By Howard Packowitz

BLOOMINGTON – District 87 administrators believe property taxes will be flat to a little bit lower even as they expect to collect more from landowners for the next school year.

Administrators are proposing an estimated $44,497,838 tax levy, or 1.69 percent higher than the previous year’s levy.

The overall tax rate is expected to decline slightly from $5.15 per $100 of assessed valuation, to $5.12 per $100 of assessed valuation.

The levy assumes two percent growth in taxable land values, which Superintendent Barry Reilly acknowledges is optimistic. Reilly said the district would be selling itself short if it assumed land values would grow by a more realistic 0.5 percent.

“It’s almost like a win-win in that the assessed values go up, the tax rate goes down, and there’s more money available to the school district,” said Reilly. If we don’t do that, and it happens to go up that amount, we’ve left money on the table, so to speak, that we now don’t have access to,” the superintendent said.

The district said property taxes represent approximately 63.4 percent of the Bloomington school system’s total revenue.

Administrators will present the proposed levy to the District 87 school board Wednesday night. The board is expected to schedule a public hearing for December 12.

Howard Packowitz can be reached at howard.packowitz@cumulus.com

By Howard Packowitz

NORMAL – The American Red Cross came to the aid of a woman whose apartment in northwest Normal was damaged by fire Tuesday night.

Normal firefighters were called about 7 p.m. to an apartment building in the 1500 block of Woods Avenue, near Cottage Avenue.

The fire was said to have started in the kitchen of one of the apartments. Authorities reported moderate fire damage to the kitchen, and smoke damage to the rest of the apartment.

The woman who lived in the apartment was not hurt, but the Red Cross provided help because there was too much damage for her to continue living there now.

A dollar estimate of the damage, and the cause were not available late Tuesday night.

The fire department said none of the other apartments were damaged.

Howard Packowitz can be reached at howard.packowitz@cumulus.com

By Howard Packowitz

BLOOMINGTON – The partnership between new Bloomington City Manager Tim Gleason and his top assistant, who once sought Gleason’s job, has come to an end after just a few months.

Gleason announced Tuesday that Assistant City Manager Steve Rasmussen has resigned, effective November 12, but he’ll be on vacation until then.

Rasmussen was one of three finalists to replace David Hales, who left the city manager’s post last November.

Rasmussen was interim city manager while the city council conducted a search with the help of a paid consultant.

During that time, Rasmussen guided the council through a difficult budget process in which aldermen raised fees and reduced services to overcome a deficit.

Aldermen wound up picking Gleason, who was Decatur’s city manager.

Rasmussen, who’s been with the city since 2014, said he’s enjoyed his time with the local government, but now’s the right time for him to explore another opportunity.

The city will conduct a search at some point for Rasmussen’s replacement.

Howard Packowitz can be reached at howard.packowitz@cumulus.com

By Dave Dahl

SPRINGFIELD – Groups watching out for the homebound say the Rauner administration is going about saving money the wrong way.

David Spurney of Staunton is confined to a wheelchair and has autonomic dysflexia. His caregiver “is my lifeline in more ways than one. She provides services that people in her line of work often do.”

The problem is, rules implemented last year cap his caregiver’s hours at 45 per week. His state senator, Andy Manar (D-Bunker Hill) pointed out, he’s disabled 168 hours per week and isn’t in a great position to recruit a second caregiver to small-town Southern Illinois.

Aide Tami Straub, who has taken Spurney into her home and who has been with him 27 years, says the staet has done a 180 in terms of service.

“The counselors (previously said) ‘Are your needs being met?’ ‘What can we do for you?’” Straub said. “Now, there’s nothing. There is no help in trying to fill out their paperwork. It’s lengthy. It doesn’t have any explanation. You’d have to see it to believe it.”

Sen. Manar, a regular critic of the Rauner administration on this matter, brushed aside a suggestion this could be a pre-election press pop, saying Spurney wanted to have the news conference a month ago, but a hospital stay intervened.

DHS issued the following statement:

Over 16,000 new caregivers have been hired since the rule went into effect. 98.8% of caregivers are working within the overtime rule. No caregiver has been suspended. We have received 775 requests for overtime exceptions and 61% percent of those were approved and 21% were denied. Other requests are pending or were withdrawn.

Dave Dahl can be reached at news@wjbc.com

This vacant building at 1311 W. Olive will become a job training center for low income and at-risk women after Bloomington aldermen granted a special use permit for the property.
(Photo by Howard Packowitz/WJBC) 

By Howard Packowitz

BLOOMINGTON – A century old building on Bloomington’s west side will be used as a job training site for women.

Bloomington aldermen, without discussion, unanimously granted a special use permit for the century old building at 1311 W. Olive St.

A staff report to the council said Mary and Hank Campbell have an option to buy the property, assuming the council granted the special use for low income and at-risk women to improve their skills in building trades.

Staffers say the building used to house Erickson’s Grocery Store, with an apartment upstairs. A realtor said the structure’s been vacant since September of last year.

The council also accepted the $1.06 million bid for Miller Park Zoo improvements. Stark Excavating will build a roof, concessions, and add about 50 parking spaces.

“If you come for any of our events, the parking lot’s full before the event even starts,” said Jay Tetzloff, Director of Parks, Recreation, and Cultural Arts for the city.

“I’ve been trying to tell people every time I’ve been on the radio, come an hour before. See the zoo and then enjoy the special event because the lot fills up so quickly,” Tetzloff told aldermen.

Tetzloff and Mayor Tari Renner noted the project will make a profit after 13 years from food sales.

Tetzloff said the additions will benefit all of Miller Park and the west side neighborhood.

Howard Packowitz can be reached at howard.packowitz@cumulus.com

By Howard Packowitz

BLOOMINGTON – New Bloomington City Manager Tim Gleason said an ordinance unanimously passed by the city council Monday night requires him to curb “pension spiking” for retiring city workers that costs taxpayers millions of dollars.

Government employees are able to collect big paychecks when they retire based on a 1995 city policy enabling them to buy back unused sick time if they have a combined age and length of service totaling 75 years and they worked continuously at least 15 years.

Gleason said he won’t bring back collective bargaining agreements to the council for consideration unless the issue is “significantly addressed.”

“Understanding that the employees of the city of Bloomington are our greatest resource, but at the same time, the financial impacts to the pension spiking are one that many, if not all communities around the state have had to address,” Gleason said in describing how he’ll have to strike a balance between workers and taxpayers’ interests.

A staff report said there are 198 workers grandfathered into the two-decades old sick leave policy, and 39 are eligible to collect their benefits immediately. The cost to the city over the next several years could run between $3 million to $4 million, according to the report.

In other business, the divisions evident two weeks ago came into view again Monday night as aldermen were asked to act a second time on a $50 registration fee for all city businesses, and higher fees for many city functions. The council had to take another vote because there were errors in the initial ordinance.

The latest vote was 5-4 with Aldermen Karen Schmidt, Scott Black, Jamie Mathy, and David Sage voting no.

“Sooner or later, we’re going to have to come to grips with the idea that we’re going to have to make some changes to services delivered by the city. We can’t keep raising fees and taxes,” said Sage.

Sage, a fiscal conservative, is retiring next spring as the Ward 2 alderman representing the southwest side.

Howard Packowitz can be reached at howard.packowitz@cumulus.com

By Illinois Radio Network/Cole Lauterbach

SPRINGFIELD – A group of 10 campaign workers who sued Democratic candidate for Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker over racial discrimination accusations in the political operation spoke out Monday in response to claims that they’re only after the billionaire’s money.

In the lawsuit, current and former campaign workers said that Pritzker’s campaign deliberately put minorities in dangerous offices and denied them promotions. The workers said they weren’t taken seriously by campaign leaders until they filed the lawsuit.

“When career campaign workers from Selma, Alabama, come to Chicago and say they have experienced racism, you believe them,” Jeanette Samuels, one of the attorneys representing the workers, said at a news conference Monday in Chicago.

Civil rights attorney Shay T. Allen said his clients wouldn’t delve into the specifics of the discrimination claims in the lawsuit, but he said they felt compelled to speak out after criticism. Allen said there has been an effort to “smear these people’s’ reputations.”

Plaintiff Maxwell Little said the campaign knew about the complaints but didn’t do anything about it until the lawsuit was filed.

“We were ignored, silenced, intimidated, and forced to endure their abuse of power,” he said. “We’ve made it our civic duty to not only speak up for ourselves, but for the people across the state and this nation who experienced the deepening crisis of discrimination and harassment in their work environment.”

Former campaign staffer Kayla Hogan said she went to Pritzker after she heard him using racially insensitive language with now-imprisoned former Gov. Rod Blagojevich on leaked FBI wiretaps. She said she spoke with Pritzker to warn him about discrimination in the campaign. She said she was let go soon after.

“He promised me to address it and I was laid off,” she said.

Pritzker’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment. Pritzker himself has said the allegations are untrue.

Pritzker’s running mate, Juliana Stratton, said the campaign was given 24 hours to give the group more than $7 million or face a lawsuit. The plaintiffs produced documents showing a letter was sent Friday with a demand for a response by Monday. The lawsuit was filled 11 days after the letter was sent.

No initial court date has been set in the lawsuit, which was filed last week in Chicago.

By Illinois Radio Network/Benjamin Yount

SPRINGFIELD – Pot is a growing business in Illinois and other states.

And that means marijuana investment scams are becoming a growing problem.

Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White issued a warning about investment scams last week. Canada became the second country to legalize recreational marijuana use. Sales there started last week. In the U.S., nine states and Washington D.C. allow for recreational use of marijuana while many other states allow for medical use. The drug remains illegal under federal law.

“Whenever something is in the news, people who are on the wrong side of the ledger, want to line their pockets,” White said. “They come up with the various schemes to take your hard earned money. And we want to do all that we can to keep these people out of your pocket, so to speak.”

White said people need to do their research before investing in anything, especially the new marketplace of marijuana.

“The company must be registered with the state of Illinois,” White said. “If you have any questions about it, you can go to the website AvoidTheScam.net.”

White said the North American Securities Administrators Association has information on scammers and other flagged-businesses.

If you have been scammed, White said the securities department inside the Secretary of State’s office needs to know.

By Illinois Radio Network/Scot Bertram

SPRINGFIELD – The Future Energy Jobs Act, which took effect last year, requires Illinois utilities to get 25 percent of their retail power from renewable sources like solar and wind by 2025.

Sean Gallagher, vice president of state affairs at the Solar Energy Industries Association, said the new interest is no coincidence.

By David Stanczak

At one time, Hillary Clinton’s mantra about abortion was that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.”  I suspected then that she really meant only the “legal” part, and time has borne out that suspicion. Case in point: a new movie premiering Friday October 12 entitled “Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer.”

Most people don’t recognize Kermit Gosnell’s name. Until about nine years ago, Gosnell was a Philadelphia abortionist. He was convicted by a jury of three counts of first-degree murder, one count of involuntary manslaughter, 21 felony counts of illegal late-term abortions, and 211 counts of violating Pennsylvania’s 24-hour informed consent law. He is serving a life sentence without possibility of parole because he agreed not to appeal his conviction in return for the state’s not seeking the death penalty.

For 15 years, Gosnell operated the Women’s Medical Society, where he performed abortions on anyone at any time during the pregnancy.  His “clinic” where he “served” primarily minority women, was filthy beyond description, with blood-stained furniture and operating tables; he routinely falsified records; permitted unlicensed assistants to medicate patients with outdated drugs; was absent during critical times for his patients;  re-used single-use paraphernalia; ran a pill mill, freely dispensing pain killers; and failed to meet even the most rudimentary sanitation requirements for surgery. He probably would still be in business, were it not for the investigation of his pill mill and the death of one of his patients, a Bhutanese refugee, Karnamaya Mongar, from an overdose of a drug administered at his clinic.  The clinic’s trash-clogged hallways delayed getting Ms. Mongar to a hospital.  The more police looked, the more they were overwhelmed by the gruesomeness of Gosnell’s house of horrors. By the time police finished the investigation, they had learned that Gosnell made sure no infants survived his attempted abortions.   He routinely used his scissors to snip the spinal cords of any viable infants who escaped their mother’s bodies alive; police recovered the bodies of 47 infants with scissors wounds at the back of their necks.  Gosnell got away with his back-alley quality facilities in part because pro-choice Governor Tom Ridge instructed his Department of Public Health to go easy on abortion facilities; the Department complied, repeatedly re-certifying Gosnell’s clinic even though it failed to meet a host of elementary medical and health requirements.

The media covered up what should have been a sensational nation-wide story because it might reflect badly on the abortion industry. One scene in the movie depicts the empty area in the courtroom which had been roped off for the press.

The conspiracy of silence continues. Two pro-choice Irish journalists, Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney wrote a book and decided to make a movie about the Gosnell trial.  Nobody in Hollywood or anywhere else would touch it.  So, they made the movie with private contributions. When they planned a large screening at a hotel in Austin, Texas close to a scheduled Planned Parenthood function, pressure was successfully applied to the hotel to cancel their event. The producers couldn’t take out ads on National Public Radio because NPR wouldn’t let them refer to Gosnell as an “abortionist.” Roget’s Thesaurus lists no synonyms for the term. This week, Facebook banned advertising for the movie.

The “rare” part of Hillary’s mantra is long since gone: abortions since Roe v. Wade are north of 60 million. The pro-abort symbol for restrictions on abortions is the coat hanger.  But back alley abortionists couldn’t have done much worse than Gosnell; low legal requirements for clinics and lax enforcement compromise the safety of women patients. So much for “safe”.  The movie, which accurately chronicles the investigation and trial, opens Friday October 12 at the AMC Classic 14 in Normal. Everyone who wants to know the truth about how the system failed not only infants but the women who carried them needs to see it.

David Stanczak, a WJBC commentator since 1995, came to Bloomington in 1971. He served as the City of Bloomington’s first full-time legal counsel for over 18 years, before entering private practice. He is currently employed by the Snyder Companies and continues to reside in Bloomington with his family.

The opinions expressed within WJBC’s Voices are solely those of the Voices’ author, and are not necessarily those of WJBC or Cumulus Media, Inc.