Two major proposals backed by Governor JB Pritzker did not advance out of legislative committees before last week’s passage deadline. Senator Suzy Glowiak Hilton confirmed that she won’t be advancing her legislation supported by the governor that would dissolve townships with populations below 5,000 (SB2217), and eventually abolish townships with populations below 50,000 and lower the petition threshold to five percent from ten percent to put a township abolition on the ballot.

Representative Marty Moylan (D-Des Plaines) recently told me he was “astonished” by some Chicago Transit Authority employee paychecks. Representative Moylan, the Chair of the House Transportation: Rail Systems, Roads, and Bridges Committee, is heading into the transit-funding discussions armed with an inch-and-a-half-thick binder filled with CTA salary data. The agency’s gross payroll for all employees in 2024 was close to a billion dollars.

Advocates say a major storm is brewing that could overwhelm the state’s child foster-care system. The problem is legal liability insurance, or, more specifically, the lack thereof.

The latest report from the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability shows that spending on four “core” state services in the governor’s proposed Fiscal Year 2026 budget will be 9.1 percent less in real dollars than it was way back in Fiscal Year 2000. Those four core services are education, health-care, human services, and public safety.

Illinois House Speaker Chris Welch didn’t sound all that enthused about passing any new ethics reforms during an interview last week.

Mike Madigan knew for a very long time that the U.S. Attorney’s office and the FBI badly wanted to put his head on a spike. It was no secret. Everybody knew it. Madigan was investigated over and over again, but nothing ever came of it.

Governor JB Pritzker has "revised" his remarks about not raising taxes to balance the budget. “It’s very important that we live within our means in this state, and that we not resort to tax increases as a way to, you know, to balance the budget,” Pritzker said on January 30.

To many Statehouse types, some of last week’s news out of Washington, D.C. felt eerily familiar.

The Illinois legislature’s Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability recently released an eye-popping actuarial analysis of a union-backed pension reform plan. The analysis concluded that the proposal, House Bill 5909, would cost tax-payers almost $30 billion through the year 2045.

Former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan’s longtime law firm partner Vincent "Bud" Getzendanner testified in Madigan’s defense against numerous federal charges last week. One of the main themes of Getzendanner’s testimony was the property tax firm’s process of weeding out clients and potential clients who could pose a conflict of interest to Madigan.

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