(rousing music) - Illinois lawmakers have wrapped up their spring session.

That tops what we'll talk about this week on "Illinois Lawmakers".

I'm Jennifer Fuller, and we'll start things off with Rich Miller of the Capitol Fax.com.

Rich, it's been a busy week for you.

I appreciate your time.

- (chuckles) Thanks.

It's been a rough.

- This session looked a bit more normal than last year, a few more days in the Capitol, a few more debates on the floor.

How would you wrap up this session, particularly compared to last year with the pandemic just unraveling at that point?

- Well, I was sitting in somebody's legislative office on May 31st, and things were going really well.

Everything was passing.

Things were on schedule.

It looked like everything was going okay.

And I said aloud, "It's just, just too good.

Something's going to happen."

And then boom!

It did.

The Senate after the governor and the House Democrats made a deal with Exelon on its subsidies, the Senate turned thumbs down unexpectedly and threw the rest of the session into chaos.

The Senate ended up coming back the next day to do some other things, and the House will have to return later in the month.

- How much of a cloud does that cast on the overall spring session?

Do you call it successful?

Do you call it to be determined?

- Yeah, to be determined on some things.

I think, they passed a budget on reasonably on time.

The budget, no one has shown me yet where the budget is physically out of bounds.

They, for Democrats, they did a interesting thing.

They left about $6 billion in federal aid unspent.

(laughs) That doesn't normally happen.

There's just money sitting around, and they don't spend it.

They wanna take their time and come up with good ways of spending this money.

And that's pretty responsible.

They paid down debt.

They did some other things by pre-paying some Medicaid in order to get a bigger match.

I'm having trouble finding too many faults with what they did budget-wise.

And that's, of course the biggest thing that they have to do every year.

- Sure, one of the other big issues that- - Now, there are people who say the ethics bill that they passed is it's not up to snuff.

But I mean, these are politicians, and you're not going to get an ethics bill that's going to get an A grade from reformers.

There were a few things in that bill that I really thought needed to happen, and those things were put in there.

So (laughs) I'm happy with that.

The elections bill, they changed the primary date to June, mainly because they don't have a map yet for the new congressional districts.

They wanna wait until the full census data is out.

Again, Republicans and various reform groups and other groups were upset with the way that legislative districts were drawn.

But when they come back in August to draw the congressional maps, it's possible that we could see another new map for legislative, state legislative districts when all the census numbers are in.

- Do you see anything besides the energy legislation that might bring lawmakers back before, like you said, August, or even the fall veto session?

- They have to do the House.

The Senate passed a Chicago School Board election bill.

The House has to take that up.

I am sure that they will find other little things that they need to do later this month when they return, I think in this month.

And then they come back in August, maybe during the State Fair.

I wish they wouldn't screw up my State Fair, but they may come back during that to do the maps.

And then barring anything unforeseen, they won't be back until the veto session, which is in October, I think it starts in October.

- All right.

Until then we'll keep an eye on things, and I'm sure you will as well.

Rich Miller of Capitol Fax.com, thanks so much for your time.

- Thanks for having me.

I can't believe I'm so positive at the end of a session.

- We continue our wrap-up of the spring legislative session with Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker.

Governor, thanks for joining us.

- Glad to be here.

- The big issue in any legislative session always has to be the budget.

If you had to give it a grade this year, what would you give this fiscal plan?

- Well, let me be clear.

This was a terrific budget because if you think back nine months, did anybody imagine that we'd be able to get out of the pandemic budget situation of a downdraft in revenues, a significant need to pay for new services, healthcare especially, and to address a global pandemic in our state, and then to get to the end of session here and to have a, not only a balanced budget from 2021, but a balanced for 2022?

So I think we did very, very well.

I don't know how to grade it, but I will say that in every which way people should be very proud of the direction that the state is going.

- This fiscal plan relies a bit on federal money through the American Rescue Plan Act.

And as I understand it, some of the money is used this year, and some of it's being held back for years to come.

Do you expect that that's going to be needed, and how are we gonna balance things going forward if we needed federal funds to plug a hole this year?

- Actually, we did not use ARPA money to balance the operating budget of the state.

I think that may be a misconception that people have.

We did very well.

The economic recovery that we're experiencing has been very, very strong in our state.

And as a result of that, we garnered more revenue for the state during 2021.

And we expect that that will continue for some time in 2022.

In addition to that, we held spending on the operating budget flat from last year.

We increased in places where we needed to, education, social services.

We also decreased in areas of the state, but together, this was a flat budget in terms of spending.

And then as I say, the economic recovery has allowed us to garner more revenue.

So it really is a balanced budget for our state.

And so many things are included in this budget that I think we're all very proud of.

I'm happy to talk about that.

- Sure, we've heard the additional 350 million for education, as well as state money that's able to pay back some of the federal borrowing that will save interest in years to come, certainly things that are gonna continue to be revealed over the next days and weeks.

I wanted to move on to the legislative redistricting, the maps that were passed.

On the one hand, Democrats are happy with the maps.

On the other hand, Republicans are saying, this was a partisan deal and passed on partisan lines.

They're pointing to your campaign pledge saying that you would favor an independent commission to draw the maps, to make them more fair.

What do you think about this bill that was passed mainly along partisan lines?

- Well, I do favor an independent commission, and I had hoped that the legislature would introduce a constitutional amendment and pass it so that we could have had it on the ballot.

We could have introduced maps that were produced by that independent commission.

They didn't do that.

And that had been my goal.

So in the absence of that, we have a constitutional requirement in the state to put maps together by June 30.

I had hoped that the Republicans would work with Democrats or at least put their own map forward so that I could see what they wanted to do.

They did none of that.

The Democrats worked very hard on the maps.

I know they got input from across the state.

And so I've been reviewing those maps, and I look forward to looking at the rest of the maps.

As you know, there's a lot of complexity in these maps.

And so I'm continuing that effort, but hope that I'll be able to make a decision soon.

Again, my standard here is we have to have a fair map for the state in each of the areas that the state is required to put forward a map.

- There were other election changes put in place, and we're seeing this throughout the country, although it kind of runs the gamut when it comes to what legislatures are saying people can and can't do the next time they go to the polls.

Do you favor what was done here in Illinois?

- Well, we're expanding the ability of people to vote in our state, unlike those other states that you're reading about in Texas and Florida and elsewhere.

And so I'm very proud of our state, and we're doing the right thing, making it easier for people to vote, not harder.

That's something that I very much believe in, and I've been helping working with the legislature to expand the capability of people to vote.

And so they put forward, I think, a pretty good bill to continue that effort.

- One of the things that was left on the table revolves around energy legislation and whether there will be subsidies for nuclear power plants, whether there will be something to balance out other clean energy legislation in the southern part of the state and central part of the state.

How do you account for regions that really based their economy on the coal industry and in some cases, natural gas?

I know that there appears to be a deal on something like this, and you probably don't wanna get too much into the weeds, but are you confident energy legislation can be passed sometime in the next couple of weeks?

- Well, I think you know that I put out principles last summer for what I think we should get passed.

And those principles are in a bill that is in the making right now.

I've been working hard on it with my team over the last few months.

There are a lot of players here, a lot of advocates, a lot of members of the General Assembly that have been engaged in these conversations.

This is, at least so far, a very good bill, and it's really about taking action with regard to our climate, moving us from being a fossil fuel-based energy economy to one that is based on renewables and clean energy.

So I'm confident that we all have a similar set of goals here, and we've got reliable energy in the state.

That's very important in making sure that we keep our jobs across the state.

So all of that's been encompassed in a bill, and I'm very hopeful that shortly we'll be able to get the legislature back together and get something passed.

- Just a few of them, many priorities that made their way through the legislature and will continue to make their way through the legislature.

And with that, we are out of time.

Governor J.B. Pritzker, thanks so much.

- Thanks for having me.

- Up next on "Illinois Lawmakers", Senate Republican Leader Dan McConchie of Hawthorn Woods.

Leader, good to have you back on the program.

- Great to be with you, Jack.

- Busy spring semester, a bit more toward normal since you were able to meet in person this session after last year's abbreviated session.

There's a new budget for the State of Illinois passed along party lines of $42.3 billion.

The Democrats say that this new budget is balanced using both some federal stimulus dollars from the American Rescue Plan Act and more income from a rebounding Illinois economy.

In your view on the Republican side of the aisle, is the budget balanced?

Will this thing work for the next few years?

- Well, because we are receiving extraordinary amount more dollars than we expected both at the state level, as well as an additional 8.1 billion in federal money, there's a lot of money to go around.

And the issue really at the end of the day is the fact that the majority Democrats chose to go ahead and really lock Republicans out of the process, spending hundreds of millions of dollars in pork projects as well as doing very little on some things that are desperately needed, like making sure our unemployment trust fund is secure, given the fact all of the people that were out of work during COVID.

So I think it looked, definitely looks balanced because of the huge influx in federal cash, but there's still a lot of problems with the budget, which is why Republicans did not support it.

- One of the things that Democrats said was, "Well, we didn't take a lot of input from Republicans because your party, frankly, wasn't offering a lot."

How do you respond to that?

- Well, it was in the House about two weeks ago, they just decided to stop communicating with Republicans in the Senate.

We were never invited to the table.

They would always come up and say, "Well, what's on your list?"

But they would never offer any sort of basic framework really of what happens with what revenues are coming in and to have a general unique set of numbers that everybody's working off of.

So that was a real problem.

It was obvious for a while now that they wanted to just do this on their own.

And that's really unfortunate for the people of Illinois.

I mean, the Republican Party represents at least 4 million people in the state, and the fact that their voices were really silenced in this whole process is very telling.

- And you alluded to this a little earlier in your comments that there were capital projects that went to Democratic districts, but did not go to Republican districts.

- Yeah.

And again, this is part of the issue that the majority had.

And look, this is, the way a functioning democracy should work, is that everybody who's elected comes to the table, they're offering their ideas and so forth, and then you have an up or down vote based on those ideas.

But the fact that the majority Democrats were not even interested, they wanted to do a go it alone approach, that may be good for guaranteeing power, but it's not good for democracy.

- One of the aspects of this budget that's a little different is because of that federal stimulus money through the Rescue Act is they're talking about holding back some of that over the next three years so that there's always some money in reserve to address whatever future budgetary issues may come up.

How do you feel about that?

- Well, that money was designed to help us get through the COVID crisis.

And certainly we wanna be fiscally responsible when it comes to that money.

We've not had a rainy day fund in many, many years, but one of the big issues that we have is the fact that so many people were laid off, right?

We had these expenditures out of the unemployment trust fund.

We have a $5 billion deficit in that fund, and businesses over the next three years, if there's not help from the federal government or the state government, there's gonna be a dramatic tax increase on Illinois businesses right as they're trying to come out of the pandemic and get back to life as normal.

It's unfortunate that the majority Democrats only wanted to put about $100 million into that.

Doesn't make a dent.

There needs to be significant support put into the unemployment trust fund in order to make sure that we can get businesses and people back to work.

- One of the issues of keeping people on the job is a clean energy bill package that has gone through a lot of iterations over the last few weeks.

It was nip and tuck right down to the deadline.

It looked like it was going to get across the finish line, but it blew up at the last minute.

What can we expect on that?

The House and Senate have gone home, but subject to return of call of the chair.

Are you gonna be back in town in a few weeks?

- Well, it does sound like it, but you know the two sides are far apart in regards to what exactly needs to happen.

I mean, this is where the whole scandal that has been underway in regards to ComEd and its parent company Exelon, the $200 million deferred judgment that was handed down by the feds, that severely complicates the issue because you have a profitable company coming in and expecting more from ratepayers and saying we're gonna shut down part of the nuclear fleet if you don't just hand us more money while they've been involved in these shady dealings.

I mean, that has really complicated matters in a lot of ways.

- There's about a minute-and-a-half to go.

One of the things where there was some bipartisan agreement was in the area of ethics reform, the revolving door between being a lawmaker and then stepping over to work for an outside agency or advocacy group.

That's ending.

There's at least a six-month cooling off period.

Republicans would have liked to have seen more on that.

I know that there's more that you would have liked to seen in the eventual package, but this is the one that passed.

- Yeah.

I mean, it was unfortunate that this was all that passed, but a real big thing that I think is really important for us to continue to work on is a statewide grand jury ability.

Right now, if we have a legislator who's not, is behaving improperly, in a lot of ways, we have to wait on the feds to come in and kind of help clean up the mess.

That's what we've seen with former Speaker Mike Madigan in the ComEd situation.

And the attorney general has said, we need a statewide grand jury ability.

Right now, our chief lawmaker in the state is on the sidelines, can't step up, can't help us clean up our own house.

That's something that really needs to be fixed.

And I'm hoping we'll be able to get to that soon.

- Senator McConchie, thanks so much for your time on "Illinois Lawmakers".

It sounds like there's more work to be done later this summer, and we hope to catch up with you again and see how progress is coming along at the State House.

Thank you so much.

- Thanks Jack.

See you soon.

- Illinois House Speaker Chris Welch joins us now on "Illinois Lawmakers".

Good to have you back on the program.

- Hey, Jack.

Thanks for having me.

- So this is your first spring session completely in the Speaker's chair.

What are the highlights for you?

- Well, I think we had a great session.

It's probably one of our best sessions in quite a long time.

We got a balanced budget that's responsible and protects our most vulnerable, pays down debt, and really takes care of our great colleges and universities across the state.

Our K through 12 schools saw the Evidence-Based Funding Formula protected and really proud of what we accomplished.

Ethics reform and so many other great pieces of legislation that so many people worked hard for.

We really did a lot, and I'm proud of the work that we've done.

- Let's talk first about the budget.

That's always the one that is kind of seen as the key landmark or milepost for the spring session.

This is about a $42.3 billion spending package.

And as you say, Democrats say, this is a balanced budget plan.

There was some help from the federal government obviously, through the American Rescue Plan, but Illinois's own revenue picture started to pick up unexpectedly in the right direction.

- That's right.

In fact, if you would've told us a year ago that we would be in the position that we are in, we would have never believed it.

We saw some great revenue numbers come in from the Illinois Department of Revenue.

And so we were able to put together a pretty nice budget with our increased revenues, with closing over $600 million in corporate loopholes and things of that nature.

We only spent about $2 billion of the ARPA money.

We received 8 billion for the state.

So we're gonna have plenty more to use over the next three years.

This is a budget that takes into account the long-term fiscal health of our state.

- This is something that is an interesting detail in that we don't really have an official rainy day fund so much because of our budget deficits over the last few years.

But this actually allows you to plan forward for the next three years in a way that we've not been able to do before.

- That's right.

I mean, it's really, when I said it's a responsible budget, I'm not just using rhetoric.

I mean, it's balanced, it pays down debt.

It pays the pension obligation in full, and we left money over.

When have you seen that, those things happen in Illinois?

We have the ability to look forward.

And I think that the credit ratings agencies are gonna look positively on us, and we're gonna continue to build upon that.

- $1.5 billion will be used to help businesses that bore the brunt of the pandemic.

Other programs like affordable housing, public health, violence prevention programs will be funded under this budget.

- Our goal was to leave town and help people.

And the legislation that we've put forward, particularly this budget, really does do that.

And I said at the very beginning of session that a budget is a moral document.

You wanna find out what we believe in, look at the budget and where we spend our money.

And the money that we allocate to help our small businesses who were just socked by the pandemic was extremely important.

The affordable housing package is really going to help hundreds of thousands of people in the years to come and really help us lift up our Illinois economy in the long-term as well.

But just really proud of the budget that we put forward.

- Some of the stimulus money, around a billion dollars or so, will also be used to ramp up some capital projects.

- Those are going to Democratic districts though.

Republicans are crying foul.

Why weren't they included?

- Well, I gotta tell you, Republicans vote no every year I've been here, and they vote no on the budget.

They don't participate.

They're not very helpful in the process.

And so we put together a budget that we believe helps working families all across this state.

And Democrats are really proud of that much.

And at some point, Republicans are gonna have to ask themselves when do they come to the table?

Even some of the loopholes that we did not close helps Republicans and Republican communities, but they have to start helping us instead of pushing away from the table and just voting no on everything.

- One of the things, of course, that there were deep differences on had to do with the new legislative redistricting plan.

There were two plans.

The Republicans didn't like the first one.

The second one's a bit different.

They don't like that one either.

- Well, again, this was a map that was done with diversity of our state in mind.

Diversity is the strength of this great state.

And if you look at this map, it celebrates and supports diversity.

It's something that we should all be proud of.

And again, Republicans, again, pushed away from the table, didn't participate in the process, it didn't offer an alternative to the map.

But if you look at it, look at it closely, you will see that the diversity that is the strength of our state is reflected in that map.

- One thing that wasn't done before lawmakers left town was the adoption of a new congressional remap or reapportionment.

That's still waiting for the final census data to come in, and there'll be some changes in election laws next year as a result of the package that was passed along party lines.

- Well, the congressional map didn't have a constitutional deadline like the legislative map.

The Illinois Legislature is constitutionally required to pass a map by June 30th following the decennial U.S. census.

And we did that.

We were not similarly required by our constitution to do that with congressional maps.

So we will gather after the U.S. census data is published to put together congressional districts.

- Got about a half-a-minute left.

That will move the primary date next year to June instead of March?

- That is correct.

June 28th will be the primary day for next year.

It's only for next year.

And again, it's a part of accommodating the election as a result of the late census data.

- Speaker Welch, thanks so much for taking the time to join us on "Illinois Lawmakers".

(rousing music) We certainly appreciate it.

Have a good summer.

- Hey Jack, you too!

Always a pleasure.