SPRINGFIELD — Staring down a month-end adjournment deadline, Illinois state lawmakers convened Friday in an atmosphere of indecision, with the fate of tax breaks to keep the Chicago Bears in Illinois and a new state budget still unresolved as myriad closed-door negotiations spread throughout the Capitol.

Also on the docket was a possible suspension of a state gas tax hike set to take effect on July 1 amid skyrocketing gasoline prices due to the U.S. war in Iran, and efforts to increase housing.

The lack of movement on the major issues has increased tensions and exposed internal dissension among Democratic lawmakers, who hold supermajorities in the House and Senate, toward their legislative leaders and Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, who is vying for a third term in November.

Progressive Democrats and some moderate Democrats are pushing for new taxes to offset cuts Pritzker proposed in his budget plan and to partially counter reductions to federal social programs that the Trump administration has targeted at Democratic-run states.

But for other Democrats, any kind of a tax hike is anathema in an election year.

Emerging midday from the governor’s second-floor Capitol office alongside House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch after a roughly hourlong meeting with Pritzker, Senate President Don Harmon said Democratic leaders still were finalizing a spending plan for the coming budget year.

Harmon said that reaching an agreement would require working through “an infinite request for spending and a finite amount of resources,” though he did not specify which components of the budget were still being worked out.

‘Still working’ on Bears bill

While passage of a budget is considered virtually inevitable despite internal squabbles, legislative action on a measure to keep the Bears from moving to Hammond, Indiana, is still being negotiated to satisfy a variety of interests.

“Still working on it,” Harmon said of the so-called megaprojects bill that is key for the Bears, reiterating a constant Senate refrain for weeks since the House in late April passed a measure would allow the Bears to enter into special payments in lieu of taxes, or PILOT, agreements with local governments at the 326-acre site of the former Arlington International Racecourse it acquired for $197.2 million in the northwest suburb of Arlington Heights in February 2023.

The House bill would allow large-scale developers, such as the Bears, to freeze their property tax assessments for 25 to 45 years in exchange for the PILOT payments. The Bears were also seeking roughly $855 million in infrastructure funding.

Unlike Indiana’s package, the Illinois bill would not fund stadium construction directly but would aim to give the Bears the financial certainty team officials said was essential to move forward at Arlington Park.

While the governor and lawmakers repeatedly insisted the megaprojects proposal wasn’t being put forward solely to benefit the Bears, team officials and lobbyists were in regular communication with top Pritzker administration officials and key legislators throughout the spring session, weighing in on some of the most intricate details of the plan, records the Tribune obtained show. The House bill also included provisions allowing half of PILOT payments to flow back as property tax relief for homeowners in the surrounding taxing districts and across the state.

But serious questions about the House bill quickly arose. The Bears didn’t fully embrace it, and neither did other lawmakers, who said they were trying to balance the team’s concerns with public pushback against giving benefits to a multibillion-dollar sports franchise. At least one watchdog group warned the legislation could poke more holes into the property tax base for very large developers across the state, not just the Bears.

The legislation then sat in the Senate for several weeks as talks continued amid concerns about whether its property tax relief provisions would be workable. In recent days, Senate supporters have whittled down the scope of the plan, authorizing it only for Cook County and Chicago sites rather than statewide as Pritzker originally intended.

Complicating the Senate’s work on a compromise package was Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. During a visit to Springfield in early May, seemingly out of nowhere, Johnson raised the prospect of resurrecting a $4.7 billion lakefront stadium proposal from 2024 that Pritzker and top lawmakers rejected out of hand as too costly to taxpayers. Later, a key state senator said negotiations were slow-going because Johnson’s comments got Chicago-area lawmakers dragging their feet on the Senate’s compromise effort.

Pritzker and Johnson have bickered recently over the bill, with the governor insisting the mayor had “no plan” for a new Bears lakefront stadium, while Johnson said the 2024 plan never got a “fair” hearing in Springfield.

Illinois’ gas tax

As Democrats look at the issue of “affordability” in an election year as inflation and consumer prices soar, some are also pushing to temporarily suspend the state’s scheduled gas tax increase.

The Illinois gas tax is set to increase by 1.3 cents on July 1, to 49.6 cents per gallon from the current 48.3 cents. The diesel tax would rise to 57.1 cents per gallon from 55.8 cents. Under Pritzker’s 2019 “Rebuild Illinois” infrastructure program, the gas tax adjusts for inflation annually to help pay for road construction across the state.

Pritzker contended Tuesday that Illinois roads are the best in the nation because of the gas tax, while blaming President Donald Trump’s war in Iran for the rise in gas prices nationally. He nonetheless signaled openness to a suspension of the gas tax.

“I think we have enough here so that we could make some sort of pause,” he said.

Other states have taken similar steps recently. Indiana paused its gas tax in early April and is expected to extend the suspension. Georgia extended its tax suspension another two weeks, until Tuesday.

This wouldn’t be the first time Illinois has suspended the inflationary increase. Ahead of Pritzker’s first reelection bid in the 2022 general elections, a period of high inflation, lawmakers paused the inflation adjustment for six months.

Republicans, including Pritzker’s opponent, GOP governor nominee Darren Bailey, have repeatedly called on Pritzker to suspend the gas tax hike.

“With the high gas prices that are hurting people right now throughout the state and throughout the country … this is something that we can actively do to make a difference in Illinois,” said GOP Rep. Ryan Spain of Peoria, who introduced legislation to pause the tax hike until the end of the year.

The budget fight

One of the central questions facing the legislature’s Democratic supermajorities is whether the final budget deal should go beyond the “maintenance” plan Pritzker laid out in February to hold spending roughly flat and rather implement a broader array of new taxes to fend off spending freezes and cuts for programs that members of their party support.

Progressive Democrats have long called for new ways to boost state funding through taxes that would hit large corporations and wealthier residents. But some moderate members of the party have now joined that effort.

“I don’t care what your politics are. I don’t care if you’re an anti-tax ultraconservative or you’re a progressive or a Democratic socialist, everyone acknowledges that there are fundamental, structural problems in the state of Illinois, and that those fundamental, structural problems are hurting people most (in) need,” said state Sen. Robert Martwick, a progressive Democrat from Chicago’s Northwest Side.

Lawmakers need to find ways to raise additional, sustainable revenue over the long term to avoid past budget missteps and support the state’s neediest residents, Martwick said.

With a state economy that has improved since taking a big hit in the early 2010s, Illinois’ leaders are now arguing over whether to continue funding mental health centers, summer jobs programs and after-school programs for disadvantaged children, Martwick said.

One option on the table is a digital advertising tax, a proposal that was considered, but ultimately not included, in a $1.5 billion mass transit funding plan last year. Martwick acknowledged legal challenges surrounding such a tax — Maryland’s digital ad tax law is being contested in the courts — but called it a “substantial revenue generator.”

“If problems from the federal government get worse, we want to ensure that we are securing revenue going forward,” Martwick said, alluding to Trump. Pritzker has proposed a social media tax projected to bring in about $200 million from large tech companies doing business in Illinois. Martwick said that doesn’t go far enough.

“We think there is more meat on the bone. We think that the wealthiest people who are profiting hand over fist and paying little in the way of taxes in terms of social media, should be willing to pitch in,” Martwick said.

The push for new revenue isn’t limited to Chicago-area progressives.

State Sen. Michael Halpin, a moderate Democrat from Rock Island, said he’s “supportive of policies that make sure that we’re holding big multinational corporations, big tech companies, financially accountable.”

“They’re out there every day taking our data, you know, mining our data, and selling it to advertisers, using it for their own purposes, to try to sell us things. And they should be paying (their) fair share into the state’s tax system,” he said.

Halpin doesn’t see this push for revenue as an issue exclusively for progressive Democrats, saying it’s not ideological and that his constituents in his “very middle-of-the-road district” are clamoring for this kind of policy.

“This is a populist issue. I represent a district that has (a) median income much lower than a lot of the places in northeast Illinois and Chicago, and we’re being taken advantage of by big corporations, the same as a lot of people in those Chicago districts,” Halpin said.

State Sen. Dave Koehler of Peoria, a member of Harmon’s Senate leadership team, echoed the call for bringing more money into the state coffers, while stopping short of publicly endorsing any specific proposal.

“I’m in favor of looking at new revenue sources because we are going to make some drastic cuts this year, and I think we owe the people of Illinois better,” Koehler said.

While there needs to be a long-term discussion about overhauling the state’s tax system, “in the next three days, I’d like to see us come up with some creative revenue sources that can help us resolve some of the deficits that we have in the budget at this point,” he said Friday afternoon.

State Sen. Graciela Guzman, another progressive Democrat from Chicago’s Northwest Side, acknowledged tensions that arise behind the scenes during budget season, though she said Friday that it’s too early to tell whether she and her colleagues in the Latino Caucus would not support a final budget package from Democratic leadership.

But with funding for healthcare under attack by Trump’s tax-and-spending-cut law from last year, Guzman and she and some of her colleagues don’t want to settle for a “maintenance budget,” where there’s “the flat funding of priorities” or even cuts to services by the state.

“We have viable revenue options that our legislature can act on by May 31,” Guzman said at the state Capitol on Friday. “(If) we leave this building with no revenue options on the table, and we’re going back home to our communities to say, ‘We’re sending you to weather the worst of (Trump’s law) with no meaningful changes to programs,’ we have a problem.”

If presented with a budget plan that includes cuts to basic services and no additional “progressive” revenue, state Sen. Rachel Ventura of Joliet said she wouldn’t support it.

Along with the digital ad tax, Ventura and others are advocating for closing corporate tax loopholes, among other revenue boosts to the state from the wealthy.

“I’ve been down here for four years, screaming that message, right, that we keep nickel-and-diming the middle class. There is nothing left to nickel-and-dime from the middle class,” Ventura said. “We need to make sure that we’re putting money back into the middle class. That doesn’t happen by continuing to tax us and giving tax breaks to the rich. That happens by asking the rich to pay their fair share.”

On the Republican side, House GOP leader Tony McCombie said she spoke with Welch a few weeks ago for 20 minutes about her caucus’s budgetary priorities, which include concerns about high healthcare costs for the state for noncitizen immigrants over 65 and pay raises for lawmakers.

“With people struggling, how is it that we ask people to give legislators a raise?” she said in an interview in her Capitol office.

McCombie also raised concerns about a Pritzker proposal that would essentially reduce the share of state income tax receipts returned to local governments from 6.47% to 6.28%. Before 2011, the municipal portion from the so-called Local Government Distributive Fund was 10%. She tied this issue to property tax increases that many residents in Illinois are facing.

“The governor continues to blame locals (local governments) on raising property taxes, but when you’re not giving them the statutory requirement that was agreed upon (in LGDF money), it gives the locals no choice but to raise their property tax levies to cover their costs,” said McCombie, of Savanna.

Amid the budget talks, changes to a prescription drug plan that helps safety-net hospitals and a ban on credit card surcharge fees, which Pritzker signed into law two years ago, also remained unresolved.

Housing plans

Prospects for Pritzker’s ambitious package of proposals to build more housing in Illinois seemed murky Friday, though several pieces of legislation have inched forward in recent days.

The Senate Executive Committee earlier in the week advanced legislation similar to the governor’s proposal to allow multiple units of housing statewide on many lots currently zoned for single-family homes, as well as a proposal similar to the governor’s plan to cut down on permitting timelines.

But some “yes-in-my-backyard” pro-housing advocates said they opposed the newer proposal for middle housing because newly added affordability requirements would make many projects financially unworkable. Other advocates, including some from Chicago’s Northwest Side, have worried that broadly legalizing medium-size developments could lead to existing affordable housing being transformed into more expensive units.

The requirements in the bill that passed through committee Tuesday that some middle housing units be made affordable to people close to the area’s median income “would make a lot of projects infeasible to construct and thus we wouldn’t get much if any middle housing” in some communities, said Steven Vance, a co-lead at the organization Abundant Housing Illinois. In higher-cost areas, affordability requirements could lead to no middle housing being built at all, Vance said.

A separate Senate proposal to broadly allow the construction of housing and mixed-use developments on properties owned by churches also appeared to be progressing, with its sponsor introducing amended language on Friday.

“Everyone’s rowing in the right direction,” Democratic state Sen. Sara Feigenholtz of Chicago said Thursday of the so-called “yes-in-God’s-backyard” bill, which was not originally part of the governor’s pro-housing package.

Brad Cole, CEO of the Illinois Municipal League and an opponent of Feigenholtz’s legislation as of earlier this week, said he had not yet seen the amended bill at the time he spoke to the Tribune on Friday. The group has consistently opposed the governor’s housing plan because of concerns over local control.

The governor’s original proposal included a number of other ideas, such as legalizing more single-stair apartment buildings rather than requiring two or more staircases, that had not received any committee votes as of Friday, with just a couple of days left in the legislative session.

Tribune reporter Rick Pearson contributed.