The new legislation keeps the door shut on building traditional nuclear power plants. It ends the moratorium only for one specific kind of reactor called a small modular reactor. The small units are not designed for the public electrical grid. They are built to be used only by specific sites, such as factories or quarries. More importantly, small modular reactors don’t exist yet.

“I don’t like that a Governor from another state without contacting our leaders in the Stateline put 350 sum people here. I didn’t think it was right. He should have at least contacted us and let us know he was going to do this,” said state Rep. Dave Vella.

Now the move to pass local laws prohibiting bus dropoffs is growing as surrounding cities and counties rush to pass laws to keep the buses aimed at heading into Chicago and not their own locales.

The Illinois Pork Producers Association estimates it will cost $3,500 per sow to upgrade infrastructure to become Prop 12 compliant, a cost they warn would be passed onto the consumer. “One area is dictating how farmers produce the products that they raise in another part of the country and that can cause a lot of concern over a patchwork of different regulations that our farmers have to adhere to,” said Tasha Bunting of the Illinois Farm Bureau.

Democrats locally and nationally are grappling with a challenging dynamic being played out, with the Israel-Hamas war in its third month.

“It’s not always about what’s best for voters and their own political beliefs and values. It’s about winning. And to the power players and their camps, it’s ‘just politics.’ In the Land of Lincoln and across the country, money is power, and some candidates are using every legal loophole they can find to win, especially in light of a 2010 Supreme Court decision that allowed individuals and corporations to funnel unlimited funds to super PACs.”

“Since day one of my administration, my priority has been making Illinois the best state in the nation for families,” said Gov. JB Pritzker. “That includes transformative education investments that will support Illinoisans from cradle to career, along with greater economic opportunities rooted in equity that give every individual the tools to succeed. My administration’s executive and legislative accomplishments this year build on four years of fiscally responsible leadership that have resulted in nine credit upgrades and a bright future for our state.”

“…(F)or developers of multi-unit condo and apartment towers, the costs could go into tens of thousands of dollars, upping per-square-foot construction costs, sale prices, and rents. The law also requires landlords to install an electric vehicle charging station into a new residential building upon a tenant’s request. However, landlords are allowed to charge a security deposit to cover the costs of restoring the property to its original condition once a tenant moves out.”

“Whether you’re ready or not, people are coming. If we had warning, great, we would’ve had stuff here. If we don’t, we do now,” City Council member Melissa McMahon said.

Ticking off the names of Hamas, ICE’s, Jackson said, “Do you see a pattern of disenfranchised groups who are not becoming extremists? We need to understand the commonality of our future. We cannot bomb our way to peace…We cannot get rid of the Ku Klux Klan in the United States. We have to create laws and curtail them.

In a vote that took just minutes, the City Council granted its unanimous support for a measure that would place restrictions on buses and drivers coming into the city unannounced or without applications. “We’re talking about human lives here. We’re talking about a $10,000 penalty,” said Council Member Frank McClatchey.

The budget for the 11-person police force did jump 41% in the last year, but that overage was because of an Illinois State Law that mandated body cameras.

Illinois’ minimum wage will increase Monday to nearly twice the federal minimum and well above most neighboring states. The minimum wage is $7.25 an hour in Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky and Wisconsin. Missouri’s minimum wage increases to $12.30 on Monday.

In the Midwest, TdA members were arrested for violent crimes in Illinois, Indiana, Missouri and Wisconsin, with law enforcement officers in Ohio involved in a multi-state ATM theft investigation.

Current business closures impacted 1,028 workers and standard layoffs accounted for the remaining 148 job cuts. The state data shows all these layoffs will be permanent.

Former Cook County state’s attorney candidate Clayton Harris III on Thursday will take over as chief of staff to House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch, while Isabel “Izzy” Dobbel, political director at the Chicago Federation of Labor, will join his office later in January as deputy chief of staff.

State Rep. Harry Benton says creating effective policy to help Illinois residents continue to receive power while keeping it affordable will be a challenge. “With Illinois on track to being a data hub for the country and these quantum computing entities coming in, we, we have to power them, and we have to talk about expansion policy and doing things responsibly and doing things the right way.”

“When a person willfully fails to comply with the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act’s truncation requirement, the (Fair Credit Reporting Act) provides a private cause of action for statutory damages. Actual damages need not be pleaded or proved,” Justice Margaret Mullen wrote. “Allowing an individual to seek statutory damages pursuant to FACTA, even in the absence of an actual injury or adverse effect beyond a statutory violation, furthers FACTA’s (preventive) and deterrent purposes by providing a strong incentive to comply with the law and preventing problems before they occur and cannot be undone.”

“Planners from, for example, the No. 1 state on the list, Illinois, often field questions from clients about the annual tax hit on their properties.”

The Illinois Farm Bureau’s Kevin Semlow says underperforming state sales tax revenues could not only lead to budget cuts, but also a potential repeal of tax breaks for farmers. “One of those, of course, is the ag sales tax incentive for feed, seed, fertilizer and equipment.” He says, “We also have our biodiesel fuel and our E85 sales tax incentives. Those things would be on the table, and we’ll probably have to battle those.”

“They’ve used financial successes over the past couple years to make really smart financial decisions, including supplemental pension payments and paying down debt,” said Mary Wagoner, director of state and local finance with the Civic Committee, a research branch of the Commercial Club of Chicago. “But the job still isn’t done though, with pensions specifically.” Despite the additional funding, financial records from nine Illinois public pension programs show only moderate increases to funding levels over the past decade.