Progress Illinois

It's not surprising that a lot more attention is being paid to Amtrak lately. High fuel costs have dominated the national political discourse all summer, and here in Illinois the Governor and the General Assembly are engaged in trench warfare over the fate of a $25 billion capital improvement project. Now comes the Wall Street Journal with a report on the precarious situation of Amtrak nationwide. The article covers some well-trod territory, pointing out that ridership (up 13.9 percent in July from a year ago) has reached historic highs. But that popularity comes with a cost. Years of Republican funding cuts have deeply reduced Amtrak's ability to cope with high ridership, which brings us to the Lincoln Corridor. In a fantastic video report, the Journal holds up our very own Chicago-to-St. Louis line as an example of how bad things have become:

Years of dwindling budgets in Congress has lead to cutbacks in all parts of the system from the ragged chairs in coach to the maroon business class seats that looks like they were designed in the height of eighties, to the fleet of rundown ticket agencies like this one in saint Louis known as “amshack.” Amtrak is worse of all around. Unfortunately the futures of Amtrak rests on the dozens of corridors across the country that look more like the Lincoln corridor than the [East Coast] Acela express.

Beyond these superficial complaints, the Journal points out that the real problem is train delays. And the major reason for delays is the fact that Amtrak owns hardly any of its own rail lines. On the Lincoln Corridor, for example, the lines are owned by Union Pacific, Burlington Northern, and Canadian National. Freight companies don't have incentive to invest in high-quality track, resulting in slower travel.

It all sounds pretty grim, but as we've pointed out before, there is reason for hope.

Continue reading »

Many top AFL-CIO officials see this presidential election as a make-or-break moment for the unions. So with an added sense of urgency and deeper pockets than ever before, they are meeting this week in Chicago to chart labor's role this campaign season. From an article in today's Tribune:

In terms of dollars and personnel, the labor group's election plans are its most ambitious, union officials said. They expect a quarter of a million volunteers to take part in 510 races on the federal and state level, the officials said.

The AFL-CIO plans to spend $53.8 million on election efforts and its member unions are expected to kick in an additional $200 million on local and national campaigns, officials said.

At the meeting the Executive Council is discussing a multi-pronged effort which involves highlighting John McCain's anti-union positions and simultaneously pushing back against smears about Obama. Most recently, the AFL-CIO sent out a mailing to 600,000 union households in swing states challenging anti-Obama lies and outlining the candidate's pro-worker positions.

The labor group also appears very conscious of the role race might play in winning over union voters, many of whom are older white men.

Continue reading »

Do you ever sit in traffic, car slowly inching forward, and wonder how much money you're losing as your fuel gauge moves towards empty? According to a new study commissioned by the Metropolitan Planning Council, the time you lose in traffic may actually cost you more than the gas.

The council estimates that the Chicago region loses $7.3 billion a year to traffic jams. And wasted man-hours are the major contributor. Greg Hinz explains:

The key finding is that, assuming that the time of someone stuck in traffic is worth an average of $14.76 an hour, the total value of wasted commuting time annually in the metropolitan area is $5.1 billion, with the typical driver losing an estimated 66 minutes a week to congestion. The remaining costs come in the form of wasted gasoline and diesel fuel, higher operating costs for freight and other businesses, and environmental damage.

Congestion and its costs are the worst in Cook County and Chicago, and generally far less in the collar counties, though Lake County is higher than other suburban areas, according to the report. But, in a surprise finding, most of the delays occur not on expressways but on arterial streets

In addition, the study claims that congestion costs Chicago's freight industry about $1 billion year and another $33 million annually in damage to the environment. While the report is short on answers, it does advocate one obvious solution that would decrease traffic and reduce unnecessary fuel consumption: a major investment in public transportation.

The Republican strategy in the 11th District this election year has been largely focused on depicting cement magnate Marty Ozinga as a blue-collar everyman. Indeed, Ozinga's own employees have been repeatedly used in political ads, testifying to his worth as a candidate. While it's fine for the campaign to point out that Marty has the support of some of the hundreds of people who work for Ozinga Bros. Cement, one has to wonder about the ethics of getting those who depend on you for a paycheck to appear in your campaign ads.

Take this campaign mailer posted today by Capitol Fax. It features a lifelong Ozinga Bros. employee, Ed Jongsma, standing in front of one of the company's cement trucks alongside the caption: "I don't trust politicians ... but I do trust Marty Ozinga. He's a good man and my friend." In his testimonial, Jongsma points out that Ozinga Bros. has "given me a paycheck for almost 30 years."

While there is no reason to doubt this man's sincerity, the fact that he relies on the candidate's company for his livelihood certainly colors his endorsement.

Meanwhile, if voters want a full picture of where Ozinga stands in regards to working Illinoisans, they might want to look into his own statements about labor laws. For instance, it was just a few months ago that Ozinga complained about the overly generous worker's compensation policies in the Prairie State.

A few weeks ago, Progress Illinois drew attention to 11th District GOP congressional candidate Marty Ozinga's misguided view that there are "very few people nowadays that have no health service at all." Ozinga's callous assessment of the U.S. health care crisis was based on the idea that anyone who can drag themselves to the emergency room will get some type of care.

Criticism of the remark included a pointed column from the Southtown Star's Kristen McQueary, who asked how Ozinga's apparent disregard for the uninsured jived with his self-declared Christian values. In a Star article published today, Ozinga's Democratic opponent, State Senator Debbie Halvorson, responded directly to the remark as well: "When I heard that, I was appalled. ... It proves how out of touch he is."

As detailed in the article, Halvorson grew up uninsured and watched her own mother suffer the indignities faced by Americans who can't afford health coverage. She recently highlighted her health care credentials before the Illinois Nurses Association in Kankakee:

According to her campaign, while in the state Senate, Halvorson worked to provide health insurance to uninsured children and veterans, create a first-in-the-nation program to provide affordable prescription drugs to seniors and the disabled, and require insurance companies to cover preventive care screenings like mammograms.

At the event in Kankakee, Halvorson laid out proposals to help reduce costs and improve health care including: allowing small businesses to bargain collectively to reduce health insurance premiums; expanding funding for the State Children's Health Insurance Program [SCHIP]; increasing funding for preventive care and screenings; ensuring that mental health ailments have the same coverage as physical ailments; and allowing Medicare to negotiate prices for prescription drugs.

Among the issues named by Halvorson, SCHIP is one that voters will want to look at closely in the run up to the election. On his website, Ozinga comes out forcefully against government involvement in providing health insurance. But state health care programs tend to be popular with voters, especially when that coverage is going to uninsured kids.

This month in Chicago Magazine, Ben Goldberger asks a question that many of us have wondered about perennial Republican candidate Jim Oberweis: after so many losses and in the face of unpopularity in his own party, what motivates the man to keep running?

Apparently Oberweis owes some of his sticktoittiveness to the support of his friends, one of whom outlined the ice-cream magnate's campaign strategy for his rematch against Rep. Bill Foster in the 14th District. In doing so, he inadvertently compared Oberweis to something that needs to be "flush[ed]":

"If elected, it is my belief that Jim would be a terrific congressman," said Robert Bonifas, the CEO of Alarm Detection Systems in Aurora and a longtime Oberweis friend and political donor. "Whether he is capable of providing a mental enema to the electorate to flush out the old Jim and instill the new Jim, I don't know."

You ready for that District 14?

We've been doing a lot of coverage lately on how higher fuel prices have changed the way Illinoisans get from here to there. Now comes this:

The Chicago Transit Authority plans to rip all seats out of some train cars during peak hours to make more room for riders leaving their autos at home because of $4-a-gallon gas. The standing-room-only cars, which will debut later this year, follow a 3.4 percent jump in train ridership in June from a year earlier. Bus usage gained 9.2 percent.

According to the article from Bloomberg, the North Central region of the country, including Chicago, has led the nation in declining automobile use. State lawmakers' decision earlier this year to give free rides to senior citizens has also bumped up ridership.

Beyond the Windy City, Dick Durbin's plan to re-invigorate rail travel nationwide got another show of support today, this time from editorial board of the State Journal-Register.

Since 1999 the payday loan industry has flooded state lawmakers with campaign contributions in an attempt to fend off efforts to reform predatory lending laws. No state politicians have benefited more from this windfall than those in Illinois, according to a new report (PDF) from the National Institute on Money in State Politics. The figures below illustrate how, during the four previous election cycles, Illinois lawmakers made nearly twice as much in contributions as lawmakers from Florida, the second largest recipient state:

Top Five Recipient States of Payday Industry Contributions, 1999-2006

Illinois: $2,521,510
Florida: $1,320,650
Georgia: $1,193,904
California: $1,152,323
Texas: $715,982

Part of the reason Illinois lawmakers are being targeted is because there are serious efforts in Springfield to reform the industry. Payday loan companies make money by trapping the economically disadvantaged in a cycle of debt through exorbitant interest rates and, in some cases, strong-arm collection tactics. As the report notes, Prairie State legislators have attempted numerous times to create broad safeguards for borrowers, but so far have been ineffective.

Nationwide, Republican state legislators received slightly more from the industry than Democrats. All party committees received more than $2.9 million in contributions since 2000, with "Republican Party committees receiving almost twice as much as Democratic Party committees." Here in Illinois, the most recent legislative effort to close a payday loan loophole was shelved until the fall, although the state's consumer protection agency is now cracking down on car title loans.

UPDATE: We've compiled a list of the top 20 recipients of predatory lending contributions in Illinois between 1999 and 2006. 

On Monday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that this year's "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico will be the second largest to date. A dead zone is an area of the ocean that cannot support marine life because rampant algae blooms suck all of the oxygen out of the water. This year, the affected area will cover 8,000 square miles.

While the Gulf of Mexico is a long way from the cornfields of Illinois, Midwestern agriculture is, in fact, contributing to this ecological disaster. As fertilizer from local farmland runs down the Mississippi and into the ocean, it encourages the growth of algae and, by extension, the dead zone. This is why a coalition of environmental groups in Illinois and eight other states petitioned the EPA yesterday to "set and enforce pollution standards in the Mississippi River basin and the Gulf of Mexico":

The groups said the EPA has dropped the ball in enforcing a rule it made in 1998, which required states to set standards for nitrogen and phosphorus pollution in the Mississippi River by 2003.

States have been slow to adopt such standards, prompting the groups to ask the EPA to intervene.

"Our feeling is there has been a dead zone at the EPA almost as big as in the Gulf of Mexico," said Jeff Grimes, assistant director of the water resources program at the New Orleans-based Gulf Restoration Network. "They have the responsibility to act. The deadline came and went a long time ago and most of our states don't have standards ... and aren't enforcing any limits."

Grimes warned that without limits that are enforced, the Gulf of Mexico could face an ecological catastrophe.

"We're looking at a total ecological shift in the gulf as far as what lives there," Grimes said.

Continue reading »

Yesterday I wrote a post on Dick Durbin's proposal to beef up Amtrak funding. With gas prices frequently breaking record highs and air travel getting more expensive and less convenient, Durbin is betting on a rail renaissance throughout the country. Over at Crain's, Greg Hinz takes up the Prairie State perspective and points out that ridership between Chicago and Springfield was up 67 percent last year and an additional 15 percent this year. He goes on to ask what a better Amtrak system would look like in Illinois. And the answer is enough to make a train geek's mouth water:

[T]he Illinois Department of Transportation says a good half-hour could be cut [between Chicago and Illinois], and service delays could be slashed, if about $10 million was spent on new signals, track sidings and the like.“That’s chump change,” says Rick Harnish, executive director of the Midwest High Speed Rail Assn., a citizens’ group. Indeed, $10 million maybe buys you a couple of extra exit ramps on the typical interstate highway.

For another $250 million, the magic sub-2½-hour service to Springfield is available, according to George Weber, acting chief of the rail bureau of the Illinois Department of Transportation. The bulk would go to build bridges over other rail tracks on the Southwest Side, something that would make neighbors quite happy. And another $125 million gets you St. Louis in four hours aboard trains moving 110 mph, Mr. Weber says.

Continue reading »