Letters: Ensure schools, day care facilities have lead-free water

SHARE Letters: Ensure schools, day care facilities have lead-free water
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(Mark Lawton/Sun-Times Media)

Last spring, my office and the Illinois Environmental Council drafted a bill to address the fact that many Illinois children have rates of lead exposure significantly higher than the national average.

The CDC says there is no safe level of lead to ingest. The devastating impacts of lead exposure on young children are well known and often irreversible; they suffer lifelong intellectual, emotional and behavioral problems.

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This legislation would have elementary schools and day cares test their drinking water. Many school districts are already doing this testing and have discovered alarming rates of lead contamination. Results from Chicago Public Schools show over a third of schools tested had water sources that contained lead.

Yet not all schools and day cares have performed testing because critics say it costs too much and is sure to reveal larger and more expensive problems.

The testing is only an average of $15 per water sample, and there are many inexpensive and immediate solutions, including shutting off the tainted water source and asking parents to send their child to school with a bottle of water.

But the bill got stalled in Springfield by opponents. Delaying the bill and refusing to test is at best a short-sighted strategy and at worst a complete disregard of our duty to protect children.

Lead testing is a simple and inexpensive way to immediately identify and prevent serious, long-term and expensive problems that otherwise will cost families, schools and government much, much more.

It is unconscionable that we are not doing all we can to protect young children and infants from dangerous lead exposure. It’s past time for the Governor, his agencies and the Legislature to agree to do something easy and helpful for our children’s future.

Lisa Madigan, Illinois attorney general

Trolls run amok

Great editorial and columns by Lynn Sweet and Jesse Jackson this week and Neil Steinberg’s recent columns about fact-free stories. Somehow we need to get out in front of all these lies. The trolls have run amok, spewing their outrageous garbage, seemingly intent on bringing our country to its knees. Enough!

Tony Galati, Lemont

Soft-drink usury

Have alderman and county commissioners been indicted yet for usury ? Twelve-packs of soft drinks are typically on sale for $3.33. Regular city sales tax at 10.25 percent equals $0.34; the city surcharge on soft drinks of 3.0  percent equals $0.10; and the county $0.01 per ounce tax equals $ 1.44. That’s a total tax of $1.88 on a$ 3.33 purchase, or a tax rate of 56.5 percent.

And the county claims dietary reasons for the tax, but then includes diet drinks.

When will enough be enough ?

Tom Justic, South Loop

Too muyh rhetoric

Gov. Rauner stated that political rhetoric doesn’t affect political talks. Yet the governor vetoed much needed money to CPS because he was upset about comments made by senate president John CUllerton. That seems to imply that GOP rhetoric doesn’t affect anything, but Democratic rhetoric does? It’s just my opinion that for two years all we have gotten here in Illinois from the present governor is rhetoric. The time is long passed due for both sides to stop talking and begin doing things for the betterment of the people of this state.

Daniel Pupo, Bellwood

Disappointing veto

As a retired member of the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund I was greatly disappointed by the actions and words of Gov, Bruce Rauner when he vetoed SB 2822 on Thursday. His veto message was that he could not support this bill until it was part of a true pension reform.

I fully support pension reform, but I think that the governor has misunderstood where the reform should begin. Chicago residents have a separate levy for the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund that was recently reintroduced in order to fund Chicago teachers pension. (It also existed before 1995 until Mayor Richard M. Daley had the Legislature direct pension payments to the Chicago Board of Education.) Suburban and downstate school districts have no such levy.

Although Chicago has about 18 percent of the teachers in the state of Illinois, last year it received less that .33 percent (1/3 of 1 percent) in state funding. Last year the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund received $12,186,100, the Illinois Teachers Retirement System received $3,741,802,146. That equates to: Chicago Teachers Pension Fund gets less than half a penny for each dollar that TRS receives from the state. Chicago’s Magnificent Mile and Little Village are the top providers of revenue through sales tax in the state of Illinois. If the Chicago Teachers Pension fund received its justifiable state allocation of funding, then it could return to the funding level it had in the 1990s (94 percent) and early 2000s (92 percent) That’s what I would consider real “pension reform.”

John P. Reilly, Edgewater

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