Under the deal, Walmart will secure approximately 176 megawatts of wholesale electricity supply from the Dresden facility in Morris. The agreement includes 30 megawatts of additional generating capacity that will be created through efficiency improvements at the plant to help support Walmart’s new technology-focused perishable goods distribution center currently being developed in Belvidere.

An exception in the federal law gives states with the highest error rates more time to try to reduce them. Illinois is one of a few jurisdictions receiving a one-year, cost-share delay.

“The $2 billion that we are owed just adequately funds, but when you are repairing harm you have to fund above and beyond,” Chicago Board of Education member Jitu Brown said. Brown also asked that Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson duplicate his December 2025 $1 billion tax-increment-financing sweep to Chicago Public Schools.

State Sen. Chris Balkema, representing a large rural area between Bloomington-Normal and Interstate 80, said it is better to use rooftops for solar than to build solar farms on top of farmland. “If there’s not a solar panel on a rooftop, the rooftop is still there, so if we put a solar panel on a rooftop, we’re getting some value out of that rooftop that otherwise there would have been no value,” he said.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled occasional and “habitual” marijuana use alone cannot be used by governments as a reason to deny people the right to own guns. In Illinois, however, the state can still deny FOID cards, which are needed to legally own guns in the state, to anyone the state determines to be “addicted to or a habitual user” of marijuana.

The legislation, spearheaded by state Sen. Celina Villanueva and state Rep. Mary Beth Canty, limits access to medical record systems containing abortion-related information; Any information on abortion services will be required to be segregated from the rest of a patient’s medical record, which will have access disabled to out-of-state entities. If the new privacy safeguards are violated, patients would be able to sue.

“We should fight like hell to protect abortion rights at the state level. We should treat every election like a referendum on women’s rights.”

Illinois lawmakers this spring failed to pass two bills to make it easier for nurses and physician assistants to work in the state. But Illinois committed to the moves in an application for funding that has awarded the state $193.4 million annually for the next five years under the federal Rural Health Transformation Program, part of the One Big Beautiful Bill.

“I think they’re trying to be as responsible as we are. They are trying to be responsible with their budget, make sure they balance their budget. They maintain the infrastructure that we so badly need in order to attract companies like this to the state of Illinois,” Gov. JB Pritzker said.