????? State at impasse with AFSCME ?????

*** UPDATED x5 - AFSCME: No bargaining dates were scheduled next week - Rauner points to AFSCME canceling next week’s bargaining - DelGiorno responds - Rauner responds, says no official impasse yet declared *** This just in… AFSCME claims Rauner administration has declared an impasse in negotiations

Friday, Jan 8, 2016

* 3:01 pm: From AFSCME Council 31…

At the wrap-up of today’s negotiating session between AFSCME Council 31 and the Rauner Administration, the Governor’s representatives said they would refuse to participate in any further bargaining sessions and claimed that negotiations are at an impasse. AFSCME executive drector Roberta Lynch rejected that claim and said the union is prepared to continue to negotiate.

Lynch issued the following statement:

“We are shocked that the Rauner Administration would walk away and refuse to continue negotiations. The Governor’s rash action invites confrontation and chaos — it is not the path to a fair agreement. The people of Illinois deserve leadership that is focused on working together and getting things done, not someone who demands his own way or nothing at all. With no state budget to fund the public services that Illinois residents rely on and no union contract for the men and women who provide those services, the last thing the people of Illinois need is another manufactured crisis from a governor unwilling to do the hard work of compromise.

“In reality, there is no impasse between our union and the Rauner Administration. Until the final minutes of today’s meeting, both parties continued to exchange proposals on many issues. There has been no hint that the administration would simply refuse to continue to negotiate. If they will not return to the table, our union will take legal action. It is a violation of state labor law for a party to declare impasse where none exists.

“The parties do have areas of serious disagreement. For example, the administration wants to double employee’s costs for health care, making the state’s health plan the worst in the nation for any state workforce. It would also would freeze wages for four years, which coupled with its huge hikes in health costs would take money from the pockets of working families. Our union believes that public-service workers, like all working people, deserve wages that can sustain a family and health care they can afford. We also disagree with the administration’s insistence on eliminating safeguards that prevent unfettered privatization of public services.

“Despite our differences, AFSCME remains committed to finding common ground. We’ve been successful in reaching fair agreements with every Illinois governor of both parties for the past 40 years. But that can’t happen if the Rauner administration refuses to remain at the table and negotiate.

“As a candidate, Bruce Rauner repeatedly threatened to impose his extreme demands and force a strike in order to do so. That’s why unions representing state employees backed legislation to provide for arbitration as an alternative means of reaching a fair agreement. When the governor vetoed that bill, he pledged to work in good faith to reach a settlement—a pledge he has broken today.

“Public-service workers in state government keep us safe, respond to emergencies, protect kids, care for the most vulnerable and fulfill countless other essential functions in every Illinois community every day. They deserve a governor who respects the work they do and who will work in good faith to reach an agreement that’s fair to all.”

*** UPDATE 1 *** According to the tolling agreement, this matter now goes to the Illinois Labor Relations Board, which will decide whether or not an impasse exists. Click here.

*** UPDATE 2 *** Lance Trover…

“Today marked the 67th day of negotiations with AFSCME. Like every previous session, AFSCME rejected all of the Governor’s core proposals and insisted that they would never agree to those proposals despite our good faith efforts to address union concerns.

“In light of that position, our negotiators asked AFSCME if they believed we were at impasse. If so, both parties signed a tolling agreement establishing a Labor Board process by which that determination can be made. AFSCME insists that the parties are not at impasse while rejecting the offer for additional sessions next week.

“After a year of no meaningful progress, we must now evaluate the benefit of future sessions given AFSCME’s intransigence. In light of their answers today, we will now decide if the previously-agreed dispute resolution process should be considered.”

The administration also has a chart which “summarizes the status of the negotiations with AFSCME, while comparing it to its previous contract and the contracts the administration has already reached with 17 other unions representing state employees.” Click here.

…Adding… Re-reading the Trover statement you’ll see that the governor has not yet formally declared an impasse. That’s an important distinction here. The governor now has to decide whether to take this to the ILRB.

*** UPDATE 3 *** Press release…

Democratic State Representative candidate Tony DelGiorno, who is vying for the 99th Illinois House District, issued the following statement and called upon the Governor to return to the bargaining table and lift his unreasonable demands.

I am disappointed that it has come to this. It has been clear since the Republican gubernatorial primary in 2014 that the Governor has a hatred for public servants and the unions that represent them. One year after his inauguration, we are on the verge of a lockout or a strike – either of which fails to serve the taxpayers of Illinois. This all or nothing politics is not serving the people of Illinois well. Governing is best done when both sides work together to serve the people. No one side has all the answers. I urge the governor to continue working with AFSCME to reach a compromise. Had enough of our representatives had the gumption to override of the Governor’s veto of the union arbitration bill, we would not be in the situation we are today.

Nothing yet from the appointed incumbent, Rep. Sara Wojcicki Jimenez (R-Springfield).

*** UPDATE 4 *** The administration notes that AFSCME has canceled next week’s scheduled bargaining session, not the Rauner people, which is significant here.

*** UPDATE 5 *** From AFSCME’s Anders Lindall…

No bargaining dates were scheduled for next week. The administration asked very late if we could meet then but our committee was unavailable. Instead AFSCME offered to meet at any time in any of the following three weeks.

I suggest that you see Illinois Fax for the lastest on this never ending issue regarding a labor impasse.  Click:  http://capitolfax.com/2016/01/08/this-just-in-afscme-claims-rauner-administration-has-declared-an-impasse-in-negotiations/

City of Springfield may put lights out at the Capitol

 

 

Lights out? Not yet, but Springfield’s struggling because of state’s past due utility bills

Thursday, Jan 7, 2016

* The SJ-R reports that the Springfield City Council is set to vote on a resolution to urge the state to pay $9 million in utility bills owed to City Water Light and Power, including $6 million that is past due…

The resolution notes that having millions of dollars in overdue bills “is causing a hardship to the operation of the city of Springfield.”

In a Monday memo to Mayor Jim Langfelder, CWLP chief utilities engineer Doug Brown wrote that the city-owned utility has sent out late notices to all of its state accounts, and that a disconnection would be possible in the future if the state continues to be in arrears.

But that doesn’t mean shutting off power to the Capitol and other state facilities is imminent. Langfelder has said that would be a last resort.

“We’re still at the point where we’re working with the state to find out what they can do,” Brown said this week, noting that the state’s nonpayment of its utility bills “is starting to be more of a struggle” for CWLP.

Above is from:  http://capitolfax.com/2016/01/07/lights-out-not-yet-but-springfields-struggling-because-of-states-past-due-utility-bills/

Governor Rauner’s calendar released

 

See highlighted text—this issue is not over yet.

 

Faced with a lawsuit from Illinois Times and three opinions from the state attorney general, Gov. Bruce Rauner has released his appointment calendar.
Download Rauner's calendar releases here and here.
The release today that came via Brown, Hay and Stephens, the Springfield law firm that is representing the governor in the lawsuit filed by the newspaper, details the governor’s meetings held last April, when he left a Holocaust remembrance ceremony early and did not respond when Illinois Times asked where he had gone. The governor later told the State Journal-Register that he had left the ceremony to meet with House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, and Senate President John Cullerton, D-Chicago. That meeting is memorialized as “leader meeting” in the calendar released today.
The calendar released by the governor includes redacted telephone numbers and other personal information that is exempt from disclosure under state law. But names of people who met with the governor are included. The governor had previously argued that releasing names could reveal his thought processes or, in the case of lawyers, legal strategies.
The attorney general’s office has issued three opinions, one to Illinois Times, another to the Chicago Reader and a third to the Associated Press, stating that the governor’s calendar is a public record under the state Freedom of Information Act.
In a letter to attorneys for Illinois Times, Don Tracy, a Springfield lawyer who defended the lawsuit for the governor’s office, called the newspaper’s lawsuit “flawed” and “improper,” and he blamed staff writer Bruce Rushton for the delay in making the calendar public. In the letter, Tracy notes that the lawsuit was filed the day after the attorney general issued an opinion stating the calendar must be disclosed. Tracy says the governor’s office hadn’t indicated whether it would comply with the attorney general’s opinion when the lawsuit was filed. He also writes that the governor didn’t know whether the lawsuit aimed at disclosure “pre-empted” the attorney general’s opinion that the document should be released.
“We, therefore, advised the governor’s office to delay the production of any documents in order to fully respond to the defects in Mr. Rushton’s improper lawsuit, and have time to determine whether such lawsuit, in effect, pre-empted (the attorney general’s opinion),” Tracy writes. “It is unfortunate that due to Mr. Rushton’s rush to court, the release of the calendar to him and other media outlets has been delayed.”
Don Craven, attorney for Illinois Times and Rushton, rejected the notion that Rushton was responsible for any delay in releasing the calendar.
“The governor could have released it upon request, as required by law, or at any time during this process,” Craven said. “I look forward to inquiring of Gov. Rauner as we pursue our claims for civil penalties and attorney’s fees how Mr. Rushton delayed the release of this record.”
Download the letter from Don Tracy here.

Above is from:  http://illinoistimes.com/article-16659-rauner-releases-calendar.html

El Chapo, Escaped Drug Lord, Has Been Recaptured, Mexican President Says

 

By AZAM AHMEDJAN. 8, 2016

The drug kingpin Joaquín Guzmán Loera, also known as El Chapo, in a photo released on Friday by the office of the Mexican Attorney General. Credit Office of the Mexican Attorney General

MEXICO CITY — Nearly six months after his escape from a maximum-security prison in Mexico, the drug kingpin Joaquín Guzmán Loera, also known as El Chapo, has been arrested by the Mexican authorities, President Enrique Peña Nieto announced Friday.

• The arrest came after an intense gun battle this morning in the city of Los Mochis, a seaside area in Mr. Guzmán’s home state of Sinaloa.

“Mission Accomplished: We have him,” read the announcement from Mr. Peña Nieto. “I would like to inform the Mexican people that Joaquín Guzmán Loera has been detained.”

The mission began shortly before 5 a.m. Friday, after an anonymous tip came in from a citizen concerned about armed men in a nearby home.

The authorities went to the house, where they were fired upon. The operation was conducted by Mexico’s most-trusted military wing, the Marines, which captured Mr. Guzmán in early 2014, before his escape last July.

It is unclear whether the government knew Mr. Guzmán was in Los Mochis, or whether his capture was a fortunate coincidence. Orso Ivan Gastelum Cruz, a leader of Mr. Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel, managed to escape, the Navy said, in the first indication that the gun battle involved high-ranking members of the cartel.

The capture of the fugitive drug lord concludes a deeply embarrassing chapter for the government of Mr. Peña Nieto, which has been waylaid by a series of security and corruption scandals that reached their low point with Mr. Guzmán’s daring escape.

Mr. Guzmán stunned the world last summer when he stepped into the shower in his cell — in the most secure wing of one of the most secure prisons in Mexico — and abruptly vanished in full view of a video camera. When guards entered the cell, they discovered a small hole in the shower floor, through which Mr. Guzmán had disappeared.

The opening in the shower led to a mile-long tunnel to a construction site. The tunnel was more than two feet wide and more than five feet high, tall enough for Mr. Guzmán to walk through standing upright — his nickname translates to Shorty — and was burrowed more than 30 feet underground.

It had been equipped with lighting, ventilation and a motorcycle on rails. Some engineers estimated that the tunnel took more than a year and at least $1 million to build.

The prison break humiliated the government of Mr. Peña Nieto, which had proclaimed the arrest of Mr. Guzmán and leaders of other drug cartels as crucial achievements in restoring order and sovereignty to a country long beleaguered by the horrific violence associated with organized crime.

It was particularly embarrassing because Mr. Guzmán had already escaped from prison before, in 2001, when his conspirators managed to smuggle him out. By some accounts, he escaped by hiding in a laundry bin.

There are still major questions looming, including the potential extradition of Mr. Guzmán to the United States.

Shortly after Mr. Guzmán was captured in 2014, the attorney general of Mexico at the time refused to extradite him to the United States, saying that the criminal would serve his time in Mexico first before he was sent to another country.

Officials and analysts said it was an effort to show sovereignty and put some distance between the Mexican authorities and their American counterparts, who often used a heavy hand to influence policy in Mexico.

But that stance came to haunt the Peña Nieto administration after the kingpin escaped. The United States had issued a formal request for his extradition less than three weeks before Mr. Guzmán broke out.

The Drug Enforcement Administration issued a statement via Twitter on the arrest Friday, saying the agency was pleased with Mr. Guzmán’s capture and congratulating the Mexican government.

While the likelihood of Mr. Guzmán escaping from an American maximum security prison is considered low, extradition would come at a cost to the image of the Mexican state, some analysts say.

“Extraditing him is a way to say we cannot cope with this with our own institutions,” said Pablo A. Piccato, a history professor at Columbia University. “While this is something everyone knows, obviously the government has not been able to publicly recognize this or tackle it in the past.”

Many analysts suspected that after his latest escape, Mr. Guzmán would hide-out in the mountains of his native Sinaloa state, where passage in and out of the area is monitored by young men driving four-wheelers and local communities revere the cartel leader as something of a Robin Hood figure.

In October, security forces said they had located Mr. Guzmán in the remote northwestern mountains where he had been hiding out, an area known as the Golden Triangle at the border of his home state of Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua.

But the authorities ultimately found Mr. Guzmán in Los Mochis, a coastal town of about 250,000 people that has long been known as a center of boxing in Mexico.

In the aftermath of Mr. Guzmán’s escape last July, American officials were frustrated with what they considered Mexico’s resistance to accepting help in the manhunt. In the days after his escape, American officials offered to give their Mexican counterparts whatever assistance they could.

When the offer was rebuffed, many analysts as well as Mexican and American officials worried that it would mean Mr. Guzmán would never be caught.

Interesting FOIA and Open Meetings Act facts

The following are few of the interesting facts supplied by Ancel Glink & Associates, Attorneys at law.    at:  http://www.ancelglink.com/Resource

Mitsubishi, taxing bodies reach terms on plant's value

 

This Normal, Illinois plant was built by a joint partnership with Chrysler and is very similiar in design to the original Belvidere Assembly plant.  This is  what happens to RE taxes when a plant is closed with no apparent buyer.

• By Derek Beigh dbeigh@pantagraph.com

  NORMAL — Mitsubishi Motors North America and McLean County taxing bodies have come to terms for the taxable value for the automaker's Normal manufacturing facilities.

Mitsubishi will accept an equalized assessed value of $5.9 million for its plant at 100 Mitsubishi Parkway and $1.1 million for its warehouse at 2601 W. College Ave., according to stipulations filed with the county on Wednesday.

A final agreement is pending. It will specify those values are valid for two years and three years, respectively, said Dry Grove Township Supervisor Jim Phillips.

The values fall between the properties' current EAVs — $7.5 million and $1.8 million, respectively — and Mitsubishi's requests of $5.3 million and $833,000, based on an appraisal.

Taxing bodies could lose about $195,000 per year. Some of that loss is likely to be passed on to taxpayers through higher tax rates.

The company asked to lower the EAV of its Normal facilities effective Jan. 1, 2015, because of the plant's upcoming closure. Vehicle production ceased in November, and the facility will shut down in May.

Normal-based McLean County Unit 5 schools, Heartland Community College, Dry Grove Township and the township's road district intervened in the reassessment.

The county's Board of Review held a hearing on the subject Dec. 15, and a decision was expected to be released within three weeks of that date.

“We had to weigh the cost of an agreement against the cost of getting our own appraisal; … litigating through the (state-level) Property Tax Appeal Board and possibly the courts; and the risk that we would not have ended up with a better result than what we agreed to,” said Curt Richardson, director of human resources and attorney for Normal-based schools.

Unit 5 stood to lose about $150,000 per year if Mitsubishi's appraisal proposal was accepted. That amount stands to be reduced to $115,000 in the agreement, using the district's 2014 tax rate.

Heartland could lose $11,000, or $4,000 less. Other taxing bodies affected include the town of Normal and McLean County. Normal stands to lose $64,000, or $21,000 less, and McLean County $64,000, or $20,000 less.

Officials with those three agencies said the losses are unfortunate but won't significantly affect their bottom lines.

For Dry Grove Township, “it’ll be a 10-year process before this is completely resolved,” said Phillips. The township could dip into reserves or raise its tax rate to offset a $10,000 annual loss.

“We would have lost approximately $30,000 a year (total for both taxing bodies)," he said. "Unit 5 looks at it as three teachers or four teachers, and I’m looking at it as losing my entire workforce."

By the time the warehouse's agreement expires at the end of 2017, Mitsubishi will be finished paying property taxes on it through a lease, Phillips said. The property is owned by HSA Commercial Inc., a Chicago-based real estate company, according to property records. 

Phillips said he hopes Mitsubishi can sell the plant before that property's agreement expires at the end of this year. A task force of state and local officials has been looking for a buyer since the closure was announced in July.

“If it remains vacant," Phillips said, "we’ll be back at the table again."

Mitsubishi declined to comment on this report.

Rauner implements merit pay for some workers; AFSCME opposed

CHICAGO (AP) — Gov. Bruce Rauner's administration is outlining a new compensation system for state workers that includes merit pay and bonuses for employees who save taxpayers money.

General counsel Jason Barclay says the administration is implementing the system for members of 17 labor unions that signed new collective bargaining agreements last year.

In a memo to state agency directors, Barclay says the Republican governor has offered a similar compensation package to Illinois' largest state-employee union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

Above is from:  http://www.pantagraph.com/ap/state/rauner-implements-merit-pay-for-some-workers-afscme-opposed/article_59013266-ad5c-5e2a-8882-602c88829d80.html