(bright music) (intense music) (computer chiming) - Welcome to WSIU Public Broadcasting's "Meet the Candidate" series ahead of the November 5th general election on our WSIU stations.

I'm Jack Tichenor.

Our guest on this edition of the series is Dr. Lisa Smith of the Mount Auburn Blue Mound area.

She's the Republican candidate for state representative in the 96th Illinois House District.

Good to meet you.

- Yeah, good to meet you.

I'm happy to be here.

- Tell us a little bit about yourself.

I understand that you come from a background in medicine, a pediatric nurse practitioner, a doctorate in nursing practice from the University of Illinois Chicago.

What has been your experience that brings you into the race?

- Well, okay, so everybody that knows me knows I'm a real person.

I have 10 children.

I've been married for 36 years.

We've adopted seven kids.

I practice mainly in the community health area, 20 years at a community health center in Decatur and then eight years over here in Springfield working with disabled and autistic kids, which I really like.

And as you can see, I've just finished my workday, and I logged in to talk to you.

I work four days a week.

It's not full-time, but it almost is.

And I like to take time off to spend with my family in the evenings.

Now, running a campaign, I've not been able to do that.

It's pretty busy, always going places and doing things, but what got me into the race was my...

I do have a love for children, and whenever we had the pandemic, and the kids were out of school, I noticed that this was not really a good thing for the children and that most of the kids I were seeing were having a very difficult time staying home and not being with their friends and being social with other people.

And I was worried about that, and I started doing my research.

And I know that that was not a good thing for our children.

And so I spoke up about that at school board meetings and such, and I just felt like we were not doing what was best for the children.

And I was speaking up, but it was like it wasn't happening.

And finally they got back into school, and then things got going, but the way they did it was very slow.

And the more I looked into things, I said, well, why are we not changing things?

Why aren't we more open?

Why are we taking the school and the liberties away from these kids where they can be social, and they can do everything when kids really didn't get sick with COVID at the time?

I mean, they weren't getting sick.

So these questions I couldn't get answered, and I decided that I would keep pushing up the legislator thing and try to get some stuff done.

And I just was coming at roadblocks, and I decided, "You know what, what can I do about this?"

I asked my US rep, and they said, "Run for office."

I said, "Okay, I'm going to," because I want to do some things for the kids.

And the education and stuff for the kids in this district was not real good.

And I was noticing that, and I was noticing how hard it was to work with the school systems and get things for the kids.

And I just thought I could do something about that, so I decided to throw my hat in the ring.

- Well, as you've talked to folks across that district, which goes into Sangamon, Christian, and Macomb Counties, you talked about education.

We'll dig into that a little more deeply here in a moment, but what are the other things that folks are telling you that's uppermost on their minds about what they hope a state representative can do for them in Springfield?

- Well, across the board, the economy.

Inflation has hurt everybody.

And then we just recently passed a humongous budget over in Springfield, and then we turned around and put a tax increase on for people in the state of Illinois to pay for that.

And people are tired of the taxes.

They're tired of the taxes going up every year.

They're tired of the gas taxes, the grocery taxes.

They're tired of their high real estate taxes, which we know are some of the highest in the nation.

And people are upset about this.

And that across the board is the number-one issue for most families here in the state of Illinois.

- Now, the grocery tax has basically been done away with except for communities that want to put it back on the ballot.

- Right.

- Is anybody in your area trying to do that?

- Well, not that I know of yet.

I know that they put it back in the municipalities and stuff just to, that they can pretty much control that.

But you know that these areas are gonna be needing...

They need help too.

They need money too.

So you know that that's gonna come back, and I'm just gonna wait and see what happens with that because I know that we're gonna experience another, some sort of a tax increase.

And I know that, you know, the municipalities are gonna wanna take advantage of that in some sort.

So, you know, it depends on what the people stand up and say.

I mean, if they say, "No, we're not gonna do that," I hope they listen, but people are hurting.

- When you talk about job creation, the state of Illinois has a number of initiatives right now.

There was just a $500 million investment in quantum computing.

We're also, as a state, investing more in terms of tax credits and the likes for the electric vehicle industry.

What are some of the bigger areas that the state could do, let's say, in your opinion, a better job in bringing more industry to the state of Illinois?

Then we'll talk about small business.

- Well, mostly when I talk to businesspeople, they complain about the regulations here in our state and the high regulations on businesses and the taxes that we have here in the state.

I mean, our taxes are high.

Regulations are high for everyone really, but for businesses, they're extremely...

It's extremely difficult to start a business and to keep a business going here in our state.

And the main complaint I have is the regulations are too high.

The tax rate is too high.

And if we could work on that and incentives, bringing down regulation for businesses, looking at the states who get a lot of business and saying, you know, how are they doing it?

What is working in those states?

Because our state, it's not working here.

Businesses are leaving.

People are leaving.

And we need to turn something around, or we're gonna just keep losing businesses and losing people.

And when we lose business, we lose jobs, and that's when people move out.

So I think bringing down the regulations, bringing down the taxes, you're gonna bring some business in.

- On the subject of taxes, Illinois ranks second only to New Jersey in terms of the property taxes that are charged at the local level.

You know, Springfield's been talking about dealing with property tax relief for a long time now, but so far nothing's really happened in terms of that.

So in your view, where does the state of Illinois, when it comes to the legislature, start dealing with property tax issues that largely go to fund schools?

- Yes, they need to start dealing with that really quickly.

People are really noticing that their taxes are higher than the rest of the country, especially the older population.

When I'm knocking doors and stuff, the older population is asking me, "What can we do about these property taxes?

I've had my house paid for for 20 years, and I'm still paying high tax rates, and they went up again this year."

And so we need to address that really quickly, and legislature can do that.

I know that a majority of it goes to school systems and stuff.

There is something that my opponent has been touting, is they're trying to pay more into the school district so that we can decrease the property taxes and give some people some relief in these areas.

The budget increases for the school systems every year so that we see that the state is giving more money to the school systems, but we don't see any property tax relief.

It was supposed to go along with that, but we're not seeing it.

So we need to investigate into that and find out, you know, what is going on here.

Why are we not being able to bring down these property taxes when we are giving more money to the school districts from the state, not out of the property tax?

So what is going on with this?

I don't know.

It's something we need to look into.

- You're talking about the school funding reform measure that passed a few years back.

It was a Democratic and Republican bipartisan measure, and the idea was to base the amount of money that goes into a school district on what it takes to adequately educate an individual student.

It's based on a lot of different factors.

And as you pointed out, there're spending something like another $350 million a year going into the education budget.

And the idea is to raise up the amount of dollars that are going into smaller districts, poorer districts, that don't have the tax revenue base that the big districts do.

How is that model working, the evidence-based model working, when you talk to school officials in your part of the state?

- Well, I know that they're happy that they're getting more, you know, they're getting more help because these smaller school districts, which I don't have a lot in my district that are small.

You know, I just have the Springfield and Decatur School Districts, so they're large school districts.

But I know people in smaller school districts, and I know school board members in other districts.

I know that they are...

I know in a way that's a relief for them.

They are getting stuff, and they know they're gonna be funded and things.

And I'm not saying that that is a bad program.

What I'm saying is that they pushed that program because they were hoping that then your real estate taxes would be able to go down, you know, and it wouldn't be such a burden on the taxpayer then as far as real estate taxes.

And they haven't seen that.

And that's the result that we haven't seen from that.

I do believe it is helping some of these smaller districts, I really do.

- The Invest in Kids tax credit program that helped low-income students attend private and religious schools was not renewed by the legislature last year.

Supporters said it was vital to school choice.

Opponents said it was taking needed money away from public schools.

Where do you stand on Invest in Kids?

- Okay, so I was all for Invest in Kids.

I think that some type of school choices needs to be out there.

These kids do not have a way to get out of these public schools that aren't performing at the way they should, and they don't have a way to get into a private school.

So you're talking about poor minority families, usually, and they would rely on these tax credits so that they could send their kids to a private school that they wouldn't be able to go to.

And I have many families calling me about that because that was the only way that their kids could go to these schools.

And they had been going there for several years, and now they had to pull them out, and now they're going back to the public school system.

The argument I heard against it was not what you said from my opponent.

My opponent said that she didn't want... She wrote a letter, and she sent it out to people that said that she didn't want millionaires to be able to use this to hide their, to get away with not paying taxes.

And I said that is not a good reason to not be funding this program and to send these kids to good schools.

We know that if you can't read, you can't succeed.

And we have a real problem with our school systems right now and the kids not reading at grade level in Springfield and Decatur.

And if we can't get 'em out of schools that they can't read, they can't learn to read in, and they can go to private schools where they can do better, and they can pull themselves out of poverty, that's the goal, is to get these kids educated well and give them a chance in life so they can pull themselves out of poverty and, you know, have a good life.

And we were really trying, and it wasn't hurting anyone.

That scholarship was not hurting anyone, and there is no reason that it shouldn't have been kept in there except, you know, the Illinois Education Association was against it.

And, you know, we can't... We gotta look at what is best for our children, what is best for our children.

And people were willing to offer money for that program to get these kids out of these schools and get 'em into some better schools, and they just wiped that out by not renewing it.

- Let's move on to higher education on the other end of the education spectrum.

Western Illinois University has been in the news in the last few days by announcing plans to lay off dozens of faculty and staff to try and deal with an estimated $20 million deficit in their budget.

Other public universities around the state are having some of the same issues in terms of the amount of money that they have to do business to keep the classes open.

A lot of this comes from declining enrollments, and the problem's only gonna get worse over the next five years because the drop in the number of 18-year-olds going into the college pipeline.

What's your prescription for higher ed at the public universities and community colleges across the state?

- Yeah, I mean, parents, kids, everyone's looking at the debt thing.

If you go in to go to a university, you're gonna be paying a lot of money to attend that university, and then you're gonna have a lot of debt on your hands when you come out.

And they're just not willing to do that right now.

And (sighs) the prescription for it, I don't know the answer to that right now.

I mean, these kids...

The school systems are way, way too expensive, and I don't know how we fix that without...

I mean, you know, a lot of kids are going to junior colleges, and that's what they are attending because the junior colleges are more affordable.

They can usually live at home and drive over there.

They don't have to live on campus, and they're getting an associate degree, or they're getting a trade, which trade schools are wonderful.

I really promote the trades because you can get a good education.

You can get a good job, and it doesn't cost you much money to get that education.

And so a lot of students are going into the trades, which is really good.

But the solution to this higher education thing, we've just gotta bring the cost down so people can afford to go.

And I'm just not sure how we're gonna do that right now in this economy, I mean, what's going on, right?

It's one of those things that I have to get in there and research a little more to figure out what might be the solution to this.

- One of the measures that's being talked about right now, and the bill I think is going to be filed, it has to do with creating a program for higher education very similar to what we just talked about with K through 12 education.

And that's basing the amount of money that the universities get from the state on their demographics.

Is that the way to go, or is there perhaps a need to do away with duplicative programs and maybe streamline the number of universities that the state of Illinois has?

- (sighs) I never wanna say that we need to regulate anything, you know, as far as universities and everything.

How do you do that?

I mean, all of these private, I think... Are you talking about state universities or private, state, everything?

- State universities in particular, but private schools do get some money through the MAP program, Monetary Award Program, if I'm correct on that.

- Yeah.

I don't know that you're ever gonna be able to regulate that or should you.

You know, like you said, some of these universities are laying off people.

They're doing things to downsize.

They're doing things on their own, like you would do with your budget, to make their university more, you know, more prosperous or to do better and be able to offer what they wanna offer to these kids that are coming there.

You just have to let the free economy work.

I mean, universities that can't make it are not gonna make it, and ones that can will.

There's just no other way to look at it.

I think we're gonna have to just see how things work out.

- When you're talking about how that all fits into the broader budget picture of the state of Illinois, you have to talk about pension debt.

The state has something like $142 billion in pension debt for the five public employee pension systems.

The Pritzker administration has been making additional payments into that debt, but it still consumes a very large part of the Illinois budget, and it will for the next number of years.

One suggestion by the Pritzker administration is to try and extend the debt service by a few years to reduce the payment.

Is is that a good solution?

There's limits on what you can do in terms of cutting benefits.

You simply can't do that according to the state's supreme court.

- Right, you can't do that, and if people have paid into this system, you know, they should be afforded the benefits from it.

I think, you know, long term, really, honestly, I think that what we need to get into is the budget and what is going on with all the money that is being spent in the state of Illinois, We, I think, take in enough tax revenue and things to pay this.

And you need to find out what is going on with the money that's coming in from the taxpayers in the state of Illinois and see what programs need to be cut and what programs are overlapping, and we're duplicating programs, and what things we can cut back on so that we can fund what we promised.

If you set up a program, and you promised people to have their pension, you better be able to fund it.

And if you're wasting money, and you're doing things with the money that is not appropriate, and it's going into things that we should not have or do, and we do not need to be doing in the state of Illinois, then we need to look at that.

And we need to streamline our spending, and we need to figure out how to pay for stuff.

That's what you do in your home.

That's what you do when you own a business.

And that's what we should be doing in the state of Illinois.

- Kind of back to economic development and jobs for a moment, you have to talk about transportation infrastructure and how that fits into the picture.

Central Illinois, of course, has a number of interstates, railroads, a lot of transportation infrastructure.

As you think about this in terms of that district that runs from Springfield over to Decatur, what are some of the projects that you think should be a priority in terms of new highways, bridges, railroad overpasses, high-speed rail?

- All the above.

(laughs) Transportation's important, and I think that, you know, like in Springfield, we're doing the underpasses and the new railroad through there, and it's wonderful.

And I think that will really help with the, you know, the traffic through Springfield and stuff and making it more accessible to people and things like that.

I'm really into innovation, and I think we should innovate a lot, and we should do a lot of things with transportation.

This high-speed rail is really interesting to me, and I think that, you know, if they made it affordable, people would use it, if it was fast and affordable.

All of the infrastructure projects that I see right now going on are very good.

They're doing some underpass development over in Decatur too that's gonna help out by the college.

And I really like those programs.

I think that we should be investing quite a bit in our roads and our bridges, making sure everything is up-to-date and safe.

All of these things can beautify Illinois.

And when I talk about Illinois, and we talk about...

I talked with some truckers the other day about some things, and they were saying, boy, they know when they hit Illinois because the roads get bad.

And I said, "We need to work on that."

And I see a bunch of projects going on, and I'm hoping that we are taking the money that we have allocated for the roads and bridges and things like that and that we are doing what we say we're gonna do as far as infrastructure goes in the state of Illinois.

I'm for improving that dramatically.

I just wanna make sure it's funded, and I wanna make sure that the money that is set aside to do that is going to that.

- I wanna turn now to the issue of law enforcement and crime in general.

Being from the Springfield area, you've no doubt heard about the situation in Springfield, where Sonya Massey died at the hands of a Sangamon County Sheriff's Deputy, now former sheriff's deputy.

He's been charged with murder in that.

He worked for a number of different law enforcement agencies across Central Illinois over the years, and at least one of them said that there were problems with them in terms of needing more education or training in high-stress environments and the like.

What kind of role does the state play in terms of, or could the state play, in terms of monitoring these kinds of situations with law enforcement officers going from one district to the next?

Is a database something that needs to be implemented, or what are your thoughts on that?

- Well, you know, I'm not quite sure what kind of...

I know they have some sort of a reporting thing anyway that they have set up because I've heard people talking about it for officers or that people can get into.

I'm not quite sure the complete details on that yet.

I haven't heard all the details on what was going on.

I do know that this was a very tragic incident, and I think that the person that did it is being held accountable, and I'm glad.

And I feel really...

I have a lot of sympathy for this family, and I feel really bad for them, and they deserve justice.

But the way this happened, I am not privy to all the details yet of what happened with that.

I know that they do talk about a system where they do put things into that they can look at, but I'm not sure what that system is.

That is something I would probably be more informed about whenever I'm in the legislature.

But for for now, I'm sitting back like one of you, and I'm seeing what's going on like everybody else, and we just haven't got every detail yet on what, how they do background checks on officers, how they figure out, you know, if they're okay, why they, you know, were at one job but not there anymore.

I don't know these things.

I don't know how the hiring process happened, so I don't wanna speak on that because I don't know about it.

But I do think there needs to be a way to hold... You know, if you have an officer that you think there's a problem with, it needs to be somewhere, where if he goes to apply somewhere else, they know, and it can be looked at.

- Sorry, there's another issue I wanna touch upon because the bill has bipartisan support in both the Illinois House and the Senate, and it's called Karina's Law.

It's named after Karina Gonzalez and her 15-year-old daughter Danielle who were killed at their home last year in Little Village, Illinois.

Her ex-husband's firearms identification card had been revoked, but his firearms had not been confiscated.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle support the idea of those who have emergency orders of protection filed against them and having their weapons taken away, but it still hasn't mustered enough to finally pass the general assembly.

Where do you stand on that idea?

- Well, so because I've worked with the community a lot, I also know, I see why people might be a little bit afraid of some of these laws coming out about confiscating weapons if you have a order of protection against someone because sometimes those are put into place without reason.

And I've seen it.

I've seen that happen.

Or, you know, the person, I don't quite know how to say it, but people are afraid because they're afraid that somebody's going to accuse them of something that they didn't do, get an order of protection, and have everything taken away from them.

And then do they get it back?

What happens to them?

So I think that when we put in stuff like this, we need to really have protections for the people too that they are putting them in for that there's a lot of proof, you know, that there is somebody here that's dangerous and that you need to be going in and taking away one of their constitutional rights.

I mean, that's what we're talking about here whenever you're saying taking away their firearms.

So if we have a law put in place that has a lot of protection for people so that they just don't get their firearms taken away without a lot of proof that there's something going on here.

And I understand about this having order of protections.

I understand about being afraid of someone.

I understand that.

And if we have somebody dangerous, we definitely do not want them to have a firearm and go after someone.

So these are things that I need to look at the verbiage here on the law and see what it is.

I am for your Second Amendment right, so I just wanna make sure it's protected.

- Dr. Smith, thank you so much.

We've covered a lot of ground in the last half hour.

We were talking with Dr. Lisa Smith, Republican candidate for Illinois House in the 96th Illinois House District.

Thank you so much.

- Thank you so much for having me on.

I really appreciate it.

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