Balancing the budget; what will we cut?

It will be interesting to see just how Cook County government manages to balance out their budget for the upcoming fiscal year; what with the fact they now have a $200 million hole.

PRECKWINKLE: Looking for pop tax alternative

That is the amount of money the county would have expected to receive from the soon-to-be defunct pop tax, the penny-per-ounce charge on purchases of pop and other sweetened drinks.

AFTER NOV. 30, that tax won’t exist. So when the new fiscal year begins Dec. 1, there’s going to be a short-fall in anticipated revenue.

Are we merely going to see the county try to concoct some sort of alternative tax to replace the revenue they were expecting to get from the pop drinkers of the Chicago area? Or are we going to get some county agencies and programs get their funding levels cut to the point where essential services will be slashed?

County board President Toni Preckwinkle hinted throughout the barrage of propaganda put out by the American Beverage Association against the pop tax that health care services the county provides would suffer.

But Cook County Board members largely were not swayed by such arguments. In voting overwhelmingly to repeal the same pop tax that many of them voted last year to implement, they called Preckwinkle’s bluff.

TOBOLSKI: Eager to slash Cook budget

THEY’RE GAMBLING THAT there really is enough “fat” in government budgets that things can be cut without impacting essential services.

Either that, or they simply don’t care, or consider those services to be essential to them. They may just not care about the kind of people who actually have to rely on Cook County-funded services to maintain their health.

That certainly was the sentiment of county Commissioner Jeffery Tobolski, R-McCook, who earlier this week said he looks forward to cutting the county budget. “What we have (in revenue) is what we have to work with,” he said. “There are some tough decisions that have to be made.”

SUFFREDIN: Fears future tax hikes

Of course, the counter-point to that view was expressed by Commissioner Larry Suffredin, D-Evanston, who was one of two commissioners (the other being Jerry “the Iceman” Butler, D-Chicago) to vote against repealing the pop tax.

IN A STATEMENT he issued following the Cook County Board’s vote on Wednesday, he pointed out that one part of the pop tax was a promise that Cook County government wouldn’t consider raising any more taxes until at least 2020.

A move he said would have provided significant benefits to people living in the county. Now, they could face whatever alternate tax hike county officials concoct in their minds to try to make up for the revenue lost from the pop tax, which is necessary because, he claims, Illinois government owes Cook County some $186 million in reimbursements it hasn't been making -- which accounts for nearly the entire hole in the county budget.

In my mind, different taxes is a scary thought – one far more onerous than the roughly 20 cents extra I was paying any time I purchased a bottle of Coca-Cola (something I indulge in maybe twice a week).

BUTLER: Voted for pop tax AND against repeal

So now, county officials have the rest of October and November to figure out how to put together a budget that doesn’t leave Cook County government in serious debt come Nov. 30, 2018.

I KNOW COOK County Treasurer Maria Pappas said she offered up her portion of the county budget with a 10 percent cut in everything, and expects she’s now going to have to slash every line-item in her budget by another 2 percent.

Whether enough other officials are capable of taking such a hardline approach is questionable – I suspect many are trying to figure out what alternate item could be taxed. Of course, it has to be something that most people would feel wouldn’t impact them.

Anti-taxer mailings to pressure county commissioners continue, as now the activist-types want to ensure their desired spending cuts get imposed when the Cook County Board approves its 2018 budget sometime next month

Perhaps that is why some have suggested that the medical marijuana purchases now becoming common in parts of our state are a more acceptable item to tax.

It seems the image some people have of “deadheads” being forced to pay up is more acceptable to them than themselves having to pay whenever they buy a bottle of that beverage whose original recipe included a jolt from the coca leaf. Why else would we call it “Coke?”

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Add Tobolski to list including Madigan, Burkes of white pols from Latino areas

A part of me wonders if the Cook County Board is on to something when it comes to dealing with the growing Latino population – which accounts for 29 percent of Chicago’s official population and about one-fifth of the metropolitan area’s people.

TOBOLSKI: The new "Latino" pol



For when the City Council and the Illinois General Assembly went through their redistricting processes to draw boundaries for their wards and districts for the upcoming decade, the end result were maps that left Latino activists feeling that the population growth was not reflected.

YET THE COOK County Board is set to approve a map when they meet Tuesday that adds another district meant to elect a Latino public official – potentially boosting the number of Latinos on the 17-member county board from two to three.

Commissioners Jesus “Chuy” Garcia and Edwin Reyes could soon have another of their ethnic brethren as a colleague on the board. Or maybe not.

To achieve that goal, the people who spent the past few months reviewing population trends in Cook County altered the district meant to represent the inner western suburbs (the ones right along the Chicago/suburban border).

There are growing numbers of Latino residents just about everywhere, but the town of Cicero that once was considered the home of the offspring of Al Capone is now overwhelmingly a Mexican-American town. Some 84 percent of its population falls into that category.

SO COUNTY OFFICIALS drew a map that centered the district around Cicero, using its overwhelming ethnic population as an anchor to create a district rigged to bolster the chances of another Latino official getting picked – some 56 percent of its people of voting age are Latino.

That is an increase from the old district that will cease to exist after Tuesday. Commissioner Jeffrey Tobolski of suburban McCook got elected in 2010 in a district that was 41 percent Latino people of voting age.

Tobolski himself admits his district has changed substantially, although he has been smart enough not to complain about it in public. Because he likely plans to seek re-election, and doesn’t have plans to move (since he is a lifelong McCook resident whose parents had their own local political ties).

Tobolski is going to have to show that he can appeal to Latinos, as well as other people. If he can, then more power to him. Because nowhere in electoral politics are there any guarantees.

NOT EVEN THAT a district with a majority Latino population will get a Latino official to represent them, even though Garcia – a former alderman and state senator – says of the proposed county map, “the creation of new Latino-majority districts in this case provides new opportunities for the community to exert itself.”

But Tobolski still has the benefits of incumbency, bolstered by the tendencies of the Latino voter bloc to not turn out in as strong of numbers as other segments of the electorate.

The county board is going to boast on Tuesday how they boosted the number of Latinos who will serve amongst them. But they may have done more for incumbent preservation than anything else.

It could be more like the City Council or the state Legislature, where officials such as 14^th Ward Alderman Edward Burke or Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, were given safe districts on the city’s Southwest Side – even though they have large numbers of Latino voters living within them.

THAT CERTAINLY WOULD put Tobolski in an exclusive club, if he manages to get re-elected when his current term ends following the 2014 election cycle.

Perhaps Tobolski could be like Burke’s brother, Dan, a state representative, who has gone out of his way during his time in the Illinois House of Representatives to include himself in Latino Caucus activities so that he has a clue about what is happening “back home” in his district. Even though some activists view Burke’s activities as laughable and inadequate, I’ll acknowledge it as an effort.

The trick will be to see which officials will be willing to make the effort, and which ones will merely think that it is the “duty” of the new residents to adapt to the way that the old (and now, often, former) residents wanted things done.

Because if that turns out to be the case, then the political story of the 2010s is going to be the number of long-time politicos who got dumped by a growing Latino electorate interested in the new way of doing things – rather than hearing political stories about the “glory” days of the Daleys.

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