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Ald. Pawar Rips Gov. Rauner on City School Funding: 'He's a Bad Person'

By Patty Wetli | June 2, 2016 3:22pm | Updated on June 3, 2016 10:52am
 Gov. Bruce Rauner's vendetta against the
Gov. Bruce Rauner's vendetta against the "Chicago machine" is going to break CPS, Ald. Ameya Pawar said.
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DNAinfo/Patty Wetli; Scott Olson/Getty Images

LINCOLN SQUARE — With Chicago Public Schools facing the potential of not opening in the fall, Ald. Ameya Pawar (47th), whose ward is home to some of the top performing schools in the city, unloaded on Gov. Bruce Rauner, calling him a "terrible person" for failing Chicago's students.

"Public schools are the backbone of our neighborhoods," Pawar, said Thursday in an interview, adding that, as alderman, he has prioritized the ward's schools throughout his five-year tenure.

"In our ward, the property values are directly linked to our schools," he said.

The uncertainty surrounding CPS has the alderman worried that middle- and upper middle-class families will flee the city in search of stability for their children.

"I don't think he knows what he's doing," Pawar said of Rauner. "What message does it send that the governor has such a vendetta against the Speaker [Michael Madigan], the Senate President [John Cullerton] and the unions that he's willing to break the third-largest school system in the country?

"I don't think anyone anticipated Rauner would be such a demagogue," the alderman said. "At some point you have to govern ... and governing means working with people you don't like."

Illinois lawmakers and the governor failed to reach agreement on a budget for the second year running, placing school funding in jeopardy.

Barnstorming Downstate earlier this week, Rauner called a rejected school funding plan a "billion-dollar Chicago bailout."

According to a report in the Tribune, the governor said: "The Senate and the House were competing with each other: Who can spend more to bail out Chicago, with your tax dollars from southern Illinois and central Illinois, and Moline and Rockford and Danville? The communities of this state, who are hardworking families, pay the taxes. The taxes should go into our communities, not into the Chicago political machine."

Pawar said the governor's framing of the issue was offensive, and strategically divisive, using "Chicago" the same way presidential candidate Donald Trump uses "immigrants."

"We're going to blame 'those people,'" Pawar said.

"To say Chicago kids are part of the Chicago political machine? He's getting people to react to their most base instincts," the alderman said. "At the end of the day, these are still kids."

The governor has said that the city system is burdened by "financial mismanagement, patronage, too much bureaucracy [and] misappropriation of funds." He argues that the Illinois Board of Education should take over CPS and that the state would stabilize the system and set it up to run more efficiently in the future, providing a better deal for taxpayers.

Pawar contrasted Rauner's behavior with that of former Gov. Jim Edgar, whom the alderman became acquainted with as a member of the inaugural class of the bipartisan Edgar Fellows Program in 2012. Edgar led the fellows on a field trip to a farm outside Champaign, pointing out that the farm's grain would be traded on the futures market in Chicago, according to Pawar.

"We're all Illinoisans — he made that crystal clear," Pawar said. "We're a state, we're in this together."

Rauner, by comparison, seems to hold portions of Illinois in contempt, the alderman said.

"Who applies for a job hating the company he wants to work for?" Pawar asked. "I think he's a bad person."

Though the alderman said he hoped threats to shut down CPS were nothing more than political posturing, he remains unsure of Rauner's end game.

"He's so angry and petulant, I don't think he knows what he wants," said Pawar.

"I'm praying there's going to be a deal," the alderman said. "But if the governor doesn't get his act together, he's going to break CPS. He breaks it — he owns it."

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