It’s October.  Walk around the neighborhood and you’ll see an ever-growing number of Halloween displays with tombstones, spider webs, ghosts, and a Frankenstein’s monster or two.  Click to your favorite streaming service and you’ll see as featured options, horror flicks or other Halloween-themed movies and shows.  And in Illinois, we’ve got our own scare:  the Illinois legislature reconvenes for six days in October, this coming week and then the last week in October, for the fall veto session.

Ostensibly, the purpose of the veto session is contained in its name: after the spring session ends and the governor signs and vetoes bills, the legislature has the opportunity to override or to make changes to those vetoed bills to respond to the governor’s objection.

In reality, it’s a final opportunity for the legislature to pass bills that didn’t get passed in the spring — and to do so quickly and behind closed doors.

What’s on the agenda?

• The megaprojects bill may have been stalled.
• A pension sweetener may be passed without sound actuarial analysis.
• We are likely facing $1.5 billion in new taxes for unrealistic transit dreams.
• And a controversial assisted suicide bill might get resurrected.

Read on. . .

Megaprojects

First up, earlier this week, the Chicago Tribune published dueling op-ed pieces on the “megaprojects” bill that would enable property tax breaks not just for the Bears but for any project of $100 million or more (see excerpts at Capitol Fax), on the expectation that this would be taken up during the veto session, though other voices, even including Arlington Heights Mayor Jim Tinaglia have said it’s not “high on the list of priorities” of legislators, and House Speaker Chris Welch has said that it’s contingent on support from the legislators from Chicago, who would have to be convinced there is a benefit to the city, and he won’t bring the bill up for a vote unless that support exists.

This bill is bad news – it favors big businesses at the expense of ordinary taxpayers.  If it’s stalled, that’s good news.  But there have been so many seemingly-stalled bills which get passed after all, that there’s still a serious risk it gets passed.

A pension sweetener

Second in the list of “Chicago Tribune op-eds by worried Illinoisans” is a Friday op-ed, “State lawmakers should reject massive pension benefit sweetener” written by multiple individuals representing civic organizations:

Derek Douglas is president of the Civic Committee and Commercial Club of Chicago. Joe Ferguson is president of the Civic Federation. David Greising is president of the Better Government Association. 

The leaders of the following organizations co-authored this piece and are partners in an effort to protect the financial solvency of pensions in Illinois: Building Owners and Managers Association of Chicago, Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, Illinois Chamber of Commerce, Illinois Manufacturers’ Association, Illinois Retail Merchants Association and the Taxpayers’ Federation of Illinois.

The piece rightly sounds the alarm that union leaders may push Pritzker and the legislature to pass a pension-sweetener bill, SB1937, which claims to solve a “safe harbor” issue with the state’s Tier 2 pension reforms but would actually increase pensions far more than is needed for this limited purpose.  To quote the article, if passed, the bill “would saddle Illinois taxpayers with $80 billion-plus in additional pension contributions over the next 30 years” which would be “fiscally catastrophic.”  In addition to those increases in the pensions funded by the state, it would also increase local pensions – and there’s no cost estimate on that at all.  They write:  “Every single state lawmaker who votes for this bill is voting to impose a stealth property tax on every resident in Illinois.”

This bill was passed through the Senate and passed through the House Committee, and, yes, locally, Nicolle Grasse is among the bill’s sponsors.

Transit taxes

Third, the so-called “transit cliff.”  bill.  In the spring, we heard two statements on repeat:  first, that the greater Chicago area faced a $700 million shortfall in funding for transit, and, second, that it needed to be paid for by a $1.5 billion set of tax increases and new taxes.   More recently, that shortfall has been downgraded to $202 million, at least for the next year, but the new tax plan remains on the table, even though pretty much every tax on that list has garnered criticism — from a $1.50 fee on any type of delivered purchase to statewide taxes on electric vehicle charging.

But why do we need to spend $1.5 billion?  The goal of the bill’s supporters is to substantially increase transit use: Rep. Mary Beth Canty described her goals in a recent interview:

People in the suburbs deserve the right to hop on a bus, to get from suburb to suburb. They should be able to use transit to get from Buffalo Grove out to Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, or up to dinner in Kildeer.

Now, I’ve lived in Germany for two years, and I’ve travelled through Europe, and I have indeed enjoyed being able to hop on a bus to get where I wanted to go.  But functional mass transit requires density, and Canty’s goals are simply not realistic, and would requires very large ongoing subsidies for a very small level of benefit.  If Canty’s goal is to convince people to use other forms of transportation than their cars, we are better served by efforts to encourage bike lanes, improved bike & pedestrian access to destinations, and (sub)urban planning that makes it possible.

What’s more, locally, there’s one major bus route with regular service, and that’s route 208 along Golf Road from Woodfield Mall to Evanston, which demonstrates what’s necessary for successful mass transit: its stops contain retail, apartments, jobs, hospitals, Oakton Community College, and, further east, connections to the Yellow and Purple Lines, and it actually has the 11th highest ridership of all PACE routes, with an average of 1,213 riders on an average weekday — but that figure is much lower than the 1,900 average before the pandemic.  The only other regular bus route, number 234 from Des Plaines up to Buffalo Grove, gets only 155 average riders per day, also down dramatically from a 250 average pre-pandemic.

In other words, spending $1.5 billion to achieve Canty’s dream is an absurd misspending of money by a state that can ill-afford it.

Possible energy boondoggles

Up next: a massive, 800-page energy bill is on tap, touted by supporters as ratepayer protection and criticized by opponents as precisely the opposite, boosting costs with boondoggles.  I am not going to weigh in on this because it’s not my area of expertise, except that I am pleased to see as one component a proposal to lift the moratorium on nuclear power plants, which was previously vetoed by Pritzker in 2023.

Assisted suicide

Finally, at the end of the spring session, an assisted suicide bill, sponsored by, among others, Nicolle Grasse and Mary Beth Canty (among 11 sponsors total), was passed through the state house using the “shell bill” gambit by amending a bill about food safety.  The sad reality is that over and over again the safeguards promised in assisted suicide legislation fall by the wayside, and, what’s more, even to the extent that people appear to making a personal choice for assisted suicide, too often it’s the case that they do so because of lack of support, the absence of proper palliative care, worries about finances, or other reasons — and there is even a connection between assisted suicide and an increase in overall suicide rates. Unusually, the bill passed by a close margin, but it still risks being brought up for a Senate vote during the veto session.

What next?

Sadly, these bills could have far-reaching consequences on our lives, with state spending increases, tax hikes, and other impacts, and yet are likely to be passed with little to no opportunity for the public to weigh in on specifics which, if the past is any guide, will be revealed with little time to spare before the votes are taken.  How can you sound the alarm within 24 hour’s time?  You can’t.  Whatever decisions there are, will have been made behind closed doors, and the only question is how many people are behind those doors.

And that’s far scarier than any ghost or skeleton!