(upbeat music) (powerful music) - Thanks for joining us on "Capitol View."

I'm Fred Martino.

Upfront this week, we continue our conversation with Democratic Representative Sue Scherer.

Last week, much of our discussion centered on education.

No surprise, because Representative Scherer spent more than 30 years as a public school teacher before becoming a legislator.

She noted that education is a key part of economic development.

And we talked about another effort to boost the economy, tourism.

The Governor's office says Illinois welcomed 111 million visitors who spent $44 billion in 2022.

That was 14 million additional travelers spending 12 billion more dollars over 2021.

And Representative Scherer says the state is on the right track.

- I think it's marvelous what we've done with our tourism and museums and things like that.

So this is a great time for me to put it out there that we as legislators have a museum pass for Chicago museums.

So if anyone is going to Chicago to go to a museum, I can give them a pass where they and three other people, so a family of four, can go to, I think there's like 15 museums in Chicago you go to for free.

So please call my office.

It's staterepsue@gmail.com or 217-877-9636.

And we're happy to share this pass for free.

And I can give it out to as many people as want to use it.

So actually, I have somebody using it just in a couple of days.

But even more than one person can use it at a time.

It's a great deal.

- So all legislators have that then?

- Yes, all legislators: Science and Industry, you know, The Art Institute, all the big museums that you would wanna go to, The Planetarium, The Aquarium, all of those you can go for free.

That's hundreds of dollars saved for your family.

- Yeah, I bet a lot more people will be getting familiar with their legislators after watching this show.

(laughs) - Well, I hope so.

- They'll be contacting them.

- Something else great that we've done is we have really pushed the park grants, the OSLAD grants.

So I know my districts have really benefited from that.

We've added a lazy river at Splash Cove in Decatur.

We've added a new splash pad in Springfield.

They're tearing down the old swimming pool and they're putting in a new really nice $600,000 splash pad that will be free for the children.

We've added a walking trail in Decatur, well, two of 'em.

Those are really nice.

And something else that's really neat is we have really pushed bringing TV and movies to be produced here in Illinois.

Like, you know, "Chicago Med," "Chicago Fire," "Chicago Police," all that is new stuff that has come in my 10 years.

And we have really pushed to add more TV and movies in Illinois.

And we give them a lot of perks for coming and it's paying off big time for us.

- Alright, well you were also on a committee, speaking of economic development, for small business and tech innovation.

Tell me about that work.

- Okay, that has been several years ago.

And I had several gatherings where I was able to call in all the local small businesses.

And I think the best thing that came out of that was being able to hear the concerns of our local small businesses and offer them some grants and let them know about a lot of the small business grants that are out there and available to them and also just to hear about the problems that they face.

I think so many times, this is where we go wrong.

You know, there's this big clash between the haves and the have nots, right?

And so we have all these working poor and people struggling desperately to find jobs.

And the government does help and a lot of nonprofits help with them.

And then we have people who work in small businesses.

And it's like they're fighting against each other.

And that's what's totally wrong.

We need to be looking at great big corporations and corporate greed.

We need to look at these huge insurance companies.

That's where our problems are.

Our problems are not between small businesses and the working poor.

And that's where a lot of society gets it mixed up.

We need to look into the billionaires.

- Very interesting stuff.

You know, maybe related to this, you have been on something called the Citizen Impact Subcommittee.

A lot of people watching the show may not even be familiar that such a subcommittee exists.

Tell me about that and how citizens can get involved.

- So with that, what we do is we, and I'm on the Consumer Protection Committee now, so we look at different bills that we're trying to get passed into law.

And the main focus of that subcommittee is to see what the effect of a certain bill would be on the consumers and the everyday citizens.

So actually, a lot of the things that I do, it's looking at: Okay, what will the direct effect be to the people in our communities, the everyday people in our communities.

- Okay, and how would somebody get involved if they wanted to have their voice be heard as part of this subcommittee?

- Okay, well that's actually one of the subcommittees that rarely meets.

But they can definitely call my office.

And I do a lot of one-on-one or small-group meetings with people who would be interested in being that.

So again, 217-877-9636 or email staterepsue@gmail.com.

- Okay; so hopefully, folks who also have other legislators who represent them, whether it be in the House or the Senate, can get in touch with their legislator to get involved.

You know, speaking of involvement, I wanna ask you about a broader issue as we conclude our time together, but it's an important one.

And it does affect state politics in so many ways.

It affects our elections.

It affects funding for the state.

And that's the national political climate.

It is so fractured right now and has been really for a number of years.

And part of that is that some argue we don't even have a civil dialogue about issues.

How do you think we can better foster a civil dialogue so that people can get involved and feel secure that their voice will be heard, that it will be done in a respectful and civilized way?

- You know, when I started, Raymond Poe was in office from Springfield and Bill Mitchell was in office from Decatur.

And they were both Republicans who had been in office, what you would really call a long-term politician.

And you know what?

I will never forget it.

Both of them made a point to talk to me about us working together.

And I said: Boy, I really hope so.

And I'll never forget Bill Mitchell saying to me, "Sue, you're gonna be surprised.

"You and I are gonna work together a lot "and we're gonna vote the same a lot "because we represent the same people."

And I saw how both of those gentlemen operated and I learned great lessons from them.

I remember one Saturday, I was having a birthday party for a grandkid over here at my house.

And I remember calling Bill Mitchell and I had to go in a closet to talk to him because there were a lot of people here.

And he picked that phone right up on a Saturday afternoon.

And we were able to do great things on a road project for Decatur at that time that we wouldn't have been able to do if he hadn't been willing to answer that phone.

And I'm seeing things nowadays where it's harder.

You know, you might call somebody and they just never call you back.

And it makes it much harder.

And I think that the general public wants us to work together.

And I try very hard to build relationships with other members.

And a lot of times what I do is I will go like to events and I'll talk more to Republicans than I do to Democrats.

Because then, you get a rapport with them.

And I think the citizens need to know, you can call your representative whether they're Democrat or Republican.

That doesn't matter one bit, not one bit.

- Start the dialogue.

Well, I'm glad we had a dialogue today.

Representative Sue Scherer was my guest representative.

Thanks so much for being with us.

- You bet; I'm really happy to be able to you know, share with our community - And we'd like to hear from you.

Send us your letters.

The email address is contact@wsiu.org.

Analysis now,and my guest today is Kent Redfield.

He's Emeritus Political Science Professor with the University of Illinois Springfield.

Thank you, Kent, for being with us.

- Good to be here.

- Good to have you here.

Well, after the conviction of Tim Mapes, the former chief of staff for longtime Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, we heard from some Republicans, as you know.

That includes Representative Paul Jacobs.

In a release, Jacobs said ethics reforms are needed, but he did not get specific in that release.

What, in your opinion if any, ethics reforms are likely, and what reforms are most urgent based on the convictions we've seen in Illinois?

- The narrative that was going back and forth after the Mapes conviction was not particularly helpful because, you know, this was about federal perjury charges, and it gets cast in a partisan light.

You know, the Democrats need to do more.

We need to do ethics reform.

And it'd work out a lot better if we had more Republicans.

You know, that's the theme from one side.

The other side says: Oh, Madigan's gone.

You know, we've been working on this and we got lots of things in play.

There are legislative solutions that would, you know, harden the target, make it more difficult to be corrupt.

But it also gets back to kind of a general attitude about politics and political corruption that, unfortunately, goes back, you know, you can pick a starting point.

It didn't begin with Mayor Richard J. Daley back in the '50s but it's been a continuing issue.

So, if I had a list, I would say we need to have a lot more transparency in terms of people understanding where politicians get their money, what their supporters are.

That would help people evaluate whether there are conflicts of interest.

We certainly could use more restrictions, more scrutiny on the way elected officials spend their campaign funds.

That's been a continuing problem that generally the legislature is reluctant to address.

We have done a lot with revolving door, but where we wanna keep people from going into lobbying or agency people going to work for people they've been regulating.

But, you know, that's something that probably we need to evaluate the reforms that we've got in place.

But, we have certainly put more things on the books.

It's a question of, you know, whether the politicians and frankly the public is going to demand more accountability and more transparency.

- Yeah, absolutely.

I think that's part of the key here.

And talk about a look at how there's a need for transparency and oversight.

This was not the only story that made headlines.

This next one, Kent, just is shocking people and really nationally because it was reporting from the non-profit ProPublica that uncovered this.

A Chicago police officer is accused of lying under oath 44 times.

And now prosecutors are dropping cases that relied on his testimony.

ProPublica reports this officer faces charges of perjury and forgery after getting out of dozens, that's dozens, of traffic violations by claiming that his girlfriend had stolen his car.

Your thoughts on oversight issues that this raises for law enforcement and maybe others really across the state that this could happen so often?

- Yeah, you know, we have had particularly within the Chicago Police Department, but it is a state and a national issue.

You get bad apples.

And then the question is, you know, is it just the bad apples and we get rid of them and things are fine?

Or does the structure, the culture, the institutions, do they attract bad people, or corrupt good people?

At that level, it's not any different than talking about ethics reform and campaign finance.

It's a question of, you know, is it just bad people, or is it a bad system, or both?

The other problem here is this reinforces the narrative within particularly minority communities that law enforcement is corrupt.

And you see examples like this, and that just makes it all the more difficult to build trust within communities and cooperation and communication between local law enforcement and communities.

And yet, we know that in order to make law enforcement work, you have to have the trust and the cooperation of the local community.

And so it just highlights a problem but it also reinforces narratives.

And the narrative on the other side, and we've seen this with the no-cash bail and even police cameras, is somehow you're tying law enforcement's hands or we're defunding the police.

And when you're just dealing with competing narratives, you're not solving problems.

So this just makes it harder to get to the things that we need to do to rebuild that trust and that cooperation to make local law enforcement work.

- Well said.

And it will be interesting to see, in this case in particular, after this officer according to ProPublica got out of dozens, dozens of traffic violations.

If there isn't some sort of database system, you know, we have this technology.

And certainly with artificial intelligence, we're gonna be hearing about more and more uses of this that could flag situations like this so that we aren't reporting stories like this.

But thanks to ProPublica for being the watchdog, getting the story out there.

They also are the organization, of course, that uncovered so much about the U.S. Supreme Court and conflicts of interest there.

So again, this highlights the importance of journalism as well.

Well, I wanna move... Go ahead.

- Absolutely.

No, I just said absolutely.

- Yeah, it does.

Well let's move on to economic development.

I know this is an important issue and one of interest for you.

A Southern Illinois casino, Walker's Bluff it's called in Carterville, is now open.

And it's sending $25 million to the state.

With electronic gaming at convenience stores statewide and even online lottery tickets, I have to ask you: What issues are raised with the continuing expansion of gambling in Illinois?

- Well, there certainly are policy issues involving problems with compulsive gambling.

You know, there are social costs from gambling.

We got into gambling.

We always had horse racing, but we got into casino gambling.

And they were riverboats.

And it was about economic development in poor downstate river towns.

And it was sold as economic development.

Once you really got serious expansion, then we decided we didn't need those riverboats to cruise anymore.

We could just tie 'em up at the dock and now we have land-based casinos.

So, you know, once you get your toe in the water, you know, everybody would like a piece of the action.

And they see development coming from these communities.

The state gets heavily invested because this is a revenue source.

And from the state's standpoint, we're not taxing people.

You know, this is voluntary for them to participate in gambling.

And we have become very dependent upon gambling to fund economic development in terms of capital construction.

You know, we use motor fuel taxes to do road construction.

But buildings, school buildings, those kinds of more vertical rather than horizontal, you become reliant on those as a revenue source.

But if you've watched any sporting event, particularly professional basketball, professional football, if you're a soccer fan, sports books have just started to dominate in terms of the attention that they get in what normally you would think of as just tuning in to watch a ball game.

And so there certainly are societal implications and dangers of corruption.

So we're not gonna go back.

We're 100% in.

There's a saturation point, of course, but if you open a Chicago casino, then you don't have Illinois people taking their money to Indiana.

And so that becomes the frame.

So, you know, it's a problem in terms of individual people becoming addicted.

But if we're not willing to deal with, you know, a progressive income tax, if we're not willing to deal with changes in the sales tax to perhaps go to services, then these become the backup ways of raising revenue.

When the people are raising the objections about the social costs of gambling, they're really pushing against a pretty strong tide.

- Good context there and certainly something to consider as we talk about this and any other issue that involves revenue for the state of Illinois.

Well, speaking of economic development, the Carroll Port project, getting some additional funding.

But the construction timeline is still uncertain.

How important are projects like this, Kent, for Illinois?

- Well, it's important for the overall economic health.

You want to maximize your ability to have local economic development taking place within the state, within communities.

And transportation is critical.

Illinois is in a position because of where we're located, you know, we are naturally a transportation hub and intersection for rail, for water, for air.

And so, this is a strength that we wanna emphasize.

- Would you say, Kent, then... Would you say that this really is a good investment because of our natural advantage in having that access to the ports?

- Yeah, if you do it right, then it absolutely is.

The problem is when you get... You say, well we want an airport in the suburban Cook.

And we fought back and forth about that airport.

Or we want an airport across the river from St. Louis.

And then, we put money and planning in.

And if it doesn't make good sense in terms of the overall economic development in terms of attracting and utilizing the advantages, then you end up wasting money, wasting time.

And so that's always the dilemma is, do you build communities by these kinds of projects to bring in jobs?

Or do you build communities by having good schools, good road, good infrastructure so that people want to bring their employees to the community?

It's not an either/or but they often get into competition with each other.

- Lots of research needed.

And that's the point there.

We only have a couple of minutes left.

I wanna get to this one.

We didn't have time for it previously.

The state is putting $20 million toward grants for grocers and research into food insecurity.

Kent, this does raise a question, though.

Will these grocery stores be sustainable without government help?

- If you don't build the local economy, if you don't build better schools, develop the main street business sorts of things, then, you know, that's why you lose grocery stores.

As people move out, they take their business elsewhere.

And so, you have to build communities or all you're gonna end up... You know, the subsidies are necessary, but they're not an answer.

- Okay.

So yeah, I mean, and that raises the question.

I mean, you can certainly provide funding that will allow a grocery store or any other entity to open, but will it stick around?

And this is a question not just in Illinois, but all over the country with economic development.

We often often see incentives.

And then when the incentives run out, it may not be sustainable.

So that's the big question.

- Yep.

- Okay.

Very interesting stuff today.

Kent Redfield.

Kent, thank you so much for being with us today.

- Good to be here.

- Good to have you here.

Good to have you at home as well.

For all of us at WSIU, I'm Fred Martino.

Thanks for joining us on "Capitol View."

Have a great week.

(powerful music)