Springfield News

  • While Lawmakers grilled Illinois Department of Children and Family Services officials and representatives of a Medicaid managed care organization charged with providing 17,100 foster children with health care by Nov. 1, a task force charged with overseeing that very responsibility sat empty. 

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  • Illinois Department of Children and Family Services Director Marc Smith. [Submitted]
    Staff at all levels of the Illinois’ beleaguered Department of Children and Family Services is not responsive to calls, several stakeholders have told The Daily Line, pointing to major communications issues as one reason for the agency’s troubles in recent years.

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  • A simmering feud between State Sen. Robert Martwick, top, and 41st Ward Democratic Commiteeperson Tim Heneghan has boiled over into an all-out war. [Submitted]
    A simmering feud between two Northwest Side Democratic party leaders has boiled over into an all-out war.

    Tim Heneghan, who is the 41st Ward Democratic committeeperson, tweeted his support on Thursday for Chicago Police Sgt. Danny O’Toole, who is mounting a primary challenge against newly-minted State Sen. Robert Martwick (D-Chicago).

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  • 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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