Phil Kadner. Quinn whiff’s on pension question.

– Phil Kadner is a columnist for the Southtown Star.

It seemed like a simple question for the governor of Illinois.

Tony Denovellis, market president for Midland States Bank in New Lenox, said his wife is a retired schoolteacher and is worried about her pension. Could the governor say something that would make her stop worrying so much?

Gov. Pat Quinn, speaking at a Chicago Southland Chamber of Commerce luncheon, replied that his mother, 96, is a retired teacher who lives on a small pension.

“She was born before women had the right to vote,” Quinn said, although that seemed irrelevant to the issue at hand.

Then he said the “pension issue is very tough,” explaining that for 40 years Illinois lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats, failed to make the required payments into the state pension systems.

Quinn started talking about “protections in law” for “people like your wife” and how the state recently passed a pension reform bill that is now facing a legal challenge in the courts.

“We have to have pension reform,” the governor said.

After the luncheon, I asked Denovellis if Quinn had answered his question.

“No,” Denovellis said. “No, he didn’t.”

What was it exactly that his wife was worried about?

After 35 years of paying into her pension system, he said, she’s worried that her pension will disappear.

If Quinn loses the election in November, it will likely be because people in Illinois are tired of the Democrats controlling the Illinois Senate, House and governor’s mansion, are fed up with political corruption and want to send a message that they want things to change.

But Quinn’s response to that question on Monday afternoon demonstrated how ineffective he is on the campaign stump. Here’s what he could have said: “There is no plan to take away the pensions of retired teachers who have faithfully paid into their pension system and devoted their lives to educating our children.”

Just to make sure that was the case, I contacted the Illinois Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union. I asked if there was any plan that had been passed in the Legislature, or was being seriously considered, that would take away the pensions of retired teachers.

“No,” said Charles McBarron, a spokesman for the IEA.

Quinn, who had already told the audience that “my opponent’s” budget plan would result in a
$4 billion cut to education funding, could have also mentioned how rolling back the 2011 income tax increase as of Jan. 1 would mean less money to pay off the state’s huge pension debt.

He could have added that Bruce Rauner, the Republican candidate for governor, has talked about shifting current teachers, and other state employees, from traditional pensions to 401(k) plans.

If you do that, you further reduce the amount of money coming into the pension funds in the future.

If you both cut taxes and remove current employees from the pension fund, retired teachers and other state workers may indeed have something to worry about.

That’s not fiction. That’s fact.

That’s not negative campaigning or a scare tactic. It’s giving voters a chance to find a distinction between two candidates running for the state’s top office.

But Quinn did not address the question directly and ended up talking about his candidate for lieutenant governor, Paul Vallas, and how he is an expert on education and budgets.

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