(upbeat music) Welcome to "At Issue".

I'm H Wayne Wilson.

Thank you so much for joining us.

April 8th was the end of the spring legislative session and your saying, I thought it was at the end of May?

Well, it was different this year because of the primary that's coming up in June.

So the legislature did retire, let's say, on April 8th with a budget of $46 1/2 billion that was a money issue, a crime issue is in there, and some money coming back to you.

We're going to be talking about that with three people who cover Springfield.

Let me first introduce to you Mike Miletich.

Mike is the capital bureau chief for Gray TV Television.

You cover how many stations with your reports from Springfield?

- Seven different stations across Illinois and we get all the news out that you need from Rockford all the way to Southern Illinois, over to the Quad Cities.

Basically everywhere except Chicago.

- So, you're busy.

And Brenden Moore is here.

Brenden's busy as well.

He is the state government reporter for Lee Enterprises newspapers.

How many newspapers is that?

- We have five in Illinois, including Bloomington, Decatur, the Quad Cities, Carbondale, and Mattoon.

- And let me introduce to you Charlie Wheeler.

Charlie is the senior reporter, if I may call him that.

Charlie is a retired Springfield correspondent but you have a long history, Charlie, starting with the Sun-Times.

- Yeah, I started with the Sun-Times in April of 1969 and I covered the Constitutional Convention and they needed someone the following year to come down and cover their General Assembly.

And I was the only person in the Sun-Times city room who had been to Springfield before and was willing to go back.

And so I became a permanent fixture down here in Springfield, and in fall of '93 I was fortunate enough to be chosen to be director of the public affairs reporting program, and I would point out that our other two panelists are graduates of that program.

And I retired, then, in August of 2019 and I'm now a retired professor emeritus.

- And I welcome all three of you and let's start with the budget.

$46 1/2 billion.

That's about a 10% increase.

It's a balanced budget, Mike?

- Many people are gonna look at it that way.

And the big talking point is how do you put together a balanced budget when we're still in COVID 19, trying to make sure that all the funding for proper priorities is all there?

But also, how can you say yes to more funding for certain priorities and we can't necessarily meet you on some obligations for different parts across the state?

So, it was hit or miss on which areas that they invested in.

But some of the biggest that you're seeing, honestly, is putting more funding towards schools, K through 12, higher education, human services because mental health has become such a huge priority during the pandemic, and of course, public safety, that was a huge part of the budget.

And I think a lot of people didn't realize how much money could go towards it.

The governor proposed $200 million and lawmakers said we need to double that, they put 230 more.

230 million more into it.

- And how were they able to do that?

I mean, where did the money come from, Brenden?

- So H, we're in a unique situation for the state of Illinois, where we're actually pretty flush with cash.

Obviously there's been a lot made about the $8.1 billion in American Rescue Plan funds that the Federal Government gave to the state last year, but even more importantly is the tax revenue that's coming into state coffers.

So basically sales tax revenue and income tax revenue, the two main drivers of revenue into the state's General Fund are through the roof, quite frankly.

Maybe part of that could be attributed to stimulus checks that people received last year.

People are back at work after being home during COVID so the state is awash in cash which has given lawmakers opportunities to do a lot of things they haven't been able to do in the recent past.

So, that includes putting an additional $500 million towards the state's pension system.

That hasn't been done, I believe, in a very long time, maybe ever.

And it allowed for them to give direct relief to taxpayers.

About $1.8 billion in tax relief is included in this budget.

Obviously it's an election year, inflation is hurting people quite a bit and lawmakers are responding to hopefully ease that burden a little bit.

- I wanna talk about the money coming back.

$1.8 billion sounds like a lot but when you divide it amongst all the residents of Illinois, not so much.

But first I wanna talk about pensions.

Charlie, if you could join the conversation.

In terms of historical perspective, $500 million more toward pension, how's that sit historically speaking?

- Well, I would say where it sits historically speaking, is it's unprecedented.

Illinois has had a pension underfunding problem from day one.

And by that, I mean when the first public pension system was set up more than a hundred years ago, a legislative commission after a year or so, issued a report warning that we're not setting aside enough money to pay for the benefits these folks are gonna get when they retire.

And that has always been the case and right now the difference between what we promised people and what we're likely to have is in the neighborhood of $140 billion.

And so this year we're putting, between the current year and the coming year, we're putting in $500 million more and it's gonna save us billions in the future.

The difficulty is, as I said earlier, we don't fund the benefits.

When I was at the university I was in the State University Retirement System and I would earn a certain number of retirement benefits per each year.

And in theory, the state, the University of Illinois, Springfield, would set aside enough money to cover those benefits in the future.

That's called the normal cost.

We've never done that.

And so this is just exceptional.

And as a matter of fact during my tenure, at one point under Governor Thompson, there were a couple years where we not only didn't set aside enough money to pay future benefits, we reduced what we set aside to only cover 60% of the benefits that were being paid out in that year.

And then in 2005 when Blagojevich was governor, we actually shorted the pension systems $2.3 billion over a couple of fiscal years.

So yeah, this is unprecedented.

It's never happened before and I certainly hope it'll keep on into the future.

- Mike, the budget, House Bill 900, it's 3,448 pages long.

(both laughing) - Yes.

- It passed 34-19-1, and then it passed the House 72-42.

Largely partisan.

Can we talk a little bit about the partisanship that exist in Springfield, and of course, veto-proofed majorities for the Democrats in both houses.

- Of course.

I think as Brenden noted, we're in an election year and no matter what side you're on, voting for things like spending or investments in certain areas can mean a lot to your constituents back home.

So, there is that heightened partisanship and there were actually quite a few suburban Democrats that decided, oh, I don't know if I could vote on this, I'll vote know or present for the budget and also several of the other bills.

But I think the big thing right now is that you're seeing people that may have sat back a little bit and not talked during session most of the past few years, stand up and take a stand so that they get those sound bites or those moments with the camera on 'em that could play back home.

Are people watching what's happening in Washington and trying to model that a little bit back home here in Illinois?

That could definitely be happening.

You're seeing a lot of the Republicans highlighting the issues with crime, the issues with overspending.

They say a lot of the money in last year's budget went towards Democratic, what they call pork projects and they didn't want that to happen this year.

You'll notice though that a lot of the investment that's going towards crime reduction and for police, they had to support it, right?

'Cause how could you not support it after you say that you need to back the police?

They want more investment so they would've voted no but they had to get that vote across.

- Because the Republicans have so few members, how much say did they have in this?

The budget was presented four days before the end of the session, by the Democrats.

How much say did Republicans have in?

- Not much.

Quite frankly if you talk to them they'll say they were basically shut out of budget negotiations, which shouldn't be a surprise because the Democrats have supermajority so they have the votes.

Quite frankly, it was probably not likely that Republicans would vote for a budget proposed by the governor in an election year, anyways.

But I will say though, the Democrats would say, well, Governor Pritzker revealed his proposed budget in February.

There have been appropriations hearings throughout the spring session.

It's been well known the revenue numbers that are coming in so it's not like they were totally blindsided.

But yes, the budget, the first Democrat House proposed budget was introduced on Tuesday.

Governor Pritzker, Speaker Chris Welch, and Senate President Don Harmon announced an agreement on Thursday that mixed a few of the plans together and we didn't see the actual bill until Friday.

So, is it a good process?

Some may question that in voting on it in the middle of the night, Republicans did the thing they do every year where they print out the whole 3,000 page thing.

You know, look at this thing that the Democrats are putting on us at one o'clock in the morning.

Fair point, but it's not like they didn't know what was coming.

I think everyone had a pretty good idea of what was gonna be in this budget.

- Historical perspective, Charlie?

- Yeah, I can recall back in the day when the budget was not in one 3,000-page bill but rather in maybe 125 separate, individual appropriation measures And those were unveiled when the governor would unveil his budget.

Back then the budget was announced in May, his proposal, and the bills for each individual agency would be introduced.

Some in the Senate, some in the House with the actual numbers in there and there'd be committee hearings and there'd be amendments, and it'd go back and forth.

And at the end of the day the governor, and during my time it was mostly a Republican governor, Democratic majorities in both chambers.

So, the governor would sit down with the Democratic leaders and the Republican leaders, and we used to refer to it when Thompson was the governor, we'd refer to it as Big Jim and The Four Tops.

And they would hash out the details and then come out and say, here's what we're gonna do.

And that budget would be, the actual physical pieces of paper would not be available well before people had a vote on 'em, but everybody knew what was in them.

And the difficulty for the Republicans is not having any say at all in the sense of being able to actually impact the budget and having a Democratic governor who can't be there to fight for them and their interests.

They were relegated to having to complain about this stuff and the irony is, as was alluded to earlier, they complained about, well, you're only giving temporary tax relief, and these things are just for the election and after the election the tax relief is gonna go away.

But I would venture to say that they virtually all voted for that particular piece of legislation that contained the tax breaks, even after they got up and railed about it because they don't wanna be seen on the campaign trail as having voted against cutting these sales tax hikes on groceries, for example.

- Brenden, a couple of things.

Budgetarily in the bill, they're going to, I think, create more or less a rainy day fund?

They're gonna pay down some debt?

- Yeah, so in addition to the additional pension payment, there's $1 billion that's going to the Budget Stabilization Fund, also known as the rainy day fund.

And that's just a practice that's common in most states that you set aside some reserves for when times aren't so good, when you're not flush with cash.

And Illinois, being in the pretty poor fiscal state it's been in for quite a while, has not had a rainy day fund and so that's pretty unprecedented investment into that.

It should also be noted that the state is now on a regular payment schedule for its bills.

The term bill backlog doesn't really apply anymore because I believe bills get paid out, I believe it's within 60 days, maybe 30 days.

- [Charlie] It's actually 15.

- [Brenden] 15?

- [Mike] Yeah, it's gotten a lot better.

- It's gotten a lot better.

And so, the state has actually found some of its fiscal footing over the past few years, so much so that it received a credit upgrade, a couple of credit upgrades last year.

And many believe the state could be in line for another one this year with this budget that they passed just a few days ago.

- Let's turn to crime.

A lot of bills passed with regard to crime.

Mike, first, let's talk about that Co-responder Bill.

Could you explain that?

And that is for selected communities?

- Yes, this is a pilot program right now to work alongside police departments for a co-responder model of having mental health professionals, they're on scenes with law enforcement.

So, H knows many times in the past I covered homicides here in Peoria and in the Bloomington-Normal area.

And when you show up to a scene, the first thing that you usually see is family members are distraught.

They're realizing that their loved one is gone and so many are going through mental health trauma at that point.

The thing is, many times people don't have the proper resources there in that moment.

And the idea with this co-responder model is that there can be people there to help survivors of violence to make sure that they're okay and to alleviate the pain the best that they can.

A lot of times police go directly to investigating, whatever they have to do, and they don't go automatically into the mindset of we need to help this person that is witnessing all of this.

- And these people would be on staff at the police department?

- Yes, and there's funding set aside for this as well, that was appropriated and that's a large chunk it too.

Because, let's say that someone is being called to a scene and they know it's a homicide, they're going to have that staffer that's with Peoria police department, was one of 'em that's included.

Peoria, Springfield, quite a few others that were included where they could show up to a scene and have that person there ready to go.

And I'm thinking at this point, you're gonna see a lot of people that are already social workers, mental health professionals that want to sign on for this type of opportunity because it could be a new model across the country.

It's very interesting.

- Brenden, let's turn to the smash and grab bill.

I think it's called the Organized Retail Crime Bill, but how's that going to work?

- Right, so first of all it defines organized retail crime.

That was not in state statute before this bill was passed.

We'll see if the governor signs it.

But the big component is that it will allow for basically any state's attorney across the state to prosecute the whole crime if any one part of it was committed in their county.

So, say you do a smash and grab in Cook County then go over and do one in DuPage and in Will, or down here in McLean County, or in Tazewell County.

State's attorneys will be able to prosecute you in that county for all the crimes that you committed, even the ones not within the county.

So, it really increases the jurisdiction and the leeway that prosecutors have, it also allows for the Attorney General Kwame Raoul to convene a state grand jury to prosecute organized retail crime.

Just to back up for a second, this became a pretty big issue a couple of years ago, especially during the pandemic.

I think we all saw the scenes on the Magnificent Mile in Chicago of looting and these smash and grab crimes.

A lot of these are very organized.

These are people that do this, I shouldn't say professionally, but are pretty skilled at this.

And there was often this view that there was not enough of a deterrent and there were too many holes in the system to allow for people to be prosecuted.

So, this addresses some of those concerns and, at least advocates this is an initiative of the Attorney General's Office as well as the Illinois Retail Merchants Association.

They believe it could serve as a national model.

They think it's the strongest legislation of this type in the country.

- There was much more than just a budget and a crime focus on the legislature this year.

And that included a patient driven payment model for congregate setting, basically for Medicaid funded patients at nursing homes.

- And this had been a long time coming.

I remember first coming to the capitol and hearing about negotiations to improve the rate model for long-term care.

And it's been a back and forth between Department of Healthcare and Family Services and basically the service providers about how we can improve the way things are within these homes.

A lot of people look at sending someone to a long-term care facility, saying that I wanna make sure that they are safe and I'm putting this person's life in your hands.

But many times they don't understand that the situations that they're going through are due to lack of funding that's for the patient.

And most of the money that the state kept giving year after year would go to the big wigs that run these facilities, not necessarily the employees that are there on the ground helping to make sure the patient is okay.

So, finally they got to a point where this patient driven model was coming to the forefront and they wanna make sure that the people that are there on the ground get paid better and don't have to work for, let's say one individual that's a direct service provider isn't helping 30 or more people at once.

One person per floor.

I mean, we have several lawmakers that have been in that industry on the ground.

Representative Lakesia Collins out of Chicago told many stories, where she said this is madness and the state needs to change and make sure that people not only are living.

And, mind you, we are still in this pandemic where many people in those facilities, they perish due to the lack of care.

- And the bill includes, excuse me, a $7 increase to just $92 1/2, I think it is, to cover.

That's a daily rate.

We know it's much more expensive to provide that care, but at least they added $7 more.

But there's also additional funding if they meet certain targets.

- That's the main basis.

You wanna make sure that the quality of the facility is strong and that people are being healthy.

It's the quality of life, not only for the employees but for the people that live there.

And less focus on how many people can pay the lobbyists in Springfield to get enough money.

That's honestly what the big problem was for years, is that it was the facilities that would come forward and say, well, okay, we're gonna slide this money under the table to you because we know that we could do better, but were the patients really gaining the best care?

That's the real question.

So, obviously the money is going where it is now but it's gonna take some time to see if this rate reform truly helps.

But it was a bipartisan effort.

- Charlie, you covered Springfield for 50 years or so.

You're now retired, but I know you still pay close attention.

The process that we went through, the bills that came out, can you give us a little bit of feel from your perspective as to was this a better session than normal, or was this typical of past sessions?

- I would say that this was unprecedented in terms of when the legislature finished up its work for the spring in the first week of April.

That has never occurred before in modern history.

And I would say modern history goes back to basically the 1970 budget put forward by Governor Richard Ogilvie.

That was for one year after the state having, what, well from its inception budgeted on a biannual basis.

So, the legislation would come in in the odd numbered year after the election, and the even numbered year, pass a budget for two years and then go home for a year and a half.

And Ogilvie changed that.

He did annual budgets.

And so this is the earliest that we've ever put a budget together under those, in that paradigm.

- Brenden, some lesser important bills were passed.

Two I wanna mention in particular: that is the state snake.

We now have a state snake and I'll let you talk about that.

If you wanna talk about the state stone?

- Yeah, absolutely.

So we always got a few, I don't wanna say silly bills, but some more lighthearted bills and one of them was the naming of the state snake which is the eastern milk snake.

It was actually a student, a kid from Southern Illinois that brought this to his local lawmaker, State Rep Dave Severin, who carried the bill and basically testified in committee, said why he believed the eastern milk snake would be a good snake for Illinois.

And it just goes to show that you can still petition your legislature and make change.

- It didn't cost a lot to do that?

- [Brenden] No.

- I wanna point out that it is not venomous and it grows to about three feet in length but I wouldn't have one at home.

And then the state stone, is that right?

- Well, you have the particular name.

I think of this as a limestone type of rock that we're seeing.

And I made a joke about it as soon as they announced it because, you know, I like that bulger, that's a nice bulger.

That's what I could think of.

It's actually very similar to what's in the Old State Capitol, so very dusty.

- Yeah, dolostone is the name of it and it is out of the dolomite material.

It' sedimentary.

And with that, Charlie Wheeler, thank you so much for joining us on "At Issue".

And to Brenden Moore and to Mike Miletich, thank you for giving us a brief analysis of what happened in Springfield this spring session.

We'll be back next time with another edition of "At Issue".

This time we'll have the new Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Peoria, Bishop Lou Tylka will join us.

See you then.

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