By Dave Dahl
SPRINGFIELD – Illinois Democrats liked what they heard from the governor, while Republicans react with guarded optimism.
Senate Minority Leader Bill Brady (R-Bloomington) said Gov. JB Pritzker left something out. “One area I wish he would have emphasized is the need for fair (redistricting) maps,” he said. “I believe more and more in this state that corruption is influenced and rooted in the beginning by two individuals drawing a legislative map that gives supermajorities to Chicago Democrats and therefore leads to the corruption that we’ve had.”
Senate President Don Harmon (D-Oak Park) says that while Pritzker barely mentioned his graduated tax proposal, it is a thread through the entire legislative agenda. “The truth is, our property tax dilemma is driven primarily by the way we fund schools and the fact that that we push most of the funding for kindergarten through high school onto local property taxpayers because the state doesn’t do what it needs to do; again, a reason why the fair (graduated income) tax is so important.” The graduated tax is on the state ballot this November.
State Rep. Kelly Burke (D-Evergreen Park), representing House Democrat leadership, said her caucus has yet to really dig into the ethics problem. “Not in particular,” she said. “The devil is in the details in a lot of this, and there’s a lot of details. Once we get a couple of (ethics commission) meetings under our belt, where we kind of start to understand the scope of what we can and should do, we’ll be having more conversations caucus-wide.”
“It’s now up to the speaker of the House,” said House Minority Leader Jim Durkin (R-Western Springs), “to see if he shares the governor’s same attitude of working in a collaborative manner to finally fix the biggest problems we have in the state of Illinois. For Illinois citizens, it’s their property tax bills. And for Illinois citizens, it is also ethics reform.”
The two Democrats appeared on public television.
Dave Dahl can be reached at [email protected]
