Money, money, money

After blowing past a self-imposed May 24 deadline to wrap up the state budget for the 2025 fiscal year, lawmakers closed out the spring legislative session in the early hours of Wednesday morning. It took state representatives three tries, but the House finally signed off on the $53.1 billion spending plan just before 5 AM (because good public policy comes from repeated votes in the dead of night, right?). The budget package now awaits the signature of Governor J.B. Pritzker.

It includes a handful of tax hikes, mostly on businesses, to fund some of Pritzker’s legislative priorities, including $200 million in new taxes on sports betting companies, a $1,000 monthly cap on the tax discount retailers currently receive for collecting sales tax, and the extension of an existing limit on the amount of income losses large corporations can write off on their state taxes.

Efforts to generate additional revenue will be used to fund a $50 million child tax credit program for low-income families with children younger than 12 years old. The state budget also scraps a 1 percent tax on grocery sales, a move Pritzker and state lawmakers made permanent after suspending the tax at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. (Local governments can still vote to impose their own 1 percent tax in its stead.) And it includes an additional $182 million to care for people seeking asylum in Illinois, as well as $440 million for health care for undocumented residents.

The budget also includes $900 million to demolish and rebuild the crumbling Stateville and Logan Correctional Centers, despite objections from advocates that shrinking prison populations mean the prisons can be shuttered without reopening them. 

[Read more: Pritzker to shutter, rebuild two prisons]

CPS takes to Springfield

The legislative session was a mixed bag for Chicago Public Schools (CPS), who’d hoped to ease a nearly $400 million budget deficit and stave off efforts by state lawmakers to stymie the Chicago Board of Education’s reform efforts. Public school districts across the state are poised to receive a collective $8.6 billion, a bump of about $350 million over the previous year but far short of the amount experts and advocates say is needed to adequately fund public education. 

The budget also includes funding for the creation of the Early Childhood Department, which will coordinate education and childcare programs currently run by the state board of education and the Departments of Human Services and Child and Family Services. A bump in money for the Early Childhood Block Grant is expected to create space for an additional 5,000 preschool students this year.

State lawmakers tried—and ultimately failed—to tie the hands of the Chicago Board of Education, who in recent months have paved the way for reforms aimed at increasing equity in the city’s public schools. The board in December passed a largely symbolic resolution calling for a move away from selective enrollment and charter schools in favor of increased investment in neighborhood schools. The General Assembly, led by Democratic state representative Margaret Croke, 12th, responded with a proposal to prevent board members from changing admissions requirements or funding to selective enrollment schools before a fully elected school board takes their seats in 2027. Croke later expanded the bill to prevent the district from closing any schools until 2027. As first reported by Crain’s, Senate president Don Harmon agreed to ice the bill after receiving a letter from Mayor Brandon Johnson that promised not to close selective enrollment schools before an elected school board is in office.

Left on the cutting-room floor

A bill that would’ve allowed local school councils to hire cops by contracting directly with the Chicago Police Department similarly failed. The proposal came in response to a different resolution, passed by the board in February, that will remove all officers from Chicago’s public schools by the next school year. Lawmakers had hoped to empower local school counselors to sidestep the board’s decision—and years of advocacy from CPS students.

And the House left for the summer without taking up a closely watched bill that would’ve made drastic changes to the Illinois Prisoner Review Board (PRB). The little-known agency has become a lightning rod for conservative backlash to recent legal reform efforts, including the landmark 2021 SAFE-T Act omnibus. The proposal came in response to a recent case in which a person attacked an ex-partner, killing a child in the process. It would’ve required the PRB to, among other things, streamline a process for collecting impact statements from crime victims, expand victim notification requirements, and mandate training for board members on domestic violence. Crime victims already have robust legal protections under state law, including the right to be notified when a person involved in their case is released from prison.