SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Illinois lawmakers early Saturday approved a $46.5 billion budget that includes $1.8 billion in largely temporary election-year tax relief and a $1 billion deposit into the state’s rainy day fund.
The House voted in favor of the budget, which had already passed in the Senate, shortly before 6 a.m., more than 36 hours after Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Democratic legislative leaders announced a budget agreement as lawmakers blew past the scheduled Friday adjournment of their truncated spring session.
As Friday came and went the Democratic-controlled General Assembly also finalized its legislative response to rising crime, which along with inflation is expected to be a key issue in this year’s elections.
The Democrats say their spending plan for the budget year that begins July 1 is designed to address both of those issues while continuing to dig out from the state’s longtime fiscal morass.
“This budget is about fiscal responsibility, restoring stability and setting a responsible course for our state,” House Majority Leader Greg Harris, a Chicago Democrat and lead budget negotiator, said Friday.
In addition to sending direct checks to most taxpayers, the Democrats’ response to soaring prices includes temporary tax breaks on gas, groceries and real estate levies. At the same time, there would be a permanent expansion of a tax credit for low- and moderate-income taxpayers.
The operating budget, approved on a 34-19 vote in the Senate and 72-42 in the House, includes more than $12 billion for elementary, secondary and higher education, nearly $9 billion for human services, and more than $2 billion for public safety. Using federal coronavirus aid, it also creates grants for the pandemic-battered hotel, restaurant and entertainment industries.
Left unresolved was a remaining $1.8 billion deficit in the state’s unemployment insurance trust fund after an earlier measure used federal relief money to cover $2.7 billion of the deficit.
Democrats touted the more than $200 million they want to spend on new public safety initiatives, including efforts to recruit and retain law enforcement officers. That’s on top of $240 million — mostly from federal coronavirus relief money — for violence prevention programs.
After Republicans spent much of the spring accusing Democrats wanting to “defund the police,” the majority was quick to highlight their outlays for law enforcement.
The spending plan “includes funding for cameras, it includes funding for new officers, it includes funding to invest in recruitment and retention activities, all the things you say you support, but you will not vote for them,” Democratic state Sen. Elgie Sims of Chicago said to Republicans.
Republicans who voted against the budget said that Democrats were both overspending and failing to provide long-term relief to financially struggling residents. The GOP dismissed the majority party’s tax relief plan as an election-year gimmick.
“It is unbelievably jaded, and people see through it,” said state Sen. Chapin Rose, a Mahomet Republican.
During the House debate, sponsoring state Rep. Mike Zalewski, a Riverside Democrat, defended the tax relief measure, which would send direct payments to individual taxpayers earning less than $200,000 annually and joint filers earning less than $400,000. Taxpayers would receive $50 each, plus $100 per dependent child, up to three children.
“Every person is going to get a check from the state of Illinois for the first time in a generation because finally, finally, we got this state on track,” Zalewski said. “This is going to lift up everyone that we care about. You should want to support this bill, regardless of the politics, because this is a good thing.”
Loathe to vote against tax breaks before facing voters later this year, however, Republicans nearly all voted in favor the proposal. Only GOP state Sen. Craig Wilcox of McHenry voted in opposition.
As the spring session came to a close, a series of anti-crime bills passed through the House and Senate and now await Pritzker’s signature.
One bill would help first responders find evening and overnight child care, while another would expand highway cameras throughout the state, beyond just Cook County, to help track down carjackers and those involved in shootings.
The bills were pushed by Democrats and garnered bipartisan support, though Republicans continued to criticize the majority party for not coming up with more inventive ways to hold criminals accountable.
The GOP had unsuccessfully tried to get the Democratic-controlled legislature to repeal last year’s landmark criminal justice reform legislation, which was intended make the legal system more equitable. Republicans have contended the legislation weakens law enforcement and emboldens criminals, while Democrats have accused the GOP of mischaracterizing the law.
But in an election year, the Democrats in recent weeks have made efforts to convince the public — through legislative proposals destined to play a role in campaign advertisements — that they’re taking a tougher approach on carjackings and other crimes. According to the Chicago Police Department, there were 1,852 reported carjackings in the city in 2021, more than triple the number two years earlier.
Among the Democratic efforts Republicans argued falls short is a bill that would authorize a state council to provide grants to law enforcement to help catch and prosecute carjackers.
“This body has made policy choices that is making carjacking, including organized carjacking, including by juveniles ... that much easier,” state Rep. Deanne Mazzochi, an Elmhurst Republican, said. “And it’s sad that we’re here on the last day of session and not a single piece of legislation has been proposed by the majority party to help the various (people) who are being attacked through these carjackings ... and this is the best you can do. A grant program for a state council.”
Democratic state Rep. Eva-Dina Delgado of Chicago, the House sponsor of the bill, argued that the council’s work would not be trivial. “We are providing resources, particularly for victims of this particular crime,” she said.
Another bill sponsored by Delgado received bipartisan support. It would codify that victims of carjacking or vehicle theft wouldn’t have to pay for tows, speeding tickets and other fees that accumulate on their vehicles after they’re stolen.
Republicans contended that owners of stolen vehicles already have ways to avoid paying such fines, and the bill does nothing to go after perpetrators.
“This, as presented on the floor, does nothing to bring down crime, does nothing to promote public safety and, in fact, is not holding the (criminals) accountable for the laws that they broke along the way. This is absurd. This is not what we need to do to bring down crime,” said state Rep. Avery Bourne, a Republican from Morrisonville who is running for lieutenant governor in the June 28 primary.
The House also passed a measure that would classify a car-fob replicator, one of the tools used by car thieves or carjackers to break into or steal cars, as a burglary tool.
Before the vote, there was a heated debate on the bill between one of its sponsors, state Rep. Jaime Andrade, a Chicago Democrat, and House Republican leader Jim Durkin of Western Springs.
“What you’re going to do is not going to change anything that is currently in practice,” Durkin argued on the House floor.
“Leader, don’t point the finger at me,” Andrade shot back. “I’ve been trying to pass bills with you and everyone in this session.”
Also Friday, after failing to rally support for his previous nominees to the Illinois Prisoner Review Board, Pritzker made two new appointments to the board: Rodger Heaton, a former U.S. attorney for Springfield, and Robin Shoffner, who previously served as a civil trial judge for the Cook County Circuit Court.
Pritzker’s nominations will bring the board’s count to eight — a full board has 15 seats — but they still need to be confirmed by the Senate.
Receiving bipartisan support was a measure including provisions for witness protection, victim-centered training for homicide investigators, a crime reduction task force and a program to send social workers along with police officers in certain instances.
Early Saturday, both chambers approved a bill intended to address organized retail crime, which has generated headlines through both smash-and-grab burglaries at high-end stores and large-scale operations targeting railroad and trucking cargo.
The senator sponsoring the bill, which was pushed by the Illinois Retail Merchants Association, said the goal was to go after “big fish,” or ringleaders of organized groups composed of two or more people who commit burglaries and resell those goods.
“It’s not a victimless crime,” said state Sen. Suzy Glowiak Hilton, a Democrat from Western Springs. “The office of the (Illinois) attorney general found that retailers are raising concerns about the safety of employees who confront thieves or customers who are bystanders when these crimes are committed.”
The proposal, which had bipartisan support, would allow county prosecutors to pursue cases for crimes carried out in different counties. The law would also require online marketplaces to verify that sellers who use the marketplaces provide contact information.
The merchants association acknowledged there’s no measurable statistic for organized retail crime, which it argued was a reason to make the crime a separate category.
“We’ve never seen this. I’ve been at this a long time. Decades,” Rob Karr, president & CEO of the merchants association told reporters after testifying Friday night before the Senate Executive Committee. “We started talking about organized retail crime over 10 years ago as an emerging problem. We’ve never seen theft show up in public reports for publicly traded corporations. It does now.”
Legislators also passed a bill banning the sale and possession of so-called “ghost guns,” often assembled from kits and are not marked with serial numbers like normal guns, making them harder to track.
Under the new legislation, owners of these guns would have six months to get them engraved with serial numbers. After that, a first violation would be a Class A misdemeanor, punishable by as much as a year in jail. Any subsequent offense would be a Class 3 felony, punishable by a prison sentence of two to five years.
The House passed clarifications to provisions that dealt with electronic monitoring of criminal suspects and other measures within the Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity-Today (or SAFE-T) Act that was signed by Pritzker last year with the aim of making the criminal justice system more equitable.
Republicans over the last few months have tried to use the justice package, which includes an end to cash bail in 2023 for nonviolent offenses, as a way to paint Democrats as being weak on crime issues going into the election.
“Safety now? We want safety now. This bill doesn’t give us safety now. Vote ‘no,’” state Rep. Patrick Windhorst, a Republican from Metropolis, said, drawing applause from his fellow GOP members.
State Rep. Justin Slaughter, a Chicago Democrat, offered a loud and impassioned rebuttal to the Republicans, saying there is a “bad stench of racism” from the GOP side of the House.
“In the Black community, it’s been a state of emergency for a really long time now,” Slaughter said. “But as long as crime and violence is contained in the hood, it was OK. As long as my folks terrorize other people of color, it was fine. But now, Chiraq is in your communities. And now, it’s a state of emergency.”
Slaughter’s remarks drew an equally angry response from several GOP members.
“That’s wrong! That’s wrong!” said Durkin, the House GOP leader. “You know that’s wrong!”
Slaughter’s clarifications passed 64-45 in the House. But won’t be heard in the Senate until the fall.
Even before the final language of the budget plan was made public, the agreement outlined by Pritzker, House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch of Hillside and Senate President Don Harmon of Oak Park already was receiving positive reviews from at least one Wall Street credit ratings agency.
“The budget agreement in Illinois suggests the state is on track to implement credit-positive measures that rebuild fiscal resilience and reduce long-term liabilities including a meaningful deposit to the rainy day fund, addressing long-standing unpaid health care bills and chipping away at the pension liability,” Eric Kim, a senior director with Fitch Ratings, said in a statement Friday.
Fitch is the only one of the three major ratings agencies that has yet to upgrade Illinois’ credit from one notch above junk bond status.
“Continued operating performance improvement and movement toward structural balance, and maintaining a more normal fiscal decision-making process, could support a return to the state’s pre-pandemic rating or higher,” Kim said.
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