The Illinois House Rules Committee passed a bill March 3 that would ban red-light cameras statewide. It now heads to the House Transportation Committee for a hearing at a later date.

“There’s a paradox here,” said MBX’s Justin Formella. “If it seems like an overreaction after the fact, it means you probably did the right thing and helped the situation improve.”

“Our top priority is to provide the safest, highest quality care for those we serve. As we further accelerate our efforts to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, we are committed to ensuring residents of Illinois and Wisconsin seek medically necessary testing and care.”

The testing, however, is not automatic. Patients still need an appointment and have to contact their primary care physician first. Then they will coordinate with the local health department and they will need to get specific permission.

“The work involved in issuing clear and direct guidelines on a day-to-day basis, when new information comes in literally by the minute, is time consuming and requires consultation with many stakeholders and partners,” Pritzker said Thursday. “We are committed to getting it right every step of the way.”

Jill Sanders, assistant director at the Perry County senior center, said the coronavirus is creating difficulty for seniors by imposing isolation on them. “They come here for the nutrition but they also come for the socialization.”

WalletHub found that Illinois residents pay nearly fifteen percent of their pre-tax income to state and local units of government. In other words, $9,064 will be taken from the typical Illinois household in state and local taxes and fees in 2020.

While motorcycle lobby leader Josh Witkowski said people should always consider contacting their lawmakers virtually through email or phone calls, he said there’s nothing like face-to-face interaction.

“We will break up events of more than a thousand people,” he said. “We will take the authority that we have to make sure that those events are not taking place.”

The Illinois Department of Public Health said roughly 29 percent of the state’s COVID-19 cases are travel-related and 44 percent stem from contact with a coronavirus patient. The remaining cases don’t have a clear connection and could be the result of community spread.

New polling data in Illinois paint an interesting picture of the state, if you know where to look. Three points stick out in recently released numbers.

“The first order of business is some tollway issues,” said State Sen. Laura Murphy. “We want to have a discussion on hiring and procurement processes. I’m a believer that sunshine makes everything look better.”

Gov. J.B. Pritzker said Wednesday that the state is evaluating new federal guidance on limiting large public gatherings as cases of the new coronavirus in the state continued to mount.

There about 1,200 long-term care facilities in Illinois, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health. Officials suggested alternative ways of communicating with loved ones such as phone calls, texts, FaceTime or Snapchat.

This can all be done: After months (not years) of negotiations, a Republican Congress and Democratic administration cooperated to pass a bill establishing a process for restructuring Puerto Rico’s debts in early 2016. Illinois is many times larger than Puerto Rico and is in the center of our nation in many respects; working with the people of Illinois to reduce liabilities and avoid a failed state at the heart of our union is an urgent national priority.

Wirepoints President Ted Dabrowski said Illinois’ underfunded pensions were already problems before the markets plunged over the past week. Those problems could become more acute. Dabrowski said it should be a wakeup call for Illinois politicians, but he said he feared politicians will only ask for tax increases to make up the funding shortfalls for pensions that he said are too generous and too costly for taxpayers already.

News came in January that more than 500 people who said they weren’t U.S. citizens were improperly registered to vote. Other problems that have surfaced this year included former inmates not being registered, and the Secretary of State forwarding the information of 16 years old to be registered to vote. The latest problem concerned conflicting voter preferences for more than 1,100 people being forwarded to elections officials.

The decisions followed similar moves by a wave of other schools nationwide trying to reduce large gatherings, communal living arrangements, travel and other events that could increase the risk of community exposure to COVID-19.