(gentle music) - Welcome to At Issue.

I'm H. Wayne Wilson.

Thank you, as always, for joining us.

This time, the conversation will be Springfield based or, let's say, Illinois based, because every spring we talk to state legislators about bills that may affect us as we go through the spring legislative session.

And to have that conversation, let me introduce to you first Representative Sharon Chung.

Representative Chung is in the 91st district, and we're gonna talk about the new district alignments in just a moment.

Also with us, Senator Dave Koehler.

Senator Koehler's in the 46th Senate District.

Thank you for being with us.

- Thanks, H. - [H. Wayne] And Representative Travis Weaver is here, a Republican from the 93rd District.

Thank you for joining us.

- Thanks for having us, H. - And let's start with the new district's every 10 years.

Representative, just real roughly, the boundaries.

- Sure.

Mostly covers the Bloomington-Normal area and then travels out west along I74, kind of covering some of Woodford, Tazewell, and a little bit of Peoria County, so the main municipalities are East Peoria and Bartonville.

- And Senator.

- Well, that is my new district.

So instead of going to Fulton County, I now go east to Bloomington-Normal.

So I still have Peoria with Jehan Gordon-Booth, and then I go to Bloomington-Normal with Sharon.

Sharon and I share an office in Bloomington.

- And Representative Gordon-Booth, of course, it's the 92nd District Bartonville in that area.

- Mm-hmm.

- And your district is described as what?

- Yeah, so I live just west of Grand Prairie near Kickapoo, and the two largest cities in my district are Pekin and Kewanee.

So you can kind of picture Pekin go west around Peoria up to Kewanee area.

Very rural, very conservative.

So, good district, proud to represent it.

- I'd like to talk about the, and I'm going to use the word the newness of the legislature.

- [Travis] Mm-hmm.

- And I don't know how far we look back, but in modern history, as far as I can determine, correct me if I'm wrong, this is the highest amount of turnover that the freshness of the legislature has.

We've never seen this before.

The two of you are fresh.

How do you envision that affecting the legislature in the way it operates?

And I know you've only been in office for two months.

- Yeah.

Yeah, I think it's great to have new ideas.

One thing I would say is it's really nice to have a balance of staff that knows issues well and has been around mixed with new ideas.

'Cause when I bring staff an idea, it's not just me coming in new, trying to come up with ideas to fix the state.

You're also balancing the people who have been there, who know the situation, who know what have been tried before, what hasn't been tried before.

So Sharon and I think are both blessed to have great staff that helps guide us so you can bring new ideas and pair 'em with also expertise of people that have more travel knowledge.

- And Sharon, the same question to you.

Has staff been supportive?

- Staff is absolutely invaluable.

From comms and the research staff and then my own legislative staffers, they've been so helpful from everything.

And I usually say, when I see them in the morning, I say, "Well, this is my dumb question for the day."

And they say, "No, Representative, there are no dumb questions."

And I'm thinking, "Well, just wait till you hear this one."

But they have been really, really helpful in helping me through this whole process and this whole, you know, just getting to know the ropes.

- And for a different perspective.

You're a senior member of the Senate.

- I'm a more senior member, yes.

Well, I think it's interesting.

It's great to have a lot of young blood into the legislature, and people talk about term limits all the time.

You know what?

Our average tenure in Illinois is probably 78 years, probably younger in the House, a little bit older in the Senate.

I've talked to people from other states where they have 10 year terms.

They serve those full 10 years.

They serve 10 years as a House member and then they serve 10 years as a Senate member.

So, we have term limits called elections every two years.

And so I think that it really serves Illinois well.

In fact, this year, we have, I think, almost equal number of women as men in the legislature.

And that makes the dynamics, I think, really interesting.

- Let's extend the conversation to leadership in both Houses.

If math serves me properly, we have two brand new leaders, and we have one with two years experience and one with three years experience.

That's unheard of in Illinois politics.

- In Illinois politics, that's pretty rare.

But both chambers have now passed rules within their chambers that say the president or the speaker can serve 10 years.

That's the maximum term.

And so it's gonna force a turnover in that regard.

I supported that.

I think it's a good thing.

I mean, you do need to have senior people.

I remember in one of my elections, people were talking about term limits.

And I think I was at the Downtown Rotary Club and Dave Leach was in the office, and I said, "Why would we want to have term limits?"

Dave Leach, he has the institutional memory that we need to have in the legislature.

If we don't have that institutional memory, then we give that to the staff and to the lobbyists.

We need to have some experienced people there.

We also need to have young people there.

It's a good dynamic.

- So right now there's a good dynamic?

- I think so.

- All right.

Before we get into some of the major bills that are pending in the legislature, there's some that are of personal interest.

I'd like to talk to you about the speech pathology.

- Sure.

Yeah, absolutely.

So my speech pathology bill passed the House unanimously.

And it's a great example of what can come when constituents reach out to their legislator for help.

I have a constituent, used to still live in California.

In California, their law says that if you have a bachelor's degree, you can be a speech pathology assistant.

In Illinois, you can only have an associate's degree to be a speech pathology assistant.

So this young lady was stuck in a situation where she had more education than what was needed.

She had on-the-job training, yet she wasn't able to fulfill her passion and help kids with speech path issues.

So Olivia Johnson's her name, her and her husband Christian reached out to me.

And I tell the story here because I encourage anybody who's got a problem with our government, reach out to Dave, Sharon, myself.

Really common sense issues that affect everyday life, that's exactly what we can get passed, we can probably get it passed unanimously if it's things like that.

And we're here to help.

We work for this, we work for the constituent.

- Before I turn to Dave with an example, I wanna point out the media literacy law that was passed a year ago.

That was spawned by a student at Naperville Central High School.

So citizens, when we talk about a citizen legislature, in a way, we do have one.

- Yeah, we do.

- Let's talk about your particular citizen-inspired bill.

- This is an interesting one.

Sharon and I have a constituent, a 15-year-old high school student from University High School in Normal.

And she was concerned about the fact that there are a lot of children on vlogging that are really influencers and their parents set 'em up so that they have this vlog that goes all over the world and they monetize it.

They get money for it.

If you have so many hits on a program, then you get so much money back.

Well, the student said that, you know, shouldn't there be some protection because this could be very abusive to the child?

You know, the child may not want to do all this.

They may do silly things that are gonna be very embarrassing for them later on in life.

And so we came up with a bill modeled a little bit after what they're doing in the state of Washington that's much like the Jackie Coogan law, back when child actors had the same issue.

And so it says that if you're a parent, you monetize your child being on a video, if you're under 16, then you have to set a certain portion of that in a trust fund for the child.

And if they don't, they have to report that every year to the Department of Labor.

If they don't, the child upon turning 18 can look back and has a right of action against the parents for not doing that.

We would be the first state in the union to pass this.

And I've amazed at the national attention this has gotten.

I've done interviews with National Press for the last several weeks.

Sharon is now gonna get this bill in the House.

- Because it did pass the Senate.

- It passed the Senate 56 to zero.

- And.

- [Travis] We do agree sometimes.

(Sharon and H. Wayne laughing) - [Sharon] Yeah, we do.

- Representative, did you wanna add to that in terms terms of the House?

- You know, it just moved over this past week, so I'm really excited to take it on.

It's something that, you know, I have young children.

It's something that I notice when my kids would actually watch these videos on YouTube.

And I think, "I can't imagine how much money these kids might be making or these parents might be making."

It's something that's actually really has sort of caught my interest.

And when Senator Koehler brought it up to me, I thought, "Well, absolutely.

We have to do something about this."

And it's one of those ways that, I think, that we never really saw stuff like this ever happen.

I never imagined this, say, a decade ago.

But now, it's just sort of how we legislate.

We kind of find issues as they come up and we try to see what we can do to help out.

- And Representative Weaver, the status of your bill is.

- Passed the House unanimously.

And I can't remember if it's picked up by Senator Anderson or Senator Stroller, but it's moving over to the Senate.

- Okay.

So we're halfway through on- - [Travis] We're halfway through.

- [H. Wayne] Yeah.

- One down, one to go.

- There's several important issues that are facing us.

The education of young people, of course, is always something that's at the forefront.

And the governor has suggested full year kindergarten, he suggested help financially for three and four-year-olds for preschool.

What's the status of that situation right now?

- Well, those are moving through the appropriations process because they have budget attached to them.

- Yeah, and this came out of his speech.

- Yeah.

It came out of his proposal.

And I think there's a lot of interest in it.

And I'm hearing from constituents all the time that say, "Yeah, let's do something to help our younger kids so that they're really ready for kindergarten and first grade."

Also, working parents need to have that place that they can have kids get some meaningful instruction during those early years.

I've got two grandkids that are in Pre-K and they're having a wonderful time.

They're learning tremendously.

So they'll be ready for kindergarten.

- Representative Weaver, and the rest, please address this, but money is always the issue.

- Yeah.

- Now we've had a boost in the budget.

- [Travis] Yeah.

- Because of the COVID money.

COGFA has indicated that we're doing a little bit better than we had anticipated- - Yeah.

- For the next year or so.

What about the budget?

- Yeah, well, I guess I would say, as long as we have inflation, we're probably gonna continue to out pass what we think we're gonna get for revenue estimates 'cause a lot of our budget is sales tax driven.

But back to what I would say about funding younger kids, I think it's great the earlier that you can get kids help in the classroom.

One bill that would pass the House is, would make full day kindergarten.

Right now a lot of districts have half-day kindergarten.

And another great example of "Good idea, good legislation, how do we pay for it?"

If you think about a school that today has four kindergartens being served in morning and afternoon, so you got two teachers, two classrooms serving four classes.

If it becomes full day, then you have to have four teachers in four classes in four rooms.

Why do the schools get the capacity to do that?

How are we gonna fund it?

Is it an unfunded mandate that we're gonna expect the local districts to pick up?

Is the state gonna provide some funding?

If it's a state funding, how are we gonna fund it?

So I think it's good ideas, but we always gotta take a reality check and say, "Okay, how are we gonna pay for this?"

- Representative Chung, we already have a teacher shortage.

- [Sharon] Yes.

- If we go to full-day kindergarten under the scenario that the representative presented.

Money.

- Yeah.

You know, and I think that that's something that Representative Canty up in the Arlington Heights area, up in Chicago, she was the one who brought forth this full-day kindergarten bill.

And I think, from what actually got passed two weeks ago in the House was very different from her original idea.

And I think because a lot of these things that Representative Weaver has brought up, the teaching shortage, the build classroom availability, those sorts of things, those were maybe things that were not always maybe anticipated right away.

And so all these issues had been coming up in this sort of discussions about the bill.

So, the bill now is going to put together a task force to analyze the needs of different districts and what we can do, and then it gives it a more of a soft ramp back to, hopefully, to get onto full-day kindergarten.

So it gives it a little bit more time more districts so that they can figure out how to budget for these things.

So, I think that that's one of those ways that we kind of show how people are actually working together, talking together in order to sort of have the best outcomes.

- Senator, let's turn to the Medicaid question.

There's an end to the what's called the continuous Medicaid, and that was basically under the COVID-19 timeframe.

People have to, and I think the term is re-certify or- - To re-enroll.

- Re-enroll.

But it's gonna be over a period of time.

How is that going to work?

- Well, you know, they have to re-enroll to determine their eligibility.

What we're trying to do, we're looking long term now at this.

If you look at everyone in the category, up to 200% of poverty, there's a line in there about 133% or 138% where people are income eligible for Medicaid.

Sometimes we see people going on and off.

They get a job, they become ineligible.

They get laid off, they become eligible again.

And so it becomes a real effort on their part.

So we wanna make eligibility as seamless as possible.

We're talking about trying to expand what we call a public option above the Medicaid area up to 200% so that people could buy Obamacare or private insurance, and then have that line be a little softer for 'em.

Because healthcare is one of those issues that we have to pay a lot of attention to it.

We do pay attention to it.

We spend $16 billion out of our budget every year on Medicaid.

So we need to make sure it works well and that families aren't missing it.

Because the health of our families means the health of your communities.

It means everything from mental health to you name it.

Healthcare is essential.

- And if I recall the budget process properly, healthcare and pension payments are the top two expenditures.

- And education.

Those are the top three.

(chuckles) - Mentioning, we've talked about education, let's talk about pensions.

There's two types of pensions in Illinois.

There's the state ones, there's five state pensions, and then there's the, I'll call it the local pensions.

It used to be individual ones.

Now they've combined the 650 sum into one.

But are there any prospects for making progress on what local communities, Representative Weaver, can do to meet the mandate of 2040 90% funded?

- Yeah.

Well, first of all, I appreciate you asking the pension question.

I think it's Illinois's biggest existential threat.

It's the number one budget item that we face every year.

Illinois has the largest unfunded pension liability.

We're gonna continue to have a high tax situation as long as we're paying for it.

So we gotta figure out what we're gonna do about it.

As far as the local municipalities go, one thing that I've suggested is if we switch from the 2045 deadline to switch to having a rolling three year amortization could be interesting because one thing that I worry about the 2045 deadline is getting to a situation in 2035, 2040 where we're aggressively hiking taxes to meet that 2045 objective.

Then once you get to 2045, you're left with these high taxes.

And we know the government isn't always eager to bring those back down.

So I think more than we could do to kinda ease into it and have a rolling amortization could be something that's helpful.

But at the same time, it's nice to have this 2045 deadline that we're pushing people that you gotta get serious about how we're gonna fund this.

- And on the local level of firefighters and police are now two, there's two pension funds in the state.

- [Dave] They're combined.

- They're combined.

Everybody that has at least one full-time firefighter, all those communities are now one.

Same for police.

- They didn't combine the pension funds, what they did is they combined the investment.

- [H. Wayne] The investment, I'm sorry.

- Right, right.

- Yes, thank you for the correction.

- [Dave] Yeah.

- And- - And I think, again, with pensions, we know we kind of joke that there's not a ton that we agree on, but I think we would all agree that a pension's a promise.

- It is, yeah.

- When you tell somebody it's their retirement and it's a state's obligation, we gotta take that seriously.

And there's only two things you can do: Reduce costs, increase funding.

And so some combination of that is how we're gonna have to get there.

And when reducing cost means reducing benefits that we promise to, I think that's something that we all agree that we gotta stay away from.

- And another issue is, not that communities, their sole source of income is not just the property tax, but in Peoria, 85% of property taxes go to the police, fire pensions.

In Galesburg, it's nearly 100%.

That's not sustainable.

- Mm-hmm.

- Representative Chung, let's turn to the five pension, the statewide pensions.

Last I checked, December of '22, we were at $139 billion that the state owes to the pension funds.

And that doesn't mean they're going broke right now, but thoughts?

(Sharon laughing) And I know that I put the pressure on you.

- I know, I feel a little bit of that.

Pensions is one of those questions that I've heard, you know, it's one of those things like Representative Weaver saying, it's just this thing we have here in Illinois.

And then people always ask, "What are we gonna do about them?"

And it was asked about it on the campaign trail and I think this is maybe going back to even what we talked about earlier about having these new fresh people and then maybe also having people who've been there before and maybe trying to figure out what we can do and people having ideas and I don't know, just trying to see what can work.

It's not like of any lack of trying that has happened over the years.

We've all seen it and we've seen sort of these pension talks and things kind of come to a stall.

And so I don't really have the greatest answer right now, but I'm feeling hopeful, honestly, with a lot of the new blood that we have.

- There will be no silver bullet.

$139 billion isn't a number that you're gonna fix overnight.

It took us 50 years to dig this hole.

We're gonna have to dig out of it.

Tier II was a big step in the right direction.

I would like to see a 401K option that they can opt into as a next step.

But again, there's gonna be no silver bullet.

- Well, Tier II was implemented in January of 2011.

Probably more than half of our state employees now are on Tier II.

And I include teachers in that.

And that has saved us quite a bit.

I mean, first of all, no one is gonna lose a pension.

The amount of debt we have is calculated on the fact that if everybody retired today, what would we owe?

Well, that's not gonna happen.

Everybody doesn't retire in one day.

If you go back in the history and you look at where our problems began, of course, they began a long time ago.

But in the mid-nineties, the legislature and the governor passed a bill which said, "We're going to flatten out our payments for 15 years on the pension."

And they did that, which basically underfunded the pension system greatly.

And if you look at the late 1990s where you had a lot of growth in the market, I mean, that's when the tech companies took off and everything.

We didn't have enough money in there to really keep up with inflation in that.

When Blagojevich came into office and there were some pension holidays, I will say that since I've been there in 2007, we have not missed a single pension payment.

In fact, last year, we gave another half a billion dollars to the pensions.

So I think we need to make some adjustments, we need to realize that we don't need to be a hundred percent funded or even 90% funded.

Let's talk to the actuaries and see whether it's 85 or is it 80%?

Because this is a long-term investment and we need to, you know, it's not just a feeling that we owe this, we're obligated, the Supreme Court said we have to do this.

- [Sharon] Yep.

- Let me stay with you, Senator, for the start of a discussion about Rebuild Illinois.

We're halfway into the six-year program.

- Sure.

- And a lot of progress.

McClugage Bridge in Peoria.

But electric vehicles and higher miles per gallon on internal combustion engines.

And 52% of transportation money in the state of Illinois comes from motor- - Motor fuel tax, yeah.

- Well, if we go to a million vehicles, that's the estimate, by 2030, will that harm our ability to fund not just Rebuild Illinois, but just transportation in general?

- No, not really.

We have a separate fee for an E-license plate.

So if you have an electric vehicle, you have to get an E-license plate.

That rate is $250, I believe.

What was calculated on is, and that'll probably need to go up as years go on as we get more and more vehicles.

But it was calculated based on what is the average car a person drive a year.

And let's take and see what, you know, if you take average gas mileage and average vehicle miles traveled, then you come up with what that fee was.

The motor fuel tax that was talked about, which is to vehicles mile traveled is a experimental program that they had in Oregon where you actually put some kind of a device in your car that you could see how many miles you were going and then you paid it.

It is so complicated.

It is not gonna happen.

It is just not gonna happen.

And that was introduced as a concept several years ago.

It got immediately blown out of the water by the media and by constituents all over.

We're not doing that.

- Let me turn to you, Representative Weaver.

This is a bill that's still in the Senate.

- [Travis] Okay.

- But Fentanyl is top of mind with regard to health.

- Yeah.

- And there is a bill in the Senate, Senate Bill 73, that calls for making a Class X felony for somebody that knowingly has fentanyl in a class two drug.

- Yeah.

- Is this something that, and I know it's still in the Senate, but what's your position on that?

- I support it.

I think a big word in there is that it knowingly has in it.

I think there's a lot of times when somebody's dealing drugs and they're unaware of what it is.

But we've gotta get serious about our fentanyl problem in this country.

It's in a lot of things.

You get a kid who thinks that they're buying an Adderall pill off of Snapchat and it turns out it's got fentanyl in it.

That's the last mistake they ever made because the kid overdoses.

And it's a big problem, we gotta get serious about it.

I think the more that we can do to show that we're making progress is important.

So I would support it.

- You're nodding in support, Representative?

- Yeah.

I actually didn't see this Senate bill itself, but it's something that like Representative Weaver said, it's something that we should probably take seriously.

It's a very serious issue.

- What's the status of it in the Senate, Senator?

- I'm not sure it made it out of the Senate.

It'll probably be- - [H. Wayne] No, it's still in the Senate.

- Is it?

- I checked.

As of March 31st, it was still in the Senate.

- Yeah, it still needs some work to do.

Everybody supports the idea that we have to do something about fentanyl.

The issue may be in the details and so it did not make it out of the Senate at this point.

But the issue is not going away.

We're gonna have to address it.

- Real quickly, we just have a minute left.

But I wanna talk about some of the issues that extreme groups on the left or right cause problems.

We've had threats to several legislators in the state of Illinois because they've distorted what the view of a particular bill was.

How concerning is it that we're getting threats to legislators after the public misrepresented what the bill represents?

- Well, I would like to say that the people that we have in Peoria county are not people that I view as extremists.

I think Peoria county's lucky to have excellent representation.

You can complain about gerrymandering that your neighbor has somebody different from you, but we are really well represented and I think that we're all trying to be part of the solution on that front.

- And with that, our half hour of discussion has ended.

We'll continue it, we hope at your home, and we'll continue it here after the cameras are off.

Thank you- - Very good.

- [H. Wayne] To Representative Weaver and Representative Chung for joining the conversation.

And Senator Koehler always, thank you for joining us on At Issue.

- Thank you, H. - And we'll be back next time.

We talked about the shortage of teachers.

Well, there is a shortage of teachers and we'll talk about that next time on the next At Issue.

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