llinois basked in a brighter fiscal picture as it met with the buy side this week than it did at its last event in 2019 when its ratings sat on the verge of junk, but investors still fret over how the state would weather a potential recession and its prospects for further progress.

Senate Minority Leader Dan McConchie said the governor’s comments are nothing more than an attempt to “paper over his poor record on public corruption as he seeks reelection…The truth of the matter is, he has sat silently by as Democratic legislators failed to even discuss, let alone allow a vote on many anti-corruption measures that have been filed in the General Assembly this legislative session.”

Jim Dey: “It’s not often the good guys in the fetid and festering sewer that is Illinois government win a round. But (Comptroller Susana) Mendoza claimed a solid victory Thursday when the Illinois Supreme Court unanimously ruled that two former legislators who had joined their colleagues to publicly renounce scheduled pay raises weren’t entitled to collect the money years later.”

Transitioning to a carbon-free electric grid by 2045 is no small task. And no state should better understand that setting energy goals and achieving them aren’t the same. In 2007, Illinois adopted a law to get 25 percent of its electricity from renewables by 2025. As of last year, it was at 10 percent. Building a carbon-free grid comes with an array of dizzying technical and policy challenges and unanswered questions.

More than two dozen people have been charged in Illinois with fraudulently obtaining pandemic relief money, with authorities alleging that some of them were behind bars when they used their relief money to post bond and free themselves from jail.

Comment: It’s not as simple as he describes, but he’s at least directionally correct that it’s a bad law.

The charges, which were made public Tuesday, allege that in exchange for a payment of $5,000 and a job for an unnamed associate from a company that operates red light cameras outside the city of Chicago, Jones agreed to focus the study only on red light cameras in Chicago. Jones was also charged with facilitating the scheme by using a Google email account and with lying to federal investigators.

“The state of Illinois is experiencing what all employers, across Illinois, are facing: a lack of qualified candidates,” Illinois State Director for the National Federation of Independent Businesses Chris Davis said. Data from WalletHub puts Illinois as eighth among the states for unfilled job openings the past 12 months.

Republican and Democratic lawmakers from Central Illinois have renewed their calls for answers about roughly 170 inmates being transferred out of the Pontiac Correctional Center in February with little to no notice for facility staff. Prison officials noted that the correctional center was short-staffed by 43%.

It reads, in part, “Pritzker’s trying to distance himself from the corruption that has plagued his office – including the still unresolved Thornley case (in which the Governor himself is directly implicated)…Additionally, there have been nine public corruption indictments during his tenure in office. And all were indicted by federal prosecutors, not the Illinois Attorney General’s office.”