Local Government Consolidation Has “Oak Lawn” Issues Included

January 18th, 2016 News 0 comments

Many of the recommendations of Governor Bruce Rauner’s “Local Government Consolidation and Unfunded Mandates Task Force mirror recommendations made by Oak Lawn’s own elected officials and Village Manager over the last couple of years.

Lieutenant Governor Evelyn Sanguinetti chaired the task force which released its full report last week with recommendations for consideration by the Illinois General Assembly.  The task force concluded that based on the tax rate compared to property values, Illinois citizens pay the second highest property taxes in the nation.  Property taxes are the main source of revenue for schools in Illinois.  Other local governments also levy taxes and the task force noted that Illinois has the most “local governments” with 6,963 units of local government.

Those property taxes are distributed statewide with 64% going to schools, 15% to municipalities, 11% to special districts, including park districts, 8% to counties, 2% to townships and less than 1% to the State of Illinois. In Oak Lawn, the village’s share of property taxes is 12% according to the administration.

The task force acknowledged that some of the increases are due to unfunded mandates from the State.  The Illinois Association of School boards noted that there have been 145 new unfunded mandates since 1992 on school districts alone.

The task force published the following recommendations:

1    Enact a four-year moratorium on creating new local governments, unless this new government is a result of the consolidation of two or more existing local governments.
2.   Empower Illinois citizens to consolidate or dissolve local governments via referendum.
3.   Expand DuPage County’s pilot consolidation program to all 102 counties.
4.   Allow all townships in the state to consolidate with coterminous municipalities via referendum.
5.   Remove the limitation capping a township size of 126 square miles.
6.   Allow counties to retain their existing form of government following a successful referendum to dissolve townships into the county.
7.   Hold taxpayers harmless from township consolidation.
8.   Allow counties with fewer than 15,000 parcels and $1 billion in Equalized Assessed Value (EAV) to dissolve all of the elected township assessors and multi-township assessment districts into one, newly-elected county assessor position and office – by majority vote of the county board or via citizen-led referendum.
9.   Protect the Intergovernmental Cooperation Act.
10. School District Consolidation: Provide the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) flexibility to incentivize outcomes of school district consolidation.
11. Encourage state agencies – when allocating discretional state and federal funds to local governments – to encourage regional sharing of public equipment, facilities, training, resources, and administrative functions.
12. Allow merger of general township road and bridge districts that maintain less than 25 miles of road.
13. Expand public notice mandate requirements to allow local units of government the option to post online public notices and other public information and allow units of government to store information digitally.
14. Repeal or reform Prevailing Wage.
15. Provide third-party contracting mandate relief for school districts.
16. Provide local school districts the flexibility to allow physical education exemptions to children for certain academic reasons or to children who are involved in other qualified physical activities.
17. Provide local school districts the authority to contract with a qualified commercial driver training school to provide driver education to students.
18. Make collective bargaining permissive, instead of mandatory.
19. Eliminate minimum manning from collective bargaining.
20. Modernize the Public Safety Employee Benefit Act, by adding the federal definition of ‘catastrophic injury’ to ensure personnel, their spouses, and children receive support when the individual is injured on the job and is unable to secure gainful employment.
21. Allow arbitrators to use existing financial parameters of local government as a primary consideration during interest arbitration.
22. Require an annual state review of unfunded mandates on local government.
23. Merge downstate and suburban public safety pension funds into a single pension investment authority, as amended.
24. Pass a constitutional amendment on unfunded state mandates.
25. Requests the Governor use his amendatory veto power to insert “if economically feasible” language into any legislation authorizing new unfunded mandates on local governments and school district
26. Economic Feasibility Exemption for local units of government, school districts, community colleges and institutions of higher education.
27. Provide local governments the authority to provide blended Social Security and 401k plans to new non-public safety employees and blended defined contribution / defined benefit plans for new public safety employees
Many of the recommendations are expected to be considered “controversial” for legislators who have failed to find a common ground with the first term Governor on a State Budget.  However, a majority of Oak Lawn officials have come out in favor of some of the proposals listed including reforming pensions, allowing arbitrators to use financial parameters of the government as a primary consideration, eliminating minimum manning, and changing collective bargaining issues to permissive rather than mandatory.

 

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