The U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency proposed a rule protecting federally chartered banks from the controversial swipe fee law set for implementation in Illinois this summer.

“This is what the legislation says. You have to have those tickets in hand before you can sell them,” state Sen. Steve Stadelman said. The House bill would also set up a complaint system for customers through the state attorney general’s office. It also aims to scare potential scammers.

Romeoville Mayor John Noak told the committee that taking away local control does not do enough to address the drivers of Illinois housing costs. “Preemption certainly will not do enough to address those costs. A simple shift in homeowners insurance in one given year can wipe out any potential costs from these preemption approaches,” Noak said.

Two interim filings posted last week by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, an independent subsection of the U.S. Treasury Department, represent the latest twist in a two-year legislative fight. One of the filings specifically preempts the state’s first-of-its-kind Interchange Fee Prohibition Act, throwing the policy into further uncertainty by creating a second legal front and added pressure on state lawmakers amid an ongoing appellate court case.

In Illinois, the total number of firefighters decreased by 13 percent, more than 2,200 firefighters, between 2019 and 2023. House Bill 2136, also known as the Future Firefighters Act, would decrease the state’s age requirement for firefighters from 21 to 18.

Every year, Illinois prisons incarcerate about 30,000 people at a total estimated cost of $1.5 billion. Nearly half of those people have a history of mental illness. By diverting people from prison through mental health courts and other interventions, one Illinois program estimates it has saved the state nearly half a billion by avoiding incarceration costs over the past 15 years, with $85 million expected to be saved this fiscal year.

“Fears that the (federal scholarship) program could fund schools promoting discriminatory, racist, anti-American, or anti-Semitic views also fall flat. Nothing prevents the state from establishing clear guidelines to guard against such outcomes. As for Pritzker’s skepticism about whether the program fully benefits students — what exactly is complicated about a scholarship that places hundreds of millions of dollars directly into the hands of parents, including those who choose to homeschool?”

The widening rift between the state’s largest public landowner and its top wildlife conservation agency shows how state-funded transportation projects may have overridden Illinois’ Endangered Species Protection Act in 11 cases in the past year.

Sheila Weinberg, founder and CEO of Truth in Accounting, said the situation points to a larger pattern of deferred maintenance. “This is indicative of the short-term planning that our elected officials do,” she said. “They’re notorious for not doing maintenance on a regular basis and they just keep on putting that off. … They don’t even figure out how much deferred maintenance they have. Some people say it’s in the hundreds of billions of dollars throughout the country.”

Ahead of an estimated 150,000 Illinois households losing access to federal food assistance May 1, Illinois launched two websites aimed at providing work, training and volunteer hours to those households. Job Ready IL collects training programs and employment opportunities, while Serve Illinois shares volunteer opportunities.

The inventory crunch is worse in Illinois than in most of the country. The state has just 32 percent of the active housing listings it had before the pandemic, less than half the national average of 79 percent.