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Illinois population spreads out

May 1, 2011 / Dan / 0 Comments

The 2010 Census revealed a lot about the gradual moves that are shaking up Illinois. From Illinois Issues:

The population details — laid out in this year’s once-in-a-decade release of U.S. census numbers — show how Illinoisans are changing as a people. As the moving vans are dropping people off in Illinois’ suburbs, they are loading up families moving out of Chicago and rural areas downstate. We are becoming not only more suburban, but more diverse. Hispanic Illinoisans outnumber blacks for the first time; if not for the surge in Hispanic population, Illinois would hardly be growing at all.

The decennial snapshot from the census is perhaps the best portrait we have of the state as a whole. It illustrates how we are changing and what challenges we are soon likely to face. The growth of the outer suburbs puts stress on local infrastructure, such as roads, sewer pipes and school buildings, and affects regional and state resources, too. Likewise, the movement of African-Americans out of Chicago, the emptying of rural areas and the growth of Latinos in nearly every corner of the state will have lasting effects on Illinois politics and policy.

The migrations affect just about everything the state does. That is why understanding the Census is so important. But, of course, many people are most concerned about the effects on elections, which is why the Census occurs in the first place. I looked at that too.

Overall, the census numbers are bad news for Democrats. Over the decade, state House districts now held by Democrats lost a combined total of 87,000 people. Republican-controlled districts, on the other hand, gained nearly half a million people. Dozens of districts reflect that pattern. The clear trend is that Republican-held areas are growing, while Democratic districts are losing people.

Immigrant students win DREAM Act in Maryland but face opposition elsewhere

April 22, 2011 / Dan / 0 Comments

Maryland became the 11th state to offer in-state tuition to undocumented students, but Georgia regents barred unauthorized immigrants from attending the state’s top universities. The moves come in the wake of a major defeat for activists supporting unauthorized immigrants. From Stateline:

The DREAM Act failed in the U.S. Senate by a handful of votes last December, and the chances of it coming up again dropped dramatically with the Republican takeover of the U.S. House this January. Some of the energy previously directed toward the federal government has now been channeled to the state level.

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The fight over the federal DREAM Act encouraged dozens of undocumented students to reveal their status publicly. Many now are becoming vocal on the state level.

That was one of the biggest changes this year in Maryland, says Helen Melton, who pushed for in-state tuition rights on behalf of the immigrant advocacy group Casa de Maryland. “The students,” she says, “came out to support the bill just about every time something important was happening.” Many of those who spoke up were honor students in high school. When they told elected officials about their struggles to afford a college education, it was “really powerful,” Melton says.

But, of course, the fight over higher education is ancillary to the much larger issue.

Whatever most states do, there is no escaping the fact that without changes in federal law, college degrees will not help unauthorized immigrants find jobs in the United States. They will be unable to obtain legal work permits. Many continue to hold out hope that, despite the current absence of federal momentum, Congress will eventually change that policy.

Six immigration issues for states

April 2, 2011 / Dan / 0 Comments

Since large-scale efforts to overhaul federal immigration law faltered in Congress in 2006, states have taken an increasingly active role in the immigration debate.

The chief battleground has been Arizona, the chief entry point for migrants since the federal government tightened up border security in Texas and California. But with the foreign-born population climbing across the country, the topic of illegal immigration has emerged in nearly every state capitol.

The most contentious issues so far have been:

1. Cops on the immigration beat Well before Arizona passed Senate Bill 1070 in 2010, state and local officials argued over the role of local police — rather than federal authorities — in enforcing immigration laws. Many large cities once barred their cops from asking suspects and witnesses about their immigration status, but critics assailed the practice allowing “sanctuary cities.”

Initially, under the Bush administration, states and localities lined up to take part in a partnership with the federal government called 287(g). But demand quickly outpaced the Department of Homeland Security’s capacity to train and monitor all the local police departments that wanted to join. The agency began focusing instead on screening suspects already in jails and prisons and underwent a major overhaul under the Obama administration. Still, critics contend the process still leads to the deportation of low-level offenders.

The passage of Arizona’s law reignited fears that police would use racial profiling while enforcing immigration laws, even though the law now expressly forbids the practice.

That provision goes beyond nearly all other criminal laws in the United States by explicitly barring racial profiling, says Brewer spokesman Paul Senseman. Most other laws never even mention racial profiling, he says, because it’s already illegal and police are generally trusted to obey the law.

For Arizona cops, a high-profile dilemma (5/5/2010)

2. Crackdowns in the workplace Several states have tried to make sure that companies are not hiring unauthorized immigrants. Arizona was one of the first states to do so, but Oklahoma and Georgia also passed sweeping laws. The U.S. Supreme Court is now considering whether the Arizona law is too broad under federal law. Questions also remain over the effectiveness of the 2007 measure.

In fact, despite the dozens of raids, only two companies have ever been forced to close their doors under Arizona’s three-year-old employee verification law. The punishments in those cases were trivial: A Subway sandwich shop agreed to close on Easter and Thanksgiving, and a water park agreed to a 10-day suspension, but only after it already had gone out of business.

The Legal Arizona Workers Act may be tough, but even its supporters say it has been a disappointment. It faces plenty of opposition here in Arizona, especially among business owners and civil rights advocates.

Arizona employer law nets immigrants, not companies (11/30/2010)

3. Unauthorized immigrants behind the wheel In the middle of the decade, at least 10 states had no requirement that motorists be in the country legally to get a driver’s license. Today, only three states–New Mexico, Utah and Washington–allow unauthorized immigrants to drive.

The move to revoke driving privileges from unauthorized immigrants came in the wake of the federal Real ID law, which called for tougher rules for identification to prevent future terrorist attacks. But the more stringent requirements affect citizens as well as non-citizens.

Recently, Maine began requiring driver’s license holders to show they are in the country legally. Matthew Dunlap, who as secretary of state has overseen the transition, says the change has had no appreciable impact on the number of unlicensed or uninsured drivers on the road. Still, he says, “I do deal with angry citizens all of the time.”

Driver’s licenses for immigrants becoming rarer (7/2/2010)

4. In-state tuition and college admission While the DREAM Act has languished on Capitol Hill, 10 states have allowed undocumented students who attend local high schools to qualify for in-state tuition at public universities. Those policies have routinely come under attack but, unlike permission to drive, the in-state tuition policies have not been overturned.

In recent years, though, several states, particularly in the South, have sought to limit access to public universities and community colleges, even if the immigrant student paid full tuition.

The in-state tuition policies have also been attacked in court, but none of the legal challenges thus far has been successful.

Children who are in the country illegally are entitled to free school from kindergarten through high school, according to a 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Plyler v. Doe. But the federal law bars states from providing “a postsecondary education benefit” to undocumented students that they don’t also offer to any other U.S. citizen — whether or not they live in the state.

Defenders of California’s law say in-state tuition is not a “benefit” under the law — as a scholarship would be — because it is not a monetary award.

In-state tuition law faces challenges (12/12/2008)

5. Birthright citizenship Emboldened by the success in enacting SB 1070, several influential Arizona lawmakers pressed to change the rules that allow all children born in the United States, including those whose parents are in the country illegally, to become citizens.

The effort in Arizona, spearheaded by longtime anti-illegal immigration crusader and incoming state Senate President Russell Pearce, is remarkable for two reasons. First, it moves the focus of the immigration debate from those who are in the country illegally to their children, who currently become American citizens if they are born in the United States. Second, Arizona will not be alone in questioning the principle of “birthright citizenship,” because lawmakers in at least a dozen more states also have agreed to push similar legislation.

Arizona’s next immigration debate: babies born in U.S. (12/16/2010)

6. National Guard troops on the border Frequently, politicians call for an increased presence of National Guard troops on the U.S.-Mexican border. Military forces are only allowed to operate in a limited capacity there, but usually they aid the Border Patrol and local law enforcement with logistic support. They helped erect sections of the border fence, handle administrative tasks and detect migrants and smugglers.

Both Presidents Bush and Obama have ordered National Guard deployments to the border, but governors can also call in the units. Texas Governor Rick Perry and former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson made regular use of the Guard. I asked Richardson how the deployments helped the situation the border. Here’s what he told me:

What the National Guard does is, one, their physical presence on its own is a deterrent. Secondly, they are very effective in terms of intelligence gathering, setting up… observation of the trails, some of the reconnaissance and detection equipment. They have limited roles. They cannot apprehend anyone. But if you ask the Border Patrol what their biggest assets are, they say, ‘National Guardsmen.’”

New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson on the issues (6/17/2010)

Unpaid state bills shift burden to local governments

October 21, 2010 / Dan / 0 Comments

The third installment of my three-part Stateline series “Behind on Bills” looks at the fall-out when Illinois and New York state ran late in reimbursing counties and other local governments.

Anthony Picente decided he’d had enough. The state of New York had fallen $34 million behind on payments to Oneida County, the Upstate county around Utica where Picente is the top elected official. Picente was counting on the money to reimburse the county for services it provides that are in high demand these days: job training, food stamps and other key pieces of the social safety net.

By July, Picente hadn’t seen a check from Albany in months. He was still waiting for reimbursements for money the county spent in December. So Picente decided to fight back. Counties in New York State are expected to make their own weekly payments back to the state, in order to help pay for the state’s Medicaid program. Picente sent a letter to Governor David Paterson with a simple message: We won’t pay Albany until Albany pays us.

Ultimately, the state had the better hand in the stand-off, and it eventually paid back the county. But the late payments still took their toll.

“Part of the issue is the state, through all its budget talks, has been talking about shutting down state government,” Picente told Stateline this summer. “In essence, what they’ve done is slowly shut down county government.”

Of course, Illinois localities also suffered. Take Hardin County, in deep southern Illinois.

Money became so tight this May that the county commission laid off all seven county employees at the courthouse who weren’t elected officials. In fact, the elected officials thought they would have to go without pay, too, until the state sent some of the money that it owed. But the county still is in crisis mode. The county was able to re-hire a janitor and some office staff on a part-time basis only because David Robinson, one of the county commissioners, gave up his salary for three months. For the upcoming election, part-time staffers are coming in on their days off to make sure the paperwork is done in time. There is no money set aside to pay election judges to monitor polling stations.

Nearly all county services are getting shortchanged, but some of the most striking examples deal with cops and courts. Criminal defendants have requested jury trials in routine cases, rather than bench trials, because they know the county can’t afford to spend a few thousand dollars to pay jurors. In one case, the county prosecutor had to ask to delay the trial from May until November, when the county hopes it will have more money on hand to pay jurors. In order to keep cases from stacking up too much, the recently-retired wife of State’s Attorney Roger Ralph has come into the office to help her husband file charges. Staffing at the sheriff’s office, Ralph says, has been reduced to the point that the county is “barely able to say there’s an officer on duty at all times.”

What’s more, Hardin County is delinquent in paying its own bills, piling on to the problems other units of local government are having getting their own payments from Springfield. In her office, Mary Ellen Denton, Hardin County’s elected clerk and recorder, has a stack of unpaid bills totaling $25,000. Almost all of the payments are owed to other government entities: More than $10,000 for the regional superintendent of schools, about $5,000 for a planning commission that handles local economic development and another $5,000 to a nearby county for housing prisoners.

On campus, a long wait for state checks

The second installment of my three-part Stateline series “Behind on Bills” addresses how students and universities coped with lengthy waits for state money in Illinois and California.

Lately, the biggest obstacle before La Madrid’s education has been the budget standoff in Sacramento. For 100 days this summer and fall, California operated without a budget. The political stalemate over how to close a massive deficit prevented the state from paying $8.3 billion in bills — a backlog that included La Madrid’s state financial aid check. The state’s community colleges estimate that 41,000 students, or 60 percent of Cal Grant recipients at community colleges, have been left hanging in the same situation this fall.

Without a Cal Grant, La Madrid has been stressing about money as much as his studies. He’s been borrowing groceries from his roommate and has contemplated taking a second job. He has several friends facing similar hardships. “We rely on the state for the grants,” La Madrid says. “I just cross my fingers and hope it comes soon. It’s pretty much my life.”

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The delays were not the result of a policy choice to cut back on financial aid or to minimize the role of community colleges. Indeed, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who attended Santa Monica City College in the 1960s, told a national group of community college administrators last year that the schools are “institutions of hope” and could lead the country out of the recession. But dysfunctional politics around California’s budget are making it difficult for the colleges to fulfill that promise.

Of course, Illinois also put colleges in a tough spot.

Cash flow is so crimped that as of the end of September, the state of Illinois owed its community colleges and universities close to $600 million. That’s more than one-third of the state’s entire budget for higher ed.

On the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago, it’s easy to see the effects. The university’s flagship building, 28-story University Hall, is literally falling apart. The concrete skin of the building is flaking off, exposing the rusted steel of rebar beneath. Canopies surround the building to keep pieces of falling concrete from hitting students and staffers on their way in. University Hall is one of three buildings on campus surrounded by protective platforms.

UIC officials aren’t planning on fixing up the buildings anytime soon. Checks from Springfield trickle in as many as six months late — the pattern is too unreliable for doing long-term planning. So administrators are trying to keep cash on hand to simply make payroll and keep the university functioning. Other universities have struggled even to do that. This spring, Southern Illinois University, then owed $140 million by the state, started planning for the possibility of shutting down its four campuses in the middle of the school year.

Illinois lawmakers had no money to alleviate the problem, so they gave colleges the authority to borrow on their own to ease the pressure.

In Illinois, late payments fray the safety net

October 19, 2010 / Dan / 0 Comments

The first installment of my three-part Stateline series “Behind on Bills” focuses on how after-school programs, domestic violence shelters and other social service providers are coping with Illinois’ inability to pay its bills on time. In some cases, they must wait half a year or more to get paid for work they have already done.

Service providers, vendors, universities and others who do business with the state are struggling to stay open, let alone plan for the future, in an environment where they never know when their next check will arrive from Springfield. Many have resorted to layoffs or letting their own bills go unpaid, trickling the economic impact down to businesses that have no direct connection to the state.

During the recession and its aftermath, of course, almost every state has had to make deep budget cuts, and those cuts have taken a toll on services. What Illinois is experiencing is different. The turmoil at the Youth Service Project is not a result of policy choices made by political leaders to cut back on youth violence prevention. Rather, it’s a result of choices they haven’t made. By failing to balance revenues with expenditures, lawmakers have turned their budget problem into a cash-flow problem, pushing decisions of how to spread the state’s fiscal pain to the governor’s budget office, which prioritizes payments, and to state Comptroller Dan Hynes, who writes the checks.

The state’s huge pile of unpaid bills doesn’t show up as borrowing on its balance sheet, but that’s essentially what it is. Illinois pays only minimal interest for late payments, and that money comes well after it cuts checks to its vendors, service providers, universities and school districts. So the state is essentially taking out low-interest loans from groups like the Youth Service Project. Martin-Ocasio says the arrangement with the state basically makes contractors “involuntary lenders.”

This goes far beyond an accounting problem. It means cuts in services to Illinoisans who rely on them.

In the suburb of Elgin, the Community Crisis Center reduced its staff from 72 people to 62. The group relies on volunteer work from former staffers to help victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, along with homeless people. Stress is high for the remaining staff, because of lengthy furloughs and increased workloads, says executive director Gretchen Vapnar. “Some of my staff are making $26,000 a year, and they have to give up a month of salary,” she says.

Long delays in state payments create a snowball effect that makes the job of Family Rescue, the Community Crisis Center and other related organizations even harder. The nature of the safety net is that many programs are tied together and only work if all the pieces are in place. When Family Rescue (which runs a domestic violence shelter) tries to move a woman and her children out of a shelter to a more stable setting, the agency relies on other nonprofits to provide medical services or job training to help the family along. But the other agencies are strapped for cash too, laying off staff and reducing services while they wait for their own payments from Springfield to come through.

Lawmakers passed a major tax increase in early 2011, but that money hardly put a dent in the stack of unpaid bills, because it was needed elsewhere. The Associated Press and other news organizations ran a series called “Deadbeat Illinois” in the fall of 2011 confirming that many of the same problems Stateline documented a year earlier remain very real.

Beyond California: States in Fiscal Peril

December 11, 2009 / Dan / Comments Off

I was the project leader for the Pew Center on the States’ November report “Beyond California: States in Fiscal Peril.” That meant I helped conceive, edit, coordinate and publicize the report. Of course, I also did quite a bit of reporting and writing. My biggest contributions on that end were the Arizona and Illinois profiles and the executive summary.

California’s problems are in a league of their own. But the same pressures that drove it toward fiscal disaster are wreaking havoc in a number of states, with potentially damaging consequences for the entire country.

This examination by the Pew Center on the States looks closely at nine states, in addition to California, that are particularly affected. All of California’s neighbors—Arizona, Nevada and Oregon—and fellow Sun Belt member Florida were severely hit by the bursting of the housing bubble and landed on Pew’s top 10 list of recession-stricken states facing a similar set of fiscal difficulties. A Midwestern cluster comprising Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin emerged, too, as did the Northeastern states of New Jersey and Rhode Island.

These states’ budget troubles can have dramatic consequences for their residents: higher taxes, layoffs or furloughs of state workers, longer waits for public services, more crowded classrooms, higher college tuition and less support for the poor or unemployed. But they also pose challenges for the country as a whole. The 10 states account for more than a third of America’s population and economic output. And actions taken by state governments to balance their budgets—such as tax increases and drastic
spending cuts—can slow down the nation’s economic recovery.

The entire report (PDF) is 65 pages long, but the Arizona and Illinois pieces provide a good sample of my contributions.

The report generated significant media coverage. Among the outlets that covered the report were PBS’ NewsHour (vide0), ABC News (story), Fox Business (video), the Financial Times, Christian Science Monitor (story) and dozens of state and local outlets. Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn (D) even called in to talk with my director on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal.

States weigh in as feds prepare to spend billions on broadband for remote areas

November 15, 2009 / Dan / 0 Comments

In this magazine-style piece, I showed how lack of broadband access affects rural communities. Of course, the news peg was a deadline to apply for money from the federal stimulus package for broadband.

With the state’s help, an increasing number of residents in rural Washington County in Down East Maine are using high-speed Internet connections to run their blueberry farms and lobster fleets, educate their children and communicate with doctors from remote areas.

But it’s a large county and its 34,000 residents are spread out: At twice the size of Rhode Island, it takes four hours to cross in a car, and yet there’s only one traffic light. That means it’s slow going for local Internet provider, Axiom Technologies, which is working town by town to set up wireless access points, sometimes serving as few as 12 households per connection.

Axiom maxed out financially some time ago to expand on its own, even as other towns asked to join the broadband network. The state stepped in and awarded Axiom grants of $750,000 over the last three years, said CEO Susan Corbett.

“With 38 additional towns, by the end of 2009, we will have created an umbrella over all 2,500 square miles” of the county, Corbett said.

Go here for the full story on Stateline.org.

A spectacular collapse

June 11, 2009 / Dan / 0 Comments

My assignment for this magazine story was simple: Explain how the recession started.

To tell the story, Illinois Issues combed through congressional testimony, position papers, media accounts and data from federal and business sources. What emerges is a common thread that explains how we got into this uncommon recession.

The story of the collapse takes many twists and turns, with fateful swings through Wall Street and Washington, D.C. Those are the places where the economy picked up steam, thanks to the political momentum, financial wizardry, insider deals, lax oversight and loose money they created. And that’s where most of the fingers are pointing now.

But the main reason for the recession is that too many people bought houses they couldn’t afford, and everybody was banking on those houses.

The whole Illinois Issues story is here.

Smart reporting. Great writing.

Author: Dan (page 2 of 2)