HAPPY FATHER’S DAY
DIAMOND DAD
June 15, 2014 • $1.50
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Sons follow footsteps with father’s Neil Diamond tribute band / Planit Style 8-9 NWHerald.com
THE ONLY DAILY NEWSPAPER PUBLISHED IN McHENRY COUNTY
Domino effect Student debt weighing on young Americans’ net worth
By STEPHEN Di BENEDETTO sdibenedetto@shawmedia.com Responsible for paying her way through college, Jill Weidner lately has fallen behind on paying down $36,000 in student loans – a top priority for her since graduating from Northern Illinois University in 2011. Weidner already moved back home with her parents in Marengo, delayed a new car purchase, avoided pricey vacations and found a full-time job upon graduation to pay down a sizable chunk of her student debt.
With $10,000 left to be paid, Weidner’s financial juggling act has been complicated lately by her own wedding plans and saving for a down payment on a house. The newly-hired fitness, wellness and sports director at Sage YMCA said she would like to save more, but she realizes her obligations. “Financial stability is about decision making,” Weidner said. “It’s not about how much you make or how much you owe. It’s about the decisions you make with the money that you have.”
Student debt, coupled with other financial decisions, are increasingly weighing on the economic fortunes of young adults. A recent Pew Research analysis found that young, college-educated households without any student debt have seven times the typical net worth than the same households with student debt. The Pew report also found that households headed by an adult age 40 and younger with student loan obligations has on average $137,000 in overall
debt, which includes credit cards, mortgages and car loans. The overall debt load is about twice as much than similar households with no student debt, the Pew report found. The national analysis comes at a time when student loan debt in the United States has exceeded $1 trillion and has caused concern about its effects on the middle class. As part of a midterm election strategy built around those individuals, President
See DEBT, page A4
Complete forecast on page A12
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County staff to start work on ’15 budget By KEVIN P. CRAVER
Sarah Nader – snader@shawmedia.com
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kcraver@shawmedia.com
Jill Weidner, Sage YMCA fitness, wellness and sports director, makes a phone call Tuesday in Crystal Lake. Weidner has paid off nearly $26,000 on her student loans since graduating Northern Illinois University in 2011. She has held off on other purchases, like a new car and house, while also living with her parents at their home in Marengo. She has $10,000 remaining on her student loans, as she tries to save for a wedding and a down payment for a house.
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WOODSTOCK – McHenry County staff tentatively will start preparing a 2015 budget that again keeps the property tax levy flat and rejects the inflationary increase it is entitled to under the tax cap. But it also will develop a proposed set of guidelines to help the County Board decide in future years whether or not to take it. County Board members gave the direction to staff at a Committee of the Whole meeting Friday, which the board convenes each spring before work starts in earnest on the following year’s budget. A formal vote to adopt the process and assumptions by which the 2015 budget will be developed likely will take place next month. If the County Board holds firm, 2015 will be the third consecutive year that it has chosen not to increase the levy, recognizing the need to hold the line on taxes on behalf of struggling taxpayers. It’s on that note that staff proposed developing guidelines to determine when collecting an increase would be justified. “Could we create a policy on this issue other than a subjective political decision you all have to bear? I don’t envy you for that,” County Administrator Peter Austin asked board members. The tax cap law, which was meant to limit runaway property tax bills by limiting annual levy increases to the rate of inflation, had an unforeseen effect when property
“Could we create a policy on this issue other than a subjective political decision you all have to bear? I don’t envy you for that.” Peter Austin County administrator
values started falling. When they decline, a scenario lawmakers never considered, the tax cap helps governments by ensuring that they can collect the inflationary rate if they so choose. Irate taxpayers discovered that their tax bills were staying the same or increasing despite the fact that home values had plummeted with the bursting of the housing bubble. The rate of inflation for 2014 that governments will be able to apply to next year’s tax levies is 1.5 percent, according to the Illinois Department of Revenue. County Board members were split on the idea of creating parameters for future years. While those open to the concept proposed such markers as the rise or fall of assessed value and the state of the county’s reserves, others expressed concerns that the policy could create a mindset of justifying the need for more taxes rather than keeping
See BUDGET, page A4
ANALYSIS
Turmoil blurring, removing Mideast nation borders By LEE KEATH and RYAN LUCAS The Associated Press CAIRO – Working in secret, European diplomats drew up the borders that have defined the Middle East’s nations for nearly a century – but now civil war, sectarian bloodshed and leadership failures threaten to rip that map apart. In the decades since independence, Arab governments have held these constructs together, in part by imposing an autocratic hand, despite the sometimes combustible mix of peoples within their
More inside For more on Iraq, see page B7.
borders. But recent history – particularly the three years of Arab Spring turmoil, has unleashed old allegiances and hatreds that run deep and cross borders. The animosity between Shiites and Sunnis, the rival branches of Islam, may be deepest of all. The unrest is redefining Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Libya – nations born after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Already quasi-states are
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forming. For the al-Qaida breakaway group that overran parts of Iraq this week, the border between that country and Syria, where it also is fighting, may as well not even be there. The group, known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, wants to establish a Shariah-ruled mini-state bridging both countries, in effect uniting a Sunni heartland across the center of the Mideast. Other potential de facto states are easy to see on the horizon. A Kurdish one in northern Iraq – and perhaps another in northeast Syria.
A rump Syrian state based around Damascus, neighboring cities and the Mediterranean coast, the heartland of President Bashar Assad’s minority Alawite sect. A Shiite-dominated Iraq truncated to Baghdad and points south. Fawaz Gerges, a professor at the London School of Economics, sees an ongoing, violent process to reshape government systems that have been unable to address sectarian and ethnic differences and provide for their publics. “The current order is in
See MIDEAST, page A4
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Severance for accused teacher
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$27K payout on table for D-200 teacher accused of inappropriately touching two girls / A3 BUSINESS
Prairie Ridge falls short Wolves settle for 4th place in Class 4A baseball state tournament loss against South Elgin / C1
AP photo
This image posted on a militant news Twitter account Thursday shows militants from the al-Qaida-inspired Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant removing part of the soil barrier on the Iraq-Syria borders and moving through it.
Happy Father’s Day
Winter slowed construction Harsh weather has set back construction on the $247M expansion of Advocate Good Shepherd Hospital, but officials think the time can be made up / D1
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