(upbeat music) - Welcome to "Capitol View" the weekly program where we talk about state government and politics and how it might just affect you.

Joining me this week on "Capitol View" is Jerry Nowicki Statehouse Bureau Chief for Capital News Illinois.

Welcome Jerry.

- Thanks for having me, Bruce.

- Also long time state house reporter Charlie Wheeler who also is former head of the Public Affairs Reporting Program at University of Illinois, Springfield.

Welcome Charlie.

- Thank you, Bruce, it's good to be here.

- Yeah, well, let's jump in.

As we always do, the legislative session has drawn to a close just within the past couple of days here.

Lots of stuff got done.

Lots of stuff didn't get done.

One thing that remains on the plate one large issue appears to be energy.

They have not figured out collectively the legislature and the governor what to do to keep nuclear plants open.

Exelon says requires a very large subsidy and what to do about fossil fuel plants that the governor would like to close shut down by 2035, 2050, that some of the dates have moved a bit.

I think the most recent one is we're looking for 2050.

I hope I have that right Jerry.

You've been covering this issue for a couple of years Jerry, where are we at?

What remains to be done and what might sticking points be?

- Yeah, it seems like natural gas plants are the sticking point at this point.

The president said he's confident we're going to get there.

The sticking point appears to be in the Senate at this time, but you never know what's gonna happen in the house either.

There's more legislators there, could lose votes at any time.

But anyway, with the natural gas plants is they all are kind of in agreement.

I thought 2045 was the date in which all of them would close.

That may have moved in the last couple of days, I'm not privy to every detail of the working group negotiations, but from my understanding, the crux of it is the governor wants to get to the de carbonization goals by declining the allowable caps on carbon emissions.

So the sort of problem there is if you set a cap of say dropping by 20%, five years from now you're essentially closing that gas plant because you can't really just drop your emissions 20% unless you have that technology for sequestrations they call it to where maybe you bury it underground or reduce the carbon emissions some other way.

So essentially it's not a 2045 date in this circumstance, you're closing it much earlier than that.

So the Harman described it as the sort of process of getting to 2045 it's what's under negotiation right now.

He says, they're close.

I've heard that since 2019 we're closed we need to get it done by this deadline, you know, I won't speculate as to what will or won't happen but there does seem to be some confidence that it will get done this summer, but there has been confidence for two years, three years or so.

- Exelon has said that absent a subsidy will be closing two plants I believe sometime this fall.

Dresden and the other one it's just starts with a B.

- Byron, Byron yeah.

- Byron by Rockford.

- Yeah and so that's also in play.

Is it even possible to know how much Exelon may have been driving this?

In past years they've been accused of the company is calling the shots that hasn't seemed to be as popular a thing to do accused folks of doing this time around, am I wrong, or what sort of role has Exelon played here in comparison to what roles it may have been played in the past?

- Yeah so I don't know if it's like the corporate executives of Exelon that are raining down decrees as to what's going to be in this bill.

I don't think that's the way this is happening but the Exelon interests are also the interests of labor unions, because there's, I forget that, I think they estimate around 2000 jobs that will be affected if you don't get subsidies for these plants.

So what it does is provide $694 million over five years for three plants.

Actually, I forget which one, the third one is maybe Braidwood, but so it's 694 million for five years for the three plants, which is a far smaller subsidy than which was in the future energy jobs act of 2016 for Clinton and the quad cities.

I believe that was 2.3 billion over 10 years, roughly.

So you have a much smaller subsidy, but then again you have the possibility that Exelon comes back to lawmakers five years from now, and the scandal has died down and you've got new lawmakers who aren't as familiar with it, and they are able to get the greater subsidies that they would prefer to have right now.

So I don't think they're out of the bargaining at this point, but they're certainly diminished from where they were in 2016 with speaker Madigan.

And that's been widely.

A lot of the people I've spoke to from the green energy groups to whoever else they believe that Exelon has been is far painted into a corner as they can be with the reality that nuclear must provide more than half of the state's energy for us to be non-carbon emitting as the governor plans to.

- Yeah, and 694 that's twice what had been talked about, I think when the governor first unveiled his proposal, nearly twice, but that was only for two plants, not for three, so the numbers have shifted quite a bit.

- It occurs to me that the governor's commission and outside study and in audit of those plants.

And I think the audit justified less than $400 million in subsidies.

And so the governor has moved considerably already.

And so I suspect that as Jerry said Exelon is not gonna be as forceful as they may have been in the past.

And they're probably just as happy as can be that basically the governor who's almost doubled the initial offer for them.

So it's not the new plants that are the problem.

It's how do we preserve the jobs of the coal fire plants?

How do we make whole or protect the communities that what, 15 years ago bought into the notion that, oh, we're gonna have this wonderful new coal generating plant and it's gotta to be so environmentally friendly and blah, blah, blah.

Our local power companies, City Water, Light & Power municipally owned utility here in Springfield faces that difficulty with one of their newer plants.

They say that if we follow the governor's guidelines to close down coal fired plants, we'll be left having to buy power from somewhere else.

At the same time, we're still trying to pay off the cost of building this dormant plan.

So that to me is where the hang up is how do we eliminate the coal fire plants as the governor wishes to do so that we're moving towards being carbon free, but at the same time protect the communities, not just in Illinois but in neighboring states, they bought in, it has notion for this power plant down in Southern Illinois.

Which if I'm not mistaken is like the ninth largest carbon polluter in the nation.

- Yeah and you know, yours is an excellent point Charlie, particularly, I think when it comes to CWLP City Water, Light & power, the municipally owned utility here in Springfield and Prairie state you're right, very large a facility in downstate, Illinois.

At least here, there have been studies however that have been produced before, one by the utility itself the municipal utility and another by the local chamber of commerce, a few years back that suggested rate payers would actually save money in the city of Springfield if we stopped burning coal and found energy from other sources, one of the other sources was natural gas, which has also under microscope now.

And so I'm not sure, when I hear, well, we won't have to pay for the plant yet.

Well, that's true, but there's also some evidence that the plant that you're running, isn't performing hasn't been able to compete economically as well as you once thought that it would.

And so that's into the mix.

I'm also curious about carbon capture.

This has been floated as a way to keep these plants open.

I think both on natural gas and coal yet it's an unproven technology and the idea has been around for a long time.

I'm wondering how real that is or is that, we'll kick the can down the road a little bit further until we can figure out whether carbon capture could work.

- Well, a couple points on that is there's been similar looks at the Marissa plant, which is that Prairie State Energy Campus that's in Marissa in the Metro east type area.

There's been similar studies, and some of the green energy groups are saying, you're gonna be paying that bond debt no matter what But it's possible that you save rate payers money by buying your electricity wholesale rather than having the coal fired power plants provide it.

So that's part of the discussion as well.

So with the carbon sequestration, I think if they get to 90% of their carbon sequestered they would be able to possibly stay open to 2045 the coal plants, at least in one of the renditions of this discussion.

So essentially Illinois, they say Illinois geologic foundation underground has these spaces, which can accept the carbon and basically lock it down there until I don't know there's an earthquake or something.

But essentially it's a pretty reliable way to do that.

What the discussion is with the technology as it exists now, you can't get to 90%.

And the question is what level of cap can you provide to where?

I dunno how long will it take to get the sequestration online?

I don't know that answer, but they wanna be able to try to do that.

But the other thing is that's a major expense.

So if you put that expense and say get to 85% sequestration, you're at years from now you've spent all this money to put this technology in place and you're still forced to close because it's not capturing enough of the carbon.

So that technology doesn't exist to get to 90% right now.

So that's one of the conundrums too but they wanna take a crack at it to see if it still be a viable option.

- Yeah and I wonder if there will be any sorts of for lack of a better word triaging here in the sense that I think a lot of folks don't like fossil fuel, but if they had to pick one or another they'd picked natural gas over coal.

Is that sort of a ranking anywhere in the cards, do you think?

I mean, we're okay coal and natural gas will be treated differently in the end.

- Yeah my understanding of the discussions is natural gas had the 2045 dates for staying open.

But yeah, and this is the natural gas for the electrification sector of course.

So, yeah, I think there's more of a acceptability for natural gas at this time but the goal is carbon free by 2050 entirely carbon free.

And nuclear is gonna have to be a major part of that which is why they're gonna get the subsidies to stay open.

- Sure and we would be remissed perhaps, in not noting that yeah, nuclear seems to be a key part of this strategy that's being developed on the state level.

We have not figured out what to do with the waste on a long-term basis that's created.

I guess we'll have to maybe figure that one out a little bit later.

Energy of course is not the only thing that has been addressed or as being tackled by the legislature this session.

We have FOID cards the Firearm Owners Identification Card which the legislation now would provide more money to a process FOID card applications more quickly that now we're languishing for many months in some cases.

The State Rifle Association took a neutral stance on this as it made its way through the legislature.

Charlie you covered the legislature for a long time and watched it.

How common has it been for the national excuse me, the State Rifle Association or gun rights groups to remain neutral on a bill like this on an issue like this, does that happen often?

- I don't think so.

Usually they're either very much for legislation.

For example, when we finally legalized concealed carry.

Or they're very much opposed to legislation.

Every attempt to try and limit the type of weapons that people could buy.

This one, they put out a three page explainer and it was available I got it through Richard Miller's capital facts website.

But they said, here are the things we like about.

One of the things they like about it is that they're gonna combine the concealed carry and the firearm owners identification card into one card.

They're gonna make it easier for people to renew.

There's going to be additional resources put into the state police to process things more quickly.

One of the things that they were, I guess holding their nose about, but willing to accept was the notion that there would be optional fingerprinting.

And they sort of said, well, we're against fingerprinting as a matter of this as a matter of principle.

But on the other hand, if you, as a law abiding citizen want to voluntarily submit your fingerprints in order to get your cards renewed automatically, well, that's up to you to decide.

So it's a wide ranging bill with a lots of moving pieces.

And I guess the bottom line in the rifle association's minds was the positives outweigh the negatives.

So we're gonna be neutral.

- Yeah, I think I probably agree with you.

This does seem like classic compromise legislation in the sense that gun rights folks often have express displeasure with even the existence of a FOID card, but there's enough sugar in this one to make them swallow this, I don't know if it's a pillar or a piece of candy, but they did get this done and so.

- Well, and one of the things that was in another version that never made it to final passage stage was a provision that said you had to give your fingerprints if you wanted to get a FOID card.

And so that was anathema to the Rifle Association.

- I would give the Rifle Association credit in that it's a fairly consistent stance because they've often you hear them say, well the Aurora shooter shouldn't have had his guns.

If weren't enforcing the laws that exists, why make new laws?

So what this does, one of the major things that it does is it creates a task force and we're not talking a legislative task force.

My dad was an officer of the law.

He was on a south suburban major crimes task force to where if there was a murder in that area, they'd call him an inter-governmental unit of officers from several departments and they get to work on solving this murder or whatever.

So this is gonna be a law enforcement task force in the Illinois State Police Director which is Brendan Kelly at this time, but whoever it may be in the future would have the opportunity to execute intergovernmental agreements.

So you'd have several law enforcement entities enforcing revoked FOID cards.

So in 2019, a shooter went into was it Henry Pratt or Henry Patt, whatever it was, warehouse and killed a number of people.

He had a felony that should have prevented him from having a gun, the state police wasn't doing anything, didn't really have the resources to take that gun from him.

That's what this task force is allegedly going to do.

It's the goal of this task force, which shall be created.

It's a violent crime investigation task force.

Another thing it does is it'll create a database with serial numbers of guns that have been reported stolen.

So if you're buying a gun privately you can put the serial number in.

If it comes up stolen you call your non emergency police numbers, say "hey I've received a stolen gun from this person."

- So do I get a 50% discount?

(both laughing) - Well, that remains to be seen.

There's a lot of rulemaking that still needs to be done.

But so the thing is that, one of the major things is the resources currently your $10 FOID renewal fee, give $6 to the Fish and Wildlife Fund, that's gone.

$5 will go to the Firearm Services Bureau previously it was three, which does the FOID, all the paperwork and stuff.

So that's gonna be more money coming in to administer this program, which has all the long delays that the State Rifle Association has been complaining about for at least a decade.

So it's supposed to expedite there.

And then the $5 will go to this other fund which will help fund law enforcement agencies involved with this task force that I previously mentioned.

So what you're doing is you're giving law enforcement the ability to take away the guns from the people that shouldn't have them because I've had their FOIS cards revoked for felonies, for whatever else.

So in that regard, it has a lot of the stuff, the State Rifle Association wanted to see.

- IRA go ahead.

(both laughing) - Yeah so.

- Yeah so I think that that's something that appears at this point to have ended well on nobody got everything they wanted.

I think the fingerprinting, mandatory finger printing would have been a tough thing to have accomplished.

And so I don't know if that was, I don't wanna call it red herring a strong argument.

I'm not quite sure how much faith folks may have had throughout the process at that really had much of a chance.

- Oh yeah the voluntary fingerprinting is essentially you won't have to pay a renewal fee as long as you, it'll allow you for automatic renewals, as long as you buy a gun in that 10 year period, and go through the state police background check to purchase a gun.

It'll say, you just did this, you just bought this gun.

You don't need to renew your FOID card.

You don't need to pay that fee.

So that's if you decide to put your fingerprints on file.

- Perhaps in the late endings of session there was a typo that came up of, either one, Jerry, Charlie will walk us through that.

I mean, essentially what happened was they passed the budget as they often do at the very last second.

And there was something missing, it was the effective date.

That's prompted an amendatory veto.

Jerry, how does something like this happen and how much political hate might the Republicans make out of it?

- Yeah well, it happens when you rush things and you pass them when everyone's ready for bed and all our reporters are ready for bed and going off our fifth cup of coffee for the day.

- Do you mean you didn't read the whole thing, Jerry, I'm sorry.

- All 3000 pages in the one hour or whatever it was that I read it no.

So, staff's human, staff is tired as everyone else but the fact is it'd be nice to get some more notice on this, we all know that Bruce, you know it as well as anyone.

- Yeah.

- Absolute react, we can't react to this stuff and report on it adequately, you know, it's just not.

- Yeah and I will guess this is no gonna be something that becomes a big campaign issue, because this is pretty much in the weeds.

So this bill was what Jerry it was like 3,800 pages long or something like that.

And it had 700 and some odd sections.

And some of those are to provide additional money for the fiscal year that's gonna end in a couple of weeks, on June 30th and others parts were for the fiscal year that starts July 1st.

And when they cobbled the bill together, because it was another bill in the Senate that did not get called ahead, all the Capitol reappropriations money that was allocated in the past, but was not spent.

And they were gonna put it in this budget.

When they cobbled that bill into the other one, they forgot to change the section that says, here's when these different parts the bill become effective.

And so a goodly chunk of it was left in a, I guess in a legal position in which it would not become effective until next June 1st.

And obviously if you're trying to provide more money for things that happened this year, it doesn't do any good if you don't get the authority to spend it until 11 months later, and it doesn't do much good for next fiscal year, if it doesn't come effective to only one month left in the fiscal year.

So the governor had to come in and do the amendatory veto.

I must say in my memory I cannot remember there ever having been an amendatory veto out a budget bill before.

- Yeah, yeah well, I mean this year is as contrasted with some prior years, that we didn't hear as much stuff about the state being broke.

There are finances are perhaps a bit better than they may have been a few ago.

If there was a good time to maybe as Jerry rightly notes pulling a budget together and voting on it an hour after you first see it isn't ideal I think for a lot of folks including folks like us who were charged with reporting it, but also folks who have to vote on it.

If everyone was a hero, I guess I'm saying that it might've been possible this may have been it, but it didn't happen.

We're running low on time so quickly I wanna chat a bit about some winners and losers in the legislature during this past session.

I think that we've talked about the energy bill.

We've talked about the FOID card issue.

I'd like to talk for a second about Chris Welch.

Charlie we were talking before we started a different style than his predecessor.

What jumps out to you about his performance during this past legislative session?

- Well, I think he's a much more collaborative leader than former speaker Michael Madigan.

Madigan played his cards close to his best you were never really sure where he was going, what he was going to do, and members would complain that they, and this is a line from probably 20 years ago, that we're treated like mushrooms, were kept in the dark and fed filling the blank.

But Welch was very open with his membership.

And Rich Miller did a column.

He talked to the 19 people who before the session began said I will not vote for Michael Madigan no matter what.

And they all were very complimentary of speaker Welch in terms of his openness, his accessibility, his what would you say, communication with the caucus and the fact that members were involved actually putting together some of these pieces of legislation.

- Yeah and he was also, I think he sat down for more than a few interviews, I think with the media more so perhaps than his predecessor had done.

And so that's for the good too.

Unfortunately though at this point we are out of time.

And so thanks everybody for joining us.

And we'll see you next week on "Capitol View".

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