The Toddler" Stroger is taking a page out of Mayor Daley's political playbook: holding the line on taxes. In a speech to county commissioners this week, Stroger touted his proposed $3 billion budget as maintaining the same level of service without raising taxes. "The executive budget I place before you is balanced, no delays of payment cycles, no long term borrowing to fund operations, no use of reserve funds to pay our bills. Likewise my budget plan for 2010 includes no new taxes, none," Stroger said. "Today, as our national and state governments face terrible deficits, and as many local governments in Illinois find themselves in dire financial shape, Cook County is relatively strong," he said. The proposed budget will actually increase spending by about $80 million, nearly four percent. Those costs include covering previously unmet obligations to employee pension funds, an increase of $35 million to the county sheriff's office, and $22 million in employ pay increases.
But not all county services are immune to cuts, at least in employment. The Cook County Health and Hospitals System plans to eliminate 700 hundred vacant positions in the system, and another 335 staff positions. The bulk of those cuts will come from support staff, such as building services and food services, although the county health system will reduce direct patient care in areas where need doesn't align with supply. These cuts are expected to save about $60 million annually in the county budget. Stroger, who agreed to set up an independent board of directors in exchange for the controversial sales tax increase last year, was critical of the move, saying that the cuts "threatened core services for the uninsured, under-insured and unemployed workers and their families across Cook County." But health system chief executive officer William Foley told the Sun-Times that “when the Cook County Board of Commissioners established the independent health system, they required us to undergo a performance improvement assessment study,” and that areas in need of staffing adjustments had been identified.
Stroger says that he hopes his budget will be passed by Thanksgiving.
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O indeed the Toddler is cribbing, as the price of not being born capable of independent thought right? Daley is just smarter. Such is a historical thing I have been told. Certainly Todd is just aping Daley, cause that’s how they do, they just ape their betters? And I like how you say "The proposed budget will actually increase spending by about $80 million, nearly four percent." as if you discovered some sort of skullduggery.
Remmanenients of the Harold Days when every policy he put forth had a dark heathenish trap door "exposed" by every daily paper and media outlet.
News flash, government spending increase as COLA's do and four percent is low. But let’s not get into what the spending is on. In Cook County it’s about healthcare, and public safety- mandated by the Fed. Court, which is some thing no one prints.
And damned if Toddler do, cut spending at the hospital by 17 percent when he was first elected( getting accused by liberals of gutting public services)
and damned if he don’t just follow along and allow the hospital board to gut more services to Black and Hispanic communities and poor whites.
To be, or not to be, this is the question.
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of white liberals
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles as best you can on behalf of the poor when no one else will, from Jesse to Daley.
This is the real story, how as more people are either uninsured and underinsured, the independent board wants to close down at least one (and is eying another) hospital that services mostly Black and Hispanics, while privatizing vast amounts of services.
But consider me envious my good brother because based upon your ethnicity you get to cover Cook County from a upwardly mobile northsiders perspective only, which means you don't have to cover what this means for poor people, and like some ungracious pastors do, show us ignorant and less informed non northsiders the steep and thorny way to heaven while being the puff' d and reckless libertine of a lake front liberal who Himself is on the primrose path of dalliance treads, and reaks not his own rede! O, your offense is rank, it smells to heaven.
-Exeunt Spook