The Center for Tax and Budget Accountability (CTBA) is an Illinois group that provides information and analysis about local, state, and federal government tax and budget related issues.
Contents
- Leadership
- Unions
- Union PACs
- City of Chicago budget
- State of Illinois budget
- Public employee union benefits and pensions
- References
The group was founded in 2000. It is a self-described bipartisan, nonprofit advocacy think tank that works across ideological political lines. CTBA's end goal is social and economic justice. CTBA's approach is to come up with new policies that are "not only rigorous and evidence-based but would also bridge rather than reinforce ideological divides was both prescient—and crucial."
Leadership
Ralph Martire serves as CTBA's executive director. Martire previously served in the Obama Administration as an appointed member to the U.S. Department of Education Equity and Excellence Commission. The commission is a federal body that proposes ways to close educational achievement gaps.
Unions
On January 1, 2015, the Illinois Education Association awarded CTBA a $40,000 grant with the stated purpose of education reform and tax policy analysis.
Union PACs
Sources of funding reported by the Illinois State Board elections include:
Illinois PAC for Education (IPACE) is the political action committee of the Illinois Education Association, a state chapter of the National Education Association, a nationwide teacher's union. The purpose of IPACE is to elect people to the Illinois General Assembly, statewide offices, and local school boards.
COPE is the political action committee of the Illinois Federation of Teachers (IFT), an Illinois teacher's union. IFT has around 103,000 members. All the aforesaid funding came in the form of general operating grants with no strings attached as to findings or recommendations that CTBA would ultimately make in any given area, it being stated policy that all such findings/recommendations would bve based on evidence based best practice findings made by the Center's staff.
City of Chicago budget
In September 2015, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel told the Chicago city council that it had a choice: either raise property taxes by $543 million to pay for police and firefighter pensions, or layoff thousands of fire department and police department employees. CTBA, through Ralph Martire, responded by saying that Chicago residents would not like the tax increases. Martire criticized the city's spending habits under former mayor Richard Daley, specifically for not funding police and fire pension debt.
State of Illinois budget
Martire wrote an opinion article on behalf of CTBA in Crain's Chicago Business in 2013. Martire proposed reamortizing the state's unfunded pension-debt liability as a way to solve the root cause of the problem. Martire said, "It will take an annual level-dollar payment of around $7.2 billion to get the systems healthy—$300 million more than it would have been in 2013."
CTBA's proposed solution for Illinois' pension problem involves the following actions:
Public employee union benefits and pensions
On its webpage where it published an April 7, 2014 press release, CTBA refers to itself in the headline as a "union-backed group."
Martire wrote an opinion article published in the State Journal-Register and the Daily Herald where he calls for higher taxes to fund public employee union benefits. He referred to Governor Bruce Rauner's position in the Illinois budget standoff as a "firm, ideological commitment to curtailing collective bargaining rights." He also write, "The need for more revenue is so clear . . . the tax increases which the evidence indicates Illinois so sorely needs."