Springfield News

  • A firm that emits the same chemical thought to cause cancer at the center of the fight over Sterigenics International Inc.’s Willowbrook plant has gotten $19.8 million in state tax credits since 2008, according to an analysis by The Daily Line

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    Nineteen children who had recently been on the Department of Children and Family Services’ radar have died in just the first 11 weeks of the 2020 fiscal year, according to the agency’s inspector general.

    Those deaths came after a particularly tumultuous year for the department, in which 124 children, whose family had some sort of involvement with DCFS within the previous year died during the 2019 fiscal year.

  • State Rep. Sara Feigenholtz (D-Chicago), who has served in the Illinois House since 1995, will have at least two Democratic primary challengers to contend with in March — a strange intra-party fight over a seat whose occupant has handily won for the last 25 years. 

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  • Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul is one of 54 attorneys general who have urged federal officials to crack down on robocalls. [Heather Cherone/The Daily Line]

    Your cellphone rings from a number you don’t recognize. Reluctantly, you pick it up and discover it’s an automated call from your credit card company, warning you that someone has fraudulently used your card to buy 10 plane tickets to Singapore. You won’t have to pay the charges. Whew!

    Amid state and federal efforts to crack down on scam robocalls, legitimate robocallers worry that calls like this one will be blocked too.

  • The technology that Illinois’ Departments of Human Services and Healthcare and Family Services officials use to determine eligibility has been improperly calibrated for six years, which may have resulted in overpayment for programs like welfare assistance and food stamps, according to a recent audit.

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  • The first two months of the 2020 fiscal year have yielded a mixed bag in terms of revenues, according to a new report from the Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability. 

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  • Illinois Supreme Court Justice Lloyd Karmeier is reaching the end of his three-year term as chief justice of the court — a term marked by forces from the other two branches of government, he wrote in a newsletter published last week. 

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  • When Illinois and Michigan announced a first-of-its-kind interstate agreement to share cloud technology to manage both states’ Medicaid rolls in the summer of 2013 — just as Illinois’ Medicaid program was about to expand as part of the Affordable Care Act — the two states were lauded for their innovative idea that promised to save both states money.

    But an audit released last month from Auditor General Frank Mautino’s office reveals that Illinois has not been upholding its end of the bargain, and places part of the blame on the Department of Healthcare and Family Services, which manages Medicaid, as well as the Department of Human Services, the Department of Children and Family Services and the Department on Aging.

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  • As Gov. JB Pritzker approaches the nine-month mark in office, he has appointed 225 people to key posts within his administration and to state boards and commissions — a diverse group that’s more than 41 percent female and 44 percent people of color. 

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  • A pair of reports out from Auditor General Frank Mautino’s office found additional  issues with the Department of Innovation and Technology’s Enterprise Resource Planning system, zeroing in on lack of controls within the system that’s supposed to centralize Illinois’ computer and financial systems after decades of separate systems at each state agency.

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