The budget includes a $50 million appropriation for demolition of the Stratton Office Building adjacent to the Capitol, and design and construction of a new legislative office building to replace it. The nearly 70-year-old Stratton is considered outdated and even unsafe.

The legislation—which also contains language directing funding to a cannabis development fund and extends a deadline for conditional licensees to find a storefront—decouples marijuana businesses from the federal tax policy, which currently bans the industry from making key deductions that are available to other traditional markets.

House Republicans are concerned that these changes could cause insurance companies to leave Illinois. “We need to be careful about government intervention in the ability to predict losses,” said Rep. Jeff Keicher. “We especially need to be cautious when we have a department that is chronically understaffed, unable to meet deadlines, and the criteria that it takes for an insurance company to maintain its operations.”

The lawsuit against Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, the consolidated police and fire pension fund boards and others, was in response to Mr. Pritzker signing a law in December 2019 consolidating municipal police and fire pension plans outside the city of Chicago into the two new consolidated pension investment funds.

The new measure requires the Illinois State Board of Education to develop and adopt a comprehensive literacy plan to improve how reading is taught by January 2024. The bill also calls for new training opportunities for teachers and a renewed emphasis on phonics.

In Illinois, Democratic lawmakers passed a bill that requires investment managers of Illinois public funds, including pension systems, to disclose how they integrate environmental, social and governance policies into their investment strategies.

With the budget for the coming fiscal year, the governor is being given the authority to manage what could be a $1.1 billion taxpayer cost for undocumented migrant health care. But, a recent Auditor General report on the governor’s handling of the Business Interruption Grant gives pause. The BIG audit found that Pritzker-administered state agencies lacked proper oversight of the $585 million in grants to businesses, initiated the spending without administrative rules and didn’t comply with conflict of interest policies.

“If the NAACP wants to identify states where policy is hostile to blacks, it should turn its eyes to states and cities run by Democrats. At the end of 2022, the national black unemployment rate stood at 6.1%. In Florida, it was more than two points lower at 3.8%. Meanwhile, black unemployment was higher than the national average in California (7.5%), Illinois (10.9%), and New York (8.3%).”

“Overall, motor fuel tax revenues make up 52% of Illinois’ transportation funding and 82% of the Federal Highway Trust Fund…According to a recent report by the Illinois Economic Policy Institute, the price of reaching our state’s stated goal of 1 million EVs on the road in Illinois by 2030 could result in the loss of $1.1 billion in transportation funding. When combined with expected improvements in fuel economy for gasoline-powered vehicles, the impact on Illinois transportation revenues rises to $4.3 billion.”

Service in the U.S. military can be a speedier route for people hoping to get citizenship, but it’s not a guarantee. Non-citizen veterans are subject to deportation for crimes committed after the military service, and application of those rules can be inconsistent across states. Reports indicate that at least hundreds of veterans have been deported, but no full accounting has ever been done.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, 20 states and the District of Columbia have enacted laws to permanently allow cocktails to-go, and 14 others, including Illinois, have enacted laws that allow cocktails to-go on a temporary basis. Numerous states are still considering cocktails to-go legislation.

First, they blew past a self-imposed deadline. Then there was scrambling behind the scenes, and grumbling over the exploding costs of health care for undocumented immigrants.

Illinois homeowners in the state’s top 11 most populous counties have lost almost $400 million in tax foreclosures between 2014 and 2021, according to research by the Pacific Legal Foundation. On average, these former homeowners lost 84% of their equity. Among those counties studied across the country, Illinois suffered the highest number of homes taken under this scheme and, combined, lost the most equity in their homes.

Around 175 million tons of freight travels on the Mississippi River each year, and from the river’s headwaters to southern Illinois, a series of locks and dams guide barges through the journey. A 2019 Agribusiness Consulting report found that in 2017, more than half of boats and barges on the river were delayed at locks and dams, up from about one in five in 2000. Delay time increased from 90 minutes to about 122 minutes, some of the longest delays in the country.

A statement from the caucus reads, in part, “Creating new programs and new line items in the budget does nothing to address the long-term budgetary issues facing our state. We are not addressing pension reform. There won’t be any meaningful property tax reforms and there won’t be any accountability measures in this budget to ensure taxpayers’ dollars are being spent wisely.”