(bright music) (upbeat dramatic music) (phone chimes) - Welcome to WSIU Public Broadcasting's "Meet the Candidate" series ahead of the November 5th general election.

I'm Jak Tichenor.

Our guest on this edition of the series is incumbent state representative Katie Stuart of Edwardsville, who's running for reelection in her house district.

Welcome to the program.

- Hi, Jak.

Thank you so much for having me.

- Well, tell us a little bit about yourself to get started.

You've served in the Illinois House since 2017.

Before that, you taught math in high school and at SIU Edwardsville right there in your district, - Right.

Yeah, exactly.

I taught math for about 20 years.

I've done every level from sixth grade through the university, and I was actually lucky enough to be involved in training future math teachers through some of my work at SIU Edwardsville.

So something I'm always really proud of is helping put young people in the classroom.

And in addition to that, I'm a mom of two and just living in the wonderful city of Edwardsville.

- Well, let's talk about your track record.

As you look back over the time you've been serving in the Illinois House, in the Metro East area, what are some of the key accomplishments that you would like to point to to let voters know why they should vote to reelect you?

- Well, I really have focused on a lot of issues that deal with education from pre-K through 12th grade and at the university level.

I'm very proud to be the chair of the House Higher Education Committee.

I do represent the SIU Edwardsville campus.

I believe in a strong public higher education system to give everybody opportunities and to also, if we're building that workforce, then that's how we're going to attract businesses and also grow and develop.

So, very proud of that.

Specifically, I'm also very proud to have been the chief sponsor of the bill to raise the minimum salary for teachers across the board to make sure that we are paying at least a respectable wage.

I don't know that anybody would say that teachers are appropriately compensated for the extremely hard and difficult job they do, but at least we are setting a floor that is reasonable.

And then another thing, and it's very tangible to me because I see it every time I'm up in the Capitol.

I passed a bill that required us to put in place lactation rooms for nursing mothers.

And we have those in all of the main buildings up at the Capitol complex.

Someone who has been through that myself, and just knowing that it is sometimes a hindrance in being out in the world.

It is the people's building and everybody should be able to be there and sometimes that's a need that has to be met.

- It's been interesting watching your district over the last few years.

It takes, in Edwardsville, as you pointed out, Granite City, Collinsville, and Fairview Heights.

That's an area on the east side of the Mississippi River that's been growing in population over the years.

What do you consider to be the top issues facing voters in your district nowadays?

- Well, I don't think it's unique to my area.

Everybody is always concerned with property taxes and people wanna be able to stay in the homes they're in.

We especially wanna make sure that we support seniors who want to age in place, that they are not, you know, priced out of the home that they live in.

So that's all I think.

But like I said, I don't think that's unique to us.

People want high-quality schools, they wanna feel safe in their neighborhoods, and they want there to be opportunities for their kids when they grow up so that they'll stay close by.

- Let's talk about, you raised the issue of property taxes and having covered Springfield for a number of years now, Illinois ranks very high at the list of states when it comes to the property tax rates.

Springfield's been talking about trying to do something in terms of property tax relief for decades, but so far it hasn't seemed to move very much.

Where do we begin?

Because a lot of this comes down to the fact that local schools depend heavily on the property tax to stay in business.

- Right.

And local schools can have such varied resources because of that different local property tax base.

And I think we, you know, we've created that evidence-based funding model.

So if people are not aware, it's a different way of looking at putting additional dollars into school funding that is kind of more of a holistic look at a district focusing on its real needs, figuring out the adequacy gap between what's available locally and what's really needed to meet the needs of those students.

So for example, I represent some districts that are really close to Scott Air Force Base.

That's a very, you know, the population of kids changes frequently.

They are coming in, so they need a little more wraparound support services to get adapted to their new environment and just maintain those struggles.

In Collinsville, we have a lot of English language learners, a higher percentage than we do in some other areas.

That also requires a little more support than it might in a different school district.

So the evidence-based funding model looks to incorporate all of that.

We've been putting more money into that for the last six years at least.

And while there's no mechanism in there that forces a lowering of property taxes, when more evidence-based funding goes into a district, it can help start to tilt the scale so that we are actually, as a state, funding schools as a whole, instead of relying on local property tax.

- The evidence-based learning model that you're talking about provides for an additional $350 million every year for K-through-12 schools.

Some districts like Chicago, for example, say that that's a good step forward, but it's not enough.

How is it impacting districts in school districts in your area?

Would there be, in your mind, a need to increase the amount of money that the state sets aside every year and puts into K through 12?

- Well, huge advocate for public education, so I'm never gonna say "No, thank you," if the offer is there for more money for our public schools.

I can tell you that I am in contact with all of the superintendents and many of the principals in the region that I represent.

They can tell me stories of the programs that they've been able to add to their schools, curricular updates they've been able to do with the increased funding, hiring of staff, sometimes it's classroom teachers, sometimes it's social workers, it might be other, you know, ESPs, educational support professionals.

But they have all said that it's made a dramatic difference helping towards better outcomes for kids.

- One of the other issues I know that has been at, well, certainly debated in Springfield during the course of your tenure is the Invest in Kids Tax Credit Program that helps lower-income students attend private and religious schools.

It was not renewed by the legislature last year.

Supporters said it was vital to school choice while opponents said it was taking funds away from public K-through-12 schools.

Where do you stand on the issue?

- Well, we've just been talking about needs in our public schools, and I don't really understand why we would want a program that's going to divert monies away when we are just trying to make smart investments in our public schools.

People can still make donations to scholarships for those private and parochial schools.

They can still get tax benefits, but it was an extremely generous, you know, a 75% tax credit means that if somebody donates a thousand dollars, they get $750 tax credit, and that is money that is then not going to be available to push towards our public schools.

- I wanna talk a little bit about higher education in a moment, but in terms of economic development, Illinois, of course, is a powerhouse economically in the Midwest.

It's always in the top five of states in terms of economies across the country.

But not everyone gets to share in that.

A lot of people are still suffering from the after effects of inflation.

Inflation has gone down, but a lot of people are still feeling the pinch.

Unemployment's still a problem in areas, along with housing insecurity and food insecurity.

What is your prescription for trying to do more in terms of economic development and job creation in your area?

- Oh, that's a great question.

I think it's, it's really important.

I do represent Granite City, and Granite City, you know, it was a steel mill town and it is still struggling today.

There is a huge resurgence.

There's a big investment in downtown and to bring back like restaurants and shops and other things.

The mayor there is doing a tremendous job of getting people involved in that work.

But we need that.

I love the support of President Biden of trying to protect US Steel, making sure that it maintains to be a US company so that it's, you know, going to employ and we're gonna keep creating steel right here in the Midwest.

I think expanding our, we are really a transportation hub, especially in our region.

We have rail, we have highways, we have the river.

And so taking advantage of that, we have the port over there in Granite City as well too.

We have close by the airport down in Mascoutah.

We just have, we're multimodal transportation and that's huge for companies.

We've got tons of investment in the warehouse districts in our area and that's been really beneficial and brought a lot of great jobs and opportunities to people.

One thing that we could have better opportunities is maybe some more local transit to help people get to and from the jobs that they do 'cause some people do not want to be car dependent or just cannot be car dependent.

So I think that's an investment that we could make in both of the St. Clair County and the Madison County transit districts are doing a really great job in innovative ways to make that, you know, more attainable for our residents.

- If you look back over the last few years of the Pritzker administration, the first administration, and now we're midway through the second, a lot of the focus at the state level has been in trying to grow the electric vehicle industry, of course, in the Bloomington-Normal area and other parts of the state.

How does that impact your area?

Is that something that your district is taking advantage of?

- I'm seeing more electric vehicle charging stations available at our city halls and at at other locations so I think that's wonderful.

I really think that the infrastructure needs to be there for people to be able to make the switch.

Because of our geography people have to drive longer distances and I understand for some people the electric car right now just isn't feasible for the ground they have to cover.

It's not a reliable path, you know, they can't find a route necessarily where they always will have the charging stations that they need.

They may live in an apartment complex where they don't have the ability to charge their car at home or where they work may not have the charging station so that they can get home.

So I think as long as we continue to focus on that infrastructure building, if people are interested, then they can make that switch to electric.

I think making sure that we're considering those, the hybrid models of cars, I think are also a great bridge for people in areas like ours that kind of have to travel longer miles than others that might live in cities where they only have a couple-of-a-mile commute every day.

- We talked a little bit about higher education at the beginning.

Of course, you're, as you said at the outset, you're serving as chair of the House Higher Education Committee.

You have SIU Edwardsville in your district.

They're doing fairly, SIU Edwardsville is doing well, but other universities haven't done as well.

Western Illinois University recently announced plans to lay off dozens of faculty and staff.

They're trying to deal with a $20 million deficit there.

Other universities are also wrestling with that, especially because of declining enrollments.

What strategy would you outline for higher education in the state to try to reverse some of those trends?

- Well, thanks.

This is a huge issue.

I spend a lot of time actually on this issue.

I serve on, it's the Midwest Higher Education Compact, which is the 12 states of the Midwest looking at issues that deal with higher education.

So it's very interesting to see what they do in, you know, Indiana and Nebraska and other states that surround us.

But one of the issues is there's the changing nature of, who are our college students?

That traditional out-of-high school, 18-year-old is no longer the average starting student, or if they are not at a particular school, they won't be pretty soon.

We have people taking various different pathways to get themselves to higher education.

Sometimes they're coming out of the workforce where they went after high school graduation.

They may have gone through an apprentice program and maybe they're an electrician and now they wanna take business classes in order to, you know, advance their career that way.

So our universities are trying to adapt to meet the needs of those different learners.

But one thing that's always been a problem is that our schools just have not been able to compete with specifically those traditional high school graduates.

We have been a net exporter of those graduates for a while.

And so one thing that I'm very proud of, it was very early in my career, I was involved with a group that created a merit-based scholarship program.

It's called AIM HIGH.

Every single one of our public institutions takes advantage of it.

And every single one reports every year at their appropriations hearings at how they're using it and how it's been able to attract and retain those Illinois students.

So what was happening was students in our area would maybe get recruited away by Southwest Missouri or Western Kentucky or a school like that because they would look at their ACT score, their GPA, maybe their extracurriculars and come to them with this package before the kid even applied.

And they could see on a website, "Oh, I would get this huge discount in tuition and that's gonna make it cheaper than going to my local school right here in Edwardsville."

It's allowed Edwardsville and all of our other campuses to kind of, compete in that market and to recruit our very own students.

And we are seeing that trend very slowly reverse.

The trend of the demographics across the country, though, are, there are just fewer young people, right?

We're in a population decline.

I mean, it can sound much more drastic than it really is, but it's just the demographics are changing.

Not as many people are having as many children.

And so the pool of 18 year olds is not as big.

So, like I said, our colleges are learning to adapt and we need to do what we can to support them as they try to adapt to that new model.

We know that there was a gap in the workforce, specifically in higher education.

So I worked with the two-years and the four-year schools to come together to create this consortium model where the four-year is a degree-granting institution, but a lot of it can be delivered through that two-year model because that's just more adaptable.

They have locations closer to where people live.

They already have a lot of purely online programs and methods of instruction.

And so that's much easier for students to adapt to.

So I think those new innovative curriculum changes and instructional models is the way that we're gonna have to go, and we've gotta support our institutions to do that.

- You talked about the evidence-based learning funding model for K-through-12 education.

There's now legislation being proposed, especially in the Senate, where the Senate majority leader Kimberly Lightford's talking about creating a similar kind of program for higher education that deals with the needs of individual institutions.

Is that a workable solution in your view?

- Yeah, I think so.

And I was lucky enough, I served on the commission that studied that.

And so it was very interesting to learn from other states, look at their models and see, how do we adapt that here in Illinois?

I think we're going to have a year full of a lot of hearings and discussions on where the model, right now, the proposed model is, you know, I represent a campus of an institution that has a medical school.

There's a little bit of concern about how that's not quite worked into the model right now.

So I think those fine tuning.

But yes, every one of our institutions has a unique student body, has a unique mission, has unique needs.

They all share the need for deferred maintenance help, and they all share the need to try to lower tuition, but they have this diverse student population and they need to meet their needs in a way that works for them.

So I do think it's a workable solution, but I think there's a lot of details that are yet to be discussed.

- Let's turn to the issue of pension reform.

Illinois, at last word, had something in the area of $142 billion in debt obligations for the five public employee unions around the state, or excuse me, pension systems around the state.

The Pritzker administration's been making additional payments to bring down that debt, but the obligations are still a large part of the annual budget.

The Supreme Court and the state of course, ruled a few years ago, you can't do anything to reduce employee pension benefits from what they were promised.

So is there any way, in your opinion, that there is a path forward to trying to reduce that obligation in future years?

- Well, I think it's important to understand two parts of that problem is years and years ago before I was ever even considering running for the Legislature, when the state decided to take pension holidays.

All that was doing was creating this future problem and knowing that we were digging a hole that we would eventually have to fill.

I do agree with the Supreme Court.

A pension, it's a promise.

The folks that put their time in and work those jobs, they plan for their future with the expectation that that's the pension that they were gonna get.

They may have made different decisions about how they would've saved money or what they would've done if they did not know that they had that pension to rely on and to yank it out from somebody when they're at the end of their career or after they have finished their career would just be morally wrong.

So I agree with that.

The other thing that I think a lot of people still don't know, even though it's been quite a while, since 2011, we are on a different pension system.

We are on the Tier-2 system that does require employees to work a longer period of time, and the the benefits are not as high as under the Tier-1 system.

So there again, there's some concerns with that, that it may be part of why it's hard to fill some of the jobs that we are having a hard time filling, but it was an attempt to make some pension reform so that we could maintain those obligations.

I think we'll be seeing, that's another thing we'll probably be seeing a lot of discussion about.

I know that the public sector unions have been holding some town halls and other information sessions about Tier-2 and trying to make a fix to that.

- Yes, because a lot of that has to deal with whether or not Tier-2 actually meets the social security payment standards or income standards, pension standards for that.

And the state could eventually be on the hook for more money if the federal government decides that Tier-2 isn't working - Right.

Yeah.

And it would be, Tier-2 was enacted to try to help a fiscal problem, but if we, hopefully, are not gonna learn that it's going to cause a bigger fiscal problem than the problem it was attempting to fix.

So that's why it's such an important discussion that we're having this year.

- This year's fiscal budget is somewhere around $53.1 billion, and in that budget, there's another $182 million to provide shelter and care for recently arrived migrants to the state, another $440 million more for programs that provide healthcare to non-citizens.

Republicans say the Democrat's priorities were misplaced back in the spring.

They say the state's resources ought to be spent on Illinois citizens, not non-residents.

How do you respond to that criticism?

- Well, I do wanna make it clear.

I actually voted against the budget this year.

I had some similar concerns to that.

The budget also relied on a revenue package, and that revenue package had some things that specifically were negatively impacting here in the Metro East.

And I was not going to vote for a revenue, right, a new tax that's going to hurt businesses and individuals in the area where I live, and I was not going to, then, I'm not gonna vote for the spending list if I'm not gonna agree with how we're gonna raise the money to do it.

I was frustrated with some of the different priorities in the budget.

The 2% to higher education was not even keeping up with inflation and with the things we talked about earlier about Western, you know, looking at getting rid of positions and there's always a threat of some programs ending at all of the schools across the state, which is not how we're gonna attract the students we wanna attract.

I just thought that it was a little shortsighted, and I did not agree with all of the priorities in the budget.

- One of your colleagues who voted along the same way that you did, Fred Crespo from Hoffman Estates, was warning that the state really shouldn't be raising taxes at this time in those areas and that the state might need to end up tightening its belt next year.

Is the budget that's currently in place going to make it intact all the way into the next fiscal year?

- So I, yeah, Fred, Representative Crespo and I, we have lots of conversations about this.

I think he and I talk about how there sometimes seems to be an interest to, "Well, let's create a new tax so that we can create a new program," instead of, "Let's look at the programs that already exist, make sure we're adequately funding those first, and let's look at where we have duplicity of effort and maybe we can streamline and be a little more efficient."

You know, my master's work was in mathematics and operations research, which has to do with efficiency.

And so it drives me bonkers when I see a lot of overlap and a lot of redundancy of effort where I think we could really streamline things.

One thing I think we did that was a really good thing this year was the creation of a new agency that's going to cover kind of all of early childhood instead of this web of different departments and agencies that a family would have to deal with.

Now it's not a immediate, you know, "Oh, tomorrow we're gonna save millions of dollars," but it's an over time, putting efficiencies like that in place helps us spend money more wisely.

- Before we go, we've got about another minute and a half left.

I want to turn to law enforcement for a moment.

What about increasing oversight on law enforcement hiring.

Criminal background checks are already required, but in the wake of the killing of Sonya Massey in Springfield by a former Sangamon County deputy sheriff, there are a lot of questions being raised on the hiring practices of sheriff's departments and local law enforcement across various jurisdictions.

Does the General Assembly have a role in trying to do more in that area?

- Yeah, that was a really tragic story in Springfield and really, and as you read the developments and you learned that this was probably someone who should not have been employed in the position they were employed.

It does make you look at that.

I have been, I've always been very proud in my career here that I have worked alongside with law enforcement.

I've always been proud that I have had their endorsement in all the races that I've run.

I think they are willing to come to the table and discuss.

Every great police officer only wants to work with other great police officers and they wanna be our partners in putting things in place that will keep, you know, those top-of-line individuals being the ones wearing the badge.

- State representative Katie Stuart of Edwardsville.

Thank you so much for your time on this edition of "Meet the Candidates."

Certainly appreciate it.

(upbeat dramatic music) - Thank you so much.

Thanks for doing this.

(upbeat dramatic music continues)