Hoping to flex a little Springfield muscle, mayors representing hundreds of municipalities in metropolitan Chicago today launched a campaign to get lawmakers to stop dipping into the share of state income tax receipts meant for cities and villages, with hundreds of millions of dollars a year at stake.There are distinctly mixed signs as to how the mayors will fare, with Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s office standing by its view that if municipalities want help, they ought to get behind his plan to close $900 million in “corporate tax loopholes.”

Christopher Mooney, who teaches political science at the University of Illinois Chicago, said there is likely a more strategic reason for Democrats to push for using the ACS data: positioning themselves for an all-but-certain court challenge. “If you lay down a marker (saying), these are the maps we want, and they get challenged, then you have first dibs at editing them up.”

“The residents of Illinois, I think, spoke out overwhelmingly against additional taxes,” said Elmhurst Mayor Steve Morley. “Now this is just another option, another way to go about taxing the residents of our municipalities and the state of Illinois when they’ve already told us that they’re taxed enough.”

“This is driving home the intent of the cannabis law of Illinois,” said state Rep. La Shawn Ford. “We want to get to the point of true social equity.”

It reads, in part, “In Illinois, we are addressing law enforcement reform, criminal justice reform, economic opportunity, educational equity and health care. We can and must make progress every day until we have a state and a nation and a justice system that truly serve everyone. And as long as there’s more work to be done, that’s what we’ll do.”

Some lawmakers are pointing out the state never should have had the money in the first place. The trailer fee bump to $118 from $18 was slipped in at the last minute on Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s $45 billion capital bill, and lawmakers were told the hike was a mistake in 2019.

State Rep. Will Guzzardi said it’s one piece of a puzzle to a housing crisis that includes creating more affordable housing options. “I think it’s local control. I think it’s democratic control. It’s letting the voters decide how their communities ought to be governed.”

“The beautiful thing about this is it will cost Illinois nothing,” state Sen. Win Stoller said. “It’s completely revenue-neutral to Illinois.”

Adam Schuster, of the Illinois Policy Institute: “The COVID-19 economic crisis showed the danger of government making promises it can’t afford. Here in Illinois, the crisis has served as a dress rehearsal for the kind of havoc the state’s pension crisis could inflict on the Illinois economy and government retirees if nothing changes.”

The state initially strained more than most to ramp up a COVID-19 vaccination program, then made up for the slow start by sending disproportionate amounts of the vaccines to areas outside Chicago that the Illinois Department of Public Health had surmised would be able to get shots into arms more quickly. Complicating matters has been that the city of Chicago gets its doses directly from the federal government, not through the state health department controlled by Pritzker.

Illinois’ constitution states inmates do not get the right to vote returned to them until after they are released; This bill put forward by state Rep. La Shawn Ford would go against that express constitutional provision.

Illinois has more local units of government than any other state in the country – so many that four separate tallies of them give four different numbers. All of those governments rely on tax money to operate, so it is no surprise Illinois shoulders the highest state and local tax burden in the nation.

House Bill 3410 would apply to any government with an operating budget of $1 million or more, so the smallest governments would not be hurt by any compliance costs associated with the reforms. By requiring this information to be posted publicly online, the information becomes exempt from Freedom of Information Act provisions.