(bright upbeat music) - Welcome back to "Illinois Lawm continuing coverage of the sprin of the Illinois General Assembly I'm Jack Tichenor along with Rich Miller of Capito Good to have you here sir.

- Good to be here.

- We're talking around midday on Thursday, about 36 hours before the scheduled adjournment of the spring session of the general assembly.

All eyes are kind of focused right now on the final draft of the new budget that takes effect on July one for the new fiscal year.

What's the progress?

- Pretty good so far, the house is putting together its own budget, kind of like to lay marker.

The senate has its own language that they want to use, but from what I can gather, and that could change because it's only midday on Thur and they're scheduled to a journal on Friday, but I mean, we could even see a budget today on Thursday, it's possible, which would be ridiculously early.

It's been a strange session Jack it's not like covering usual ses Now we're gonna see again, things can break down.

Things can always break down, but I mean, everybody involved is credibly claiming that they're negotiating in good and they're trying to get this d - I talked with house majority leader Greg Harriso a little earlier and he says he believes it's entirely possible that the house and senate democratic versions of the budge can be reconciled pretty shortly - Yeah, like today maybe, it's w It's bizarre, would have you ever seen that before Jack?

You've been doing this, how long - 30 Years.

- Yeah, me too, like 32 years.

Well, it's easy to put together when you got so much money layin - Well, you're not sniping around the margins as we've had to do for so many y - Well, usually, I mean, they're trying to stretch every last penny to get something out of it because there's hardly any money available to spend.

The problem now is convincing pe not to spend the extra money that they have just set it aside for a rainy da set it aside because revenues are going to start declining, ri And the state has to be ready fo And that's what this budget is a because revenues will decline.

- How close are the two super ma in the house and senate to getting this thing done?

But they've both rolled out as y their own budget initiatives and there's several hundred million dollars between the two in terms of a di to get hammered out here in the last few hours.

- Yeah, I mean, some of this is fundamental, right?

But is it fundamental to stop them from getting finished?

No, I don't think so.

It's not so ideologically or politically entrenched that they can't figure a way to split the difference so to sp And that's what the house budget their proposal really does.

The governor proposed, for insta a billion dollars in tax breaks, temporary tax breaks.

The senate had proposed about 1.8 billion, the house comes out with 1.3 billion, 1.4 billion, whatever somewhere in there, literally splitting the difference between the two.

So, you figure they'll split the difference again between the house version and senate version and that's not all that difficult to do, I don't think, but we'll see.

Again, they've been working together pretty well surprisingl So, there was a lot of tension l between the house and the senate and between the governor's office and the senate.

And there was some several days but I don't detect that now.

- Yeah, I'm hearing what you're that I don't sense that there's that much daylight between the two super majorities In the last half minute or so, we have your (laughs).

Yeah, and that's always a possib Where are the Republicans in thi in the last half minute or so?

- They're on the sidelines.

They've chosen to be on the side They've been forced to the sidelines at the same time.

They don't, this would be a really good budget year for them to be participating but politically, it's just not in the car.

- Rich, you've been watching the whole thing run its course over the last 30 years or so, the two of us have, and it's really interesting in this session to see how speaker Welch has advanced his agenda, with the Illinois house, and it's a widely diverse group of lawmakers.

- Right, so in the past, if you were a member under speaker Madigan, you would have to go to him and he would have to, or his office would then approve whatever you wanted to get done and that required whatever, righ In return.

Now it's much more member driven It's not perfect by any means, but it is significantly more member and caucus, sub caucus is driven than it than it was in the past.

And I find that to be refreshing And then by the way, that's in both chambers now.

More so in the past, the members have more control over things like the budget, things like tax cuts, things like the crime, the criminal justice bills with the crime bill, anti crime bills.

There's just a lot more involvem And they're going, it's like being in the balcony J they're going into the session while we're talking.

I got it up on my computer.

(Jack laughs) - Well, and you were mentioning - It's like old times.

- That sounds like a plan.

As you were saying, it's a different kind of atmosph as opposed to the top down management style that Speaker Madigan had, but Welch seems to be able to round up everybody at the end of the day and get them pretty close to being on the same page.

- Yeah, that is very true.

I would agree with that.

I mean, he is doing a pretty goo Considering he never, I mean, just nobody thought that he would be speaker necessa and he kind of just jumped into I think he's doing a fairly good of herding the kindergartners.

- You mentioned a little earlier that the same kind of situation is kind of playing itself out in the senate, under President Don Harmon.

There have been some splinters here and there, some daylight between them on some things, but at the end of the day, they seem to be able to get back on the same page in the agenda.

- And I think part of that is because have devolved some of their authority down to their members.

So it's not just two personalities going at it or thr when you include the governor, they're representative of their more than in the past, the leader's personal opinion about what is going to happen with this budget or with this se or with this particular omnibus It's more of the representing their caucuses interests.

And that's a healthier way of going about this.

- Rich Miller, thank you so much We appreciate it sir as always.

- Thank you.

- Up next on "Illinois Lawmakers we're joined by democratic house majority leader, Greg Harris of Chicago.

Thanks for taking the time out leader in the last hours of the spring session of the general assembly.

The big news this week of course is the house has put its budget outline out there for everyone to consider.

What are the highlights in that package sir?

- I think the highlights are fir Illinois has done pretty well in recovery from COVID.

We've seen things really turning but we also know that some people in Illinois have recovered faster and some people are still struggling.

So we're gonna be putting a tax relief program for Illinois families into place that will return $1.4 billion to Illinois families focusing on with the highest needs.

- How closely does this proposal what governor Pritzker put out back at the first part of Februa and how does it stack up with what senate Democrats have put on the table?

- As we speak today, those are being merged together, those three different programs.

So I think a lot, you're gonna see a lot of simila but our key answer is putting in property tax relief, putting in inflation relief and returning about a billion and a half billion $1.4 to our families across the state.

- There's a lot of tax relief built into this package.

There's gas tax relief, there's grocery tax relief, property tax relief.

- And also we're looking at expanding the earned income tax credit.

So that families who are at the lower ends of the wage scale, get maximum benefit from this.

We wanna be sure that we direct as much relief to families who are really struggling as we can.

- How would that play out in the house package for lower income of folks who need this kind of tax relief - Well, we're gonna base it on earned income tax credit.

This is something that already exists both at the federal and state level, but we're going expand it we want to add additional children's tax credits to it.

So there'll be a number of expansions to help people out.

- What's this clock in at in terms of the overall impact on the budget overall?

- Like I said, it's gonna be about 1.4 billion, 1.4 billion.

- Howard talks going between Speaker Welch and Senate President Harmon on reconciling what the senates and what the house is put forth.

- They're going real well.

And on the expense side too, of how we appropriate money for the other operations of the I think senate Democrats and house Democrats are on the same page.

We wanna be sure that we're addi to the state share of education so that we can reduce local reli of school districts on property And we want to improve access to healthcare.

We know there's just (indistinct) across the state, there are tens of thousands of backlog appointments of people waiting for mental hea or substance abuse treatment in communities.

And that has just shot up during So putting 170 million into allow workforce expansions in every city in town so that the mental health service can be provided.

We're adding money 5% to grow our colleges in universities and we're going to allow about 24,000 more Illinois families to get map grants for their stud who wish to go to college.

- Yeah, that's a crucial one for higher education.

There was some pushback earlier from the trade unions about the gasoline tax.

How has that panned out?

- Well, and that was really a sort of behind the scenes, inside baseball discussion of what the mechanism of how you pay for it is.

So I think those are all getting worked out, that's a technical issue.

- The house version is I underst it puts another $100 million into the local government distributed fund.

That's the way that the state takes income taxes and pours some of that back into municipal governments.

- Sure, and house members have been really insistent that we need to do, send some more back to the locals to help some of their costs related COVID, for more police protection, more fire protection, those kind of things.

So, we're hoping we can include that in our plan as well.

- Looks like you're gonna get this all done by the end of business tomorrow?

- Hopefully before midnight so that we can all home and get a good night's rest, 'cause it'd be a long night toni - Leader, thank you so much for on "Illinois Lawmakers."

We certainly appreciate it.

- Thank you.

- More on the budget now with Deputy House Republican Leader, Tom Demmer of Dixon.

Good to have you with us leader and I know this is an extremely as we're counting down the hour to adjournment.

The Democrats have put their budget out there in the house.

There's a competing version on the senate Democrat side.

Where is all this shaking out in your view?

- Well, I think it's still developing too.

We've seen a couple versions of the budget be introduced in t I'm not sure we've seen the final version be introduced yet, but about 36 hours ago, we saw for the first time as house Republicans, a 3,600 page budget.

So our appropriations team went into full discovery mode and try to understand exactly what was in that budget proposal But as you mentioned, this is a really busy day and I think things are still evo on what we're actually going to as a full budget this year.

- So this is basically very clos at least in terms of what the Democrat majorities are putting out.

It's very close to what Governor outlined on February 2nd in his in the state of the state addres About a $45 billion budget, there's tax relief in there to the tune of around a billion dollars on groceries, gasoline taxes, some property tax rebates.

How does that square with what you would like to do with the budget?

- Well, first I think it's impor that we address some of the burd that Illinois families are feeli So some of those tax relief prop are in line with what house Repu are advocating for a long time.

And frankly, I'm glad to hear that the Democrats in the legisl are starting to acknowledge that the high taxes in Illinois are a burden on Illinois familie We'd like to see some of these p maybe a little bit more long term or sustainable.

Some of the proposals that we've seen so far, it's for a six month delay in implementation of a tax or a temporary 1% reduction.

Some of those, you have to ask a little questio about whether Illinois families or consumers would even notice t when they went to buy their groc are they going to notice that there's not a 1% sales tax added to it?

We've been advocating for some more significant relief to deliver to Illinois families, but frankly, I think it's a good thing to that for once, Springfield's looking to say, what can we do to provide some kind of tax relief?

- And we're in a different situa than we have been in years past, very much of your tenure.

It's been a real exercise in try to fund state agencies at the proper level and to be able to actually do some tax relief, is something kind of remarkable in recent Illinois history.

- It is, and I think one of the other things we have to be cognizant of, is we've had bad budget years throughout much of our recent hi really challenging budget years.

We should be really careful about how we're making spending plans right now, what we're building into our normal operating base spending plan versus doing some things that are retiring some debts or addressing some one time conc Some of the spending increases in this budget, were growing those spend plans faster than our revenues are com And so you're setting yourself up in a year where we maybe have a little bit of an economic downturn, maybe tax revenues don't come in as strong as what we projected.

We have to be really careful that we're not setting ourselves to come up to the edge of a new - So this is what you're talking this is what we always call the out years.

You build in stuff into the base of the budget, and then who knows what happens a few years from now.

- That's exactly right and that's something we have to be really careful about.

We're seeing better than expected revenues right now, add to that, this avalanche of federal cash that came to the state over the last couple of years, as one time infusion for COVID r we need to be really careful that we're not building an expec or an assumption into the budget that those kinds of things are going to continue because they're not, the federal cash is certainly limitive.

And we know that just in the normal economy, there are good years and bad yea There are high revenue years and low revenue years.

So we need to be really cautious about that.

- We got about half a minute left leader Demmer, both the house and the senate Democrats have an idea about change, setting up an earned income tax credit for lower income residents of Il How's that square with your view of the budget?

- Well, I've been an advocate of the earned income tax credit for several years and have signed on as a co-spons to many of those initiatives.

I think it is a really good way to deliver meaningful relief to some of the lowest income, lowest earning families in the state of Illinois.

And so I'm glad to see that as one of the items that's being considered.

- Leader Tom Demmer, thank you so much for taking the on an extremely busy day.

We certainly appreciate it.

- Thank you Jack.

- Fresh from the Senate floor on third readings, is Senator Julie Morrison, Democrat of Deerfield who chairs the Senate Health Com She also serves a as a Senate majority web.

Good to have you here and I know this is an extremely of the year for you.

- Well, thanks for asking me to be honest with you for a few - Senator, just before sitting down to talk, I was reading an article by Capital News, Illinois, about the death of an eight year old youngster in the Peoria area who died while his case was bein by the department of children and family services.

And the story went on to say that we've had at least five chi under DCFS watches here in the last several months.

It always seems to be that when we sit down to talk the agency, there's a tragedy like this to report.

- DCFS is probably the most difficult agency to talk about because it deals specifically with families and children that are in trouble or at risk.

And so even just this week, I've had a lot of conversations with both the governor's office, the DCFS administration, and several of my colleagues who are also really concerned about the fact that yet another child has died while an investigation was pendi - And this is not new.

This goes back some 30 odd years that the agency has been chronically underfunded.

The caseloads have been extremel And unfortunately from time to t children fall through the cracks What is the (indistinct) adminis and the Senate Democrats hoping to do in this session of the general assembly to try and turn the agency around?

- Well, I can tell you that the that the governor presented in t I believe will be passed for DCF has sufficient funding to bring in more and very needed case workers and investigators.

The case level that these folks have in DCFS is way too high and not in compliance with some of the consent decrease.

So we know that that is a big is One of the issues too, that just happened on too long ago in central Illinois, was the death of an investigator at a home where there was a child she was investigating and the whole idea of providing greater safety for those investigators who walk into homes with the intention some time of maybe having to remove a chil Asking someone to go into that very dangerous situation, we have got to do a better job of preparing the case worker both through better training and perhaps having tools and resources with them that they don't have now.

DCFS, I met with them this morni They actually do have a series of pilot programs that they are trying around the to see what is most effective, a buddy system contracting with local law enforcement to sort of be on call and be there should somebody need, should an investigator needs someone immediately.

Various ways of texting or panic to call for additional help, a buddy system.

So there are lots of different t that are being looked at, but I think we recognize we cannot recruit and keep good investigators when it's not a safe situation.

- I completely agree, that was a terrible situation that she encountered there.

The governor's proposed budget, as I read it says, there's something like a quarter of a billion dollars on new funding for DCFS overall, nearly $100 million to help community based provider which is how a lot of the agencies services are actually delivered.

- That's right.

When a child goes into foster ca or when a family receives in tech services, they go to services within their community.

They're going to be closest and best able hopefully to meet with that family and child and to reunify, if that's the appropriate goal.

We need to do a better job of building up the community res And I'm hoping that this funding will be a step in the right dire - There's another $15 million with an M to hire an additional 360 employees to deal with the growing caseloa - We need, as I think I mentione the caseloads are much too high for the investigators and the case managers, especially the intact families, which is something I've looked at for several years.

An intact family is one word investigator has gone in, found a very serious allegation has been proven.

They choose not to remove the ch but instead offer services to th trying to keep the family intact, which is always best.

We hope for the child, unless it's extraordinarily dang It's those intact families that we know have a positive fin for abuse or neglect that need to have eyes on them much more often than we are.

And it's something that I continually ask for and request funding about.

- As we wrap up here, we're just about out of time, are you confident that the extra and the extra oversight that's being provided in this ne will help turn the agency around - I'd like to tell you I am, but It requires more than just money It's going to require consistenc It's going to require better coo with the department of human ser and with the department of publi DCFS can't operate in a vacuum b and it also needs to work with our educational system, all the different facets of our and resources that touch that child and that family.

So while I think dollars will certainly improve and help, that's not gonna be the only ans - A more holistic approach, no d Senator Morrison, thank you so much for taking time on a very busy, busy day.

- My pleasure, thank you.

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