Kurt Summers, Chief of Staff, Participates in Bloomberg State and Municipal Conference

Kurt Summers, Chief of Staff to Toni Preckwinkle, will participate in a Bloomberg State and Municipal Conference with other Chief Executives at 10:45 a.m. today.

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Overview:

10:45 am
NEW FISCAL SHERIFFS IN TOWN

The City of Chicago and Cook County operated for generations as separate fiefdoms joined mainly by their reputation for graft and employing armies of patronage workers. The new age of fiscal austerity has forced two blunt-talking, rookie political executives – Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Cook County President Toni Preckwinkle – to work together like never before to address the litany of economic challenges bequeathed to them. For the chief executive of the nation’s second-largest county, that included a $487 million deficit and a jail system bloated with 1,000 nonviolent offenders. For the mayor of the nation’s third-largest city, it’s more than $15 billion in unfunded pension obligations that recently prompted Moody’s Investors Service to put a negative outlook on Chicago’s credit. Emanuel, whose biggest challenge is to find new sources of revenue, is pushing a public-private partnership to upgrade buildings, transportation and utilities without going back on his campaign pledge not to privatize city assets the way his predecessor, Richard Daley, did with Chicago’s parking meters. Preckwinkle has laid off 800 employees and taken the politically risky step of urging the release of nonviolent inmates, most of them drug addicts. How are these two progressive pragmatists finding new ways to govern in this age of austerity? With declining populations and tax bases, how can they attract the investment needed to make the region thrive? Can their partnership in making city and county government work more efficiently be a laboratory for American metropolitan areas? And where is the opportunity amid this tumult for distressed investors?

Speakers:
Laurence L. Gottlieb, Chairman and CEO, Fundamental Advisors, LP James Reynolds, Jr., Chairman and CEO, Loop Capital Markets, Kurt Summers, Chief of Staff to President Toni Preckwinkle, Cook County Board of Commissioners

Interviewed by:
Flynn McRoberts, Chicago Bureau Chief and Editor-at-Large for Projects & Investigations, Bloomberg News

For more information, go to:

http://www.bloomberglink.com/gatherings.php?page=1

For a full agenda of the conference, go to:

http://bloomberglink.com/gatherings_agenda.php?gathering=120