McHenry County Blog

Jim Tobin’s National Taxpayers United of Illinois has revealed the top 50 pensions for the General Assembly Retirement Fund.

It doesn’t have many pensioners, but the legislative retirement fund has some big payouts.

Part of the reason is that statewide elected officials can opt in.

While he was in office, for instance, Governor Jim Thompson announced that he would be in the same pension fund that regular state employees paid into.  Right before leaving office that changed.  He transferred his pension credits to the GA Retirement System.

Indeed many of the largest pensions you see below are the result of an ex-legislator getting a well-paying job for a while and transferring in the pension credits in their new public pension fund back to the more lucrative legislative system.

Tobin’s press release follows:

TOP 50 GA PENSIONS REVEAL MILLION DOLLAR PAYOUTS AS TAX INCREASE LOOMS

CHICAGO–Jim Tobin, President of National Taxpayers United of Illinois (NTUI), today released the latest pension study of pension researcher Bill Zettler: the Top Fifty pensions received by former members of the Illinois General Assembly.

“Governor Quinn and the lame duck General Assembly are desperate to increase tax revenues any way they can to ensure that these outrageous, lavish pensions are available to themselves when they retire.

“Under the current pension program, General Assembly members are guaranteed to be millionaires if they can collect for only eight to ten years.  Protecting this rite of passage has become their highest priority, despite the terrible financial situation in which most Illinoisans find themselves.

“Under the guise of securing the financial future of the Illinois general fund, Quinn and his conspirators are trying to push any tax increases that they can.”

“If Quinn can’t get HB 174 with the 67% income tax increase through the house, he will push to get a 33% income tax increase passed.

“At the same time, there are efforts to increase the gasoline tax by an unknown amount, the cigarette tax by $1 per pack, and a new 7-10% sales tax on 39 services.

“The primary objective is to pump 15 billion taxpayer dollars out of taxpayer pockets and into the pension and payroll funds of the robber barons that are bankrupting the great state of Illinois, not to secure the financial future as they would have us believe.”

“Do you recognize any of these pension millionaires? Figures are as of 10/1/2010.  A complete list can be viewed at www.ntui.org.
Mo. Pension         Yearly Pension         Total Pension Paid So Far
Arthur Berman                     $16,459               $197,503           $1,449,640
Judy Barr Topinka              $12,144                 $145,727            $402,229
Jim Edgar                           $10,910                 $130,925             $1,106,372
James R. Thompson           $10,601                 $127,215             $1,547,836
James “Pate” Philip             $10,551                 $126,615             $713,029
Dawn Clark Netsch             $10,143                 $121,720             $1,476,711
Walter Dudycz                     $7,661                 $91,937                $449,128

“Jim Edgar and James R. Thompson engineered the largest tax increases ever passed in Illinois. Arthur Berman was the author of the Berman Tax Increase Amendment. Dawn Clark Netsch never met a tax she didn’t like.”

“I urge members of the Illinois General Assembly to vote in the interest of the constituents they serve and not their own best interest.”

How do legislators manage to hike their pensions so much?

Some get a short-term position paying a lot more than they received in their last year as a state legislator. Former State Senator John Friedland, for example, was hired as a lobbyist by the Elgin Sanitary District for a couple of months as a hefty salary. That boosted his base salary.

Add three percent extra each year, which all on public pensions in Illinois receive and it mounts up over time.

Others like Terry Stezco lose an election and get a well-paying local governmental job. In his case, Cook County Assessor Jim Houlihan hired him.

Others get appointed to head state departments. Chuck Hartke, for instance, was appointed Director of the Department of Agriculture.

All can transfer pension credits from the new pension system and their final salaries–upon which their pension is based–back into the General Assembly Retirement System.

How would you like to live in Marengo and have your grade school board members ask whether you would allow them to increase part of your tax bill by 3¾ times?

Forever.

That’s the way I read the language on tomorrow’s ballot.

“Shall the debt service extension base under the Property Tax Extension Limitation Law for Marengo-Union Elementary Consolidated School District Number 165, McHenry County, Illinois, for payment of principal and interest on limited bonds be increased from $180,983.80 to $680,983.80 for the 2010 levy year and all subsequent levy years?”

From $181,000 (to round off the numbers) to $681,000.

Pretty audacious, wouldn’t you say?

Asking for a 376% increase on a tax capped levy.

I’m pretty sure what the district is talking about is the measure I fought so hard to defeat in the mid-1990′s.

When the tax cap was passed under Governor Jim Edgar in 1992, I quickly read the bill. When I ran into Illinois Revenue Director Doug Whitley, I asked him if he let the park districts off the hook. I was talking about allowing park districts to continue borrowing money without a referendum.

“They think I did, but I didn’t,” he told me as he walked quickly into the Republican House office complex.

At the behest mainly of park districts, Republican Speaker Lee Daniels and Senate President Pate Philip sponsored a bill to give any local tax district the ability to borrow forever the amount of debt they had issued without a referendum.

(I asked Daniels why he was so bent on repealing this taxpayer protection. “Because park district employees walk precincts for our campaigns,” was pretty much his answer, if not his exact words.)

With my aversion to non-referendum debt, stimulated by our paying about $500 a year extra for the better part of a decade to pay off the golf course bought by our Lakewood village board right before the tax cap went into effect, you can imagine how strongly I felt and feel about the such borrowing without asking the voters first.

So, the grade school in Marengo had $180,983.80 in non-referendum loans outstanding when the revision of the original tax cap legislation went into effect.

That amount has acted as the upper limit on a credit card does. It matters not that it never paid off. The school district has a revolving credit line that the taxpayers have to dig into their pockets to pay the interest.

I am confident that the school board took every dime it could under the law. Virtually every tax district does. (That’s why local governments should be called “tax” districts.)

But, as I read this referendum question, the board wants to be able to borrow almost four times as much…indefinitely.

Passage of this one referendum will allow that.

You don’t have to ask how I would vote if I lived in Marengo or Union.

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Here’s some detail I found about the law on page 61 of this publication:

“Non-referendum bonds (Working Cash, Funding, Fire Prevention and Safety, Tort Judgment, and Insurance Reserve Bonds) may be issued as “limited bonds.” The limited amount of the tax that can be extended to make principal and interest payments on such bonds is determined by each district’s debt service extension base (DSEB). For school districts in Cook and the collar counties, the DSEB is the 1994 levy-year extension (extended in 1995) to make principal and interest payments on nonreferendum bonds. For all other school districts, the DSEB is the amount of taxes for the year in which the referendum is held which make the district subject to the law (extended, collected and distributed in the following year).”

I’m pretty amazed that the issue I stressed when I ran for governor against Rod Blagojevich and Jim Ryan in 2002 is getting attention during this year when the media is pushing reform:

When my Libertarian Party running mate Jim Tobin and I kicked off our campaign in his National Taxpayers United of Illinois office in the South Loop, the sign we held up is the one you see below.

The sign went everywhere in the campaign and might have gotten some real play had Blagojevich and Ryan not conspired to skip the Illinois League of Women Voters gubernatorial debate after I managed to reach the 5% threshold in the Daily Southtown’s 1,000 person survey. (That was the largest in the entire campaign, by the way.)

It seemed perfectly obvious to me that legislative leaders should not be leaders for life.

Except for two years after Republican Lee Daniels managed to elect a Republican majority in 1994—the year that the GOP’s Contract with America clicked on the national level—Mike Madigan has been speaker since George Ryan held the office in the early 1980′s.

Pate Philip stopped all sorts of bad legislation in his leadership of the state senate during the 1990′s, but it still seems to me that there ought to be turnover.

While the old guy/gal may pick the new guy/gal, at least the newbies would have different friends.

When Daniels got deposed during a staff-campaign-work-on-state-time scandal initiated by Rich Means–part of which took place in McHenry County–successor Tom Cross won votes by promising not to try to follow Daniels’ example of being Republican leader as long as he could.

Cross promised term limits.

In 2008, that 2002 promise went bye-bye.

And, of course, nothing will happen on the issue because Madigan is not willing to see an end to his regime…even if it were ten years from now.

The Daily Herald has polled suburban legislators on how they stand on various reform proposals and how the term limits for leaders issue shakes out can be seen below.

First House members:

• Susanne Bassi – Favors
• Mark Beaubien (Republican representing eastern part of McHenry County) – Favors
• Bob Biggins – Favors
• Linda Chapa-LaVia – Favors
• Franco Coladipietro – Favors
• Sandy Cole – Favors
• Michael Connelly – Favors
• Tom Cross – Opposed (Big surprise there.)
• Keith Farnham – Opposes
• Mike Fortner – Favors
• Jack Franks – (Democrat representing northern & western McHenry County) Favors
• Paul Froehlich – Opposes
• Kay Hatcher – Favors
• Emily Klunk-McAsey – Did not respond to Daily Herald
• Sidney Mathias – Favors
• Rosemary Mulligan – Favors
• Elaine Nekritz – Favors
• JoAnn Osmond – Favors
• Sandra Pihos – Favors



• Randy Ramey – Opposes (Step-father is Pate Philip.)
• Dennis Reboletti – Favors
• Kathleen Ryg – Favors
• Skip Saviano – Favors
• Tim Schmitz – Favors
• Darlene Senger – Favors
• Ed Sullivan – Favors
• Mike Tryon – (Representing southeastern McHenry County) Opposes
• Mark Walker – Opposes
• Eddie Washington – Favors

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The top sign is the one used in the 2002 campaign. The bottom one was the first version. I concluded that 8 years as leader was better than 6, hence the change in toll free phone numbers.

I was more than fed up with the way the McHenry County Conservation District had borrowed $39 million without asking for permission at the ballot box after Lee Daniels and Pate Philip passed the tax hiking bill numbered Senate Bill 368.

That was the bill that gave tax districts that had behaved badly by taking out loans prior to the Tax Cap’s going into effect without asking for voter approval to continuing doing so forever.

It could be described as a revolving credit card which we taxpayers will never see paid off.

So, when MCCD trustees actually decided to put a referendum on the ballot the year after I got kicked out of office, why was I disturbed?

I went down into the catacombs, which my wife will have put in a dumpster when I die, and found a Daily Herald article from August 29, 1997. It which answers the question in one sentence.

Reporter Arthur Kane was writing a story about the Algonquin Township Board’s putting an advisory referendum on the ballot asking whether voters wanted the Conservation District to buy more land in Algonquin Township.

MCCD at the time was trying to condemn what was then being called Gentry Ridge, but which most long-timers will remember as the ski resort owned by Henry Carroll called Fox Trails. I knew the property pretty well because my good high school friend Tom Carroll lived there before his father built the resort.

In any event, here’s the sentence from the story:

“(MCCD Executive Director Craig) Hubert said traditionally the district did not buy land in Algonquin Township because it” was more expensive.”

Any dim bat could tell you that land in the Southeastern-most township in McHenry County would be the most expensive. It’s closest to Chicago.

But, that was and is no reason to spend virtually nothing in the most populated township in McHenry County.

Cary has made out pretty good with

• the purchased 168 acre Fox Trails/Gentry Ridge property, now called Fox Bluff Conservation Area
• the donated 220 acres in the Fel-Pro RRR Conservation Area south of Rawson Bridge Road near the Fox River
• the 440-acre Hickory Grove Conservation Area/Lyons’ Prairie and Marsh,
• the donated 338-acre Hollows, an old gravel pit between Crystal Lake and Cary
• the 840-acre Silver Creek Conservation Area on the Fox River northwest of Fel-Pro in Nunda Township

The rest of the township can boast of a bike path and the Lake in the Hills Fen, which will finally be accessible from Crystal Lake behind CVS Pharmacy.

So, if you get the feeling that I think the money from my immediate area has been spent elsewhere, you would be correct. Virtually none of it was being spent where most of the people in my state rep district lived, which was south of Crystal Lake Avenue in Algonquin and Grafton Townships.

Hence, this re-entry into the political arena in 2001:

Click to enlarge any image.

The highlight of the session most of the time I was in the Illinois House was the Gridiron Dinner put on by the press corps.

When Senate President Pate Philip managed to shorten the session by getting a constitutional amendment passed requiring a super majority to pass legislation starting on June 1st, rather than on July 1st, that changed.

While Philip got to go fishing earlier, the workload for reporters got too heavy to put on an annual show.

So, who stepped in to fill the void?

Legislators.

After all, they don’t have a lot to do with four people in the General Assembly making most of the important decisions.

The Conference of Women Legislators already put on a fund raising event. I remember Clyde Robbins singing at one held at the pool of the Statehouse Inn. That was the same event that State Senator John D’Arco read poetry.

The event now brings in $90,000, according to Springfield Journal-Register political reporter Bernie Schoenberg (whose high school son Samuel’s accomplishments were featured in last Sunday’s Chicago Tribune). The money goes for for scholarships and leadership training.

Featured in this knock-off of American Idol was McHenry County’s State Senator Pam Althoff. She was Paula Abdul, one of the judges.

There’s even a recording of part of the event that can be accessed through the Journal-Register story.

The highlight of the session most of the time I was in the Illinois House was the Gridiron Dinner put on by the press corps.

When Senate President Pate Philip managed to shorten the session by getting a constitutional amendment passed requiring a super majority to pass legislation starting on June 1st, rather than on July 1st, that changed.

While Philip got to go fishing earlier, the workload for reporters got too heavy to put on an annual show.

So, who stepped in to fill the void?

Legislators.

After all, they don’t have a lot to do with four people in the General Assembly making most of the important decisions.

The Conference of Women Legislators already put on a fund raising event. I remember Clyde Robbins singing at one held at the pool of the Statehouse Inn. That was the same event that State Senator John D’Arco read poetry.

The event now brings in $90,000, according to Springfield Journal-Register political reporter Bernie Schoenberg (whose high school son Samuel’s accomplishments were featured in last Sunday’s Chicago Tribune). The money goes for for scholarships and leadership training.

Featured in this knock-off of American Idol was McHenry County’s State Senator Pam Althoff. She was Paula Abdul, one of the judges.

There’s even a recording of part of the event that can be accessed through the Journal-Register story.