The Fraternal Order of Police, Lodge 7, which represents most rank-and-file cops, said it planned on filing a grievance over the error so that the city would have to pay that interest charge instead of workers.

The flub is hitting Tier 2 members of the Policemen’s Annuity and Benefit Fund of Chicago, those who started working for the CPD on or after Jan. 1, 2011. Those members make up roughly half of the more than 12,000 active members of the fund. Sworn officers contribute 9% of their salary to their pension, which is automatically withdrawn from paychecks.

PABF, in a letter to members, said the error was because of a “fiscal year discrepancy” with the city.

“This letter serves to inform you of a payment shortfall in your pension contributions,” the message from PABF Executive Director Kevin Reichart reads. “Due to a fiscal year discrepancy with the City of Chicago, the retroactive salary contract payment you received 1/1/2022 was counted by the City toward your 2022 annual salary cap.”

As part of the new contract for Chicago police officers approved by the City Council in late 2023, union members received a 2.5% base salary increase that applied retroactively to the start of 2022.

“The city did not withhold the correct 9% of members’ salary and duty availability pay for the required payment,” according to a post on the fund’s website.

Reichart did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the city’s Finance Department.

Per state law, the fund “must receive the required contributions,” plus 3% interest. Members are asked to sign a letter of acknowledgement and cut a check to the PABF for the salary cap correction.

Failure to pay up by Aug. 31 means that original amount — plus interest — would be withheld from pensioners’ annuity payments when they retire. The union says the charge for some members is as low as about $80, and for others as high as $1,300.

“I know nobody likes to get a bill, and it should have never happened,” FOP President John Catanzara said in a video posted to the union’s YouTube page Monday. He blamed “incompetence” in CPD’s Finance Department and chastised the pension fund for not bringing the issue to the members’ attention earlier.

The union will be filing a class-action grievance demanding the city pay the 3% interest charge “that the pension fund is looking to hammer our officers with,” Catanzara said.

Given that those workers paid state and federal income tax on those earnings, Catanzara said the city should also refund the equivalent of the taxes charged on that income.

“I don’t know where this all ends up. It’s pretty disappointing where we’re at with this department and this administration,” Catanzara said.

The PABF is among the lowest-funded city pension funds, with enough assets to cover 21.76% of its obligations through the end of 2022.

aquig@chicagotribune.com

jgorner@chicagotribune.com

“We’ve heard complaints every year after we balance the budget. ‘The next year’s going to be terrible,” Pritzker said during a signing ceremony in Chicago, flanked by Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton and the General Assembly’s top Democratic leaders. “You heard that in 2021. You heard that in 2022. You heard that in 2023. You’re hearing it in 2024. People say it every year and you know what we’ve done? Balance the budget every single year.”

Pritzker has yet to sign a revenue package that includes roughly $750 million in tax hikes necessary to balance the budget, but said Wednesday he plans to do so without making any changes.

While the budget passed comfortably in the House by a 65-45 vote and more convincingly in the Senate by a vote of 38-21, negotiations in the Democratic-controlled chambers stretched into overtime and seven Democrats in the House and two in the Senate joined Republicans in voting no.

While the Democratic opposition to the budget was largely silent, Republicans were clear about the shortcomings they see in the budget that takes effect July 1, in particular $182 million in spending on the migrant crisis in the Chicago area and hundreds of millions more on health care for immigrants.

“In six short years, Gov. Pritzker has raised the cost of state government by over 30 percent and expanded non-citizen spending from a few million dollars per-year to nearly a billion dollars per-year today,” Senate Republican Leader John Curran of Downers Grove said in a statement Wednesday.

Democrats went into the budget season knowing talks would be difficult, with the governor’s office last year projecting a shortfall of close to $900 million based on pension contributions and other costs rising faster than projected revenue. That figure needed to be made up through some combination of spending cuts or tax increases.

“We knew going into the start of the year that this was going to be a tougher budget than in the previous years,” House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch, a Democrat from Hillside, said at Wednesday’s news conference. “It was not easy getting there, but I do believe this budget continues to make Illinois a great place to live, work and play.”

The sweeping revenue measure that includes the hundreds of millions of dollars in tax increases was a particular sticking point. It took three votes in the House — enabled by a motion to suspend a rule limiting lawmakers to one do-over — for Democrats to round up the bare minimum 60 votes necessary to pass the bill. Eleven of the chamber’s 77 Democrats voted against the plan, while six others were either absent or did not vote.

The measure includes a limit on the tax discount retailers would receive for collecting sales tax, something the governor’s office predicts could bring about $101 million in additional revenue.

To gain support from the Illinois Retail Merchants Association, a deal was struck to eliminate certain credit card fees, known as interchange fees, on the portion of transactions that includes sales tax and tips. Banks and other financial institutions rallied against the move, saying it would create a burdensome and expensive implementation process that would lead to a worse experience for consumers. Earlier this week, advocates for those institutions, including the Illinois Bankers Association and Illinois Credit Union League, urged Pritzker in a letter to veto the section of the revenue bill that addresses the credit card fee elimination.

“In no jurisdiction in the U.S. or in the world does the electronic payment system differentiate the internal, private elements of a purchase,” the groups wrote. “A change to the payment system of this magnitude involving and impacting more than seven million Illinois card holders, hundreds-of-thousands of Illinois merchants, and thousands of card-issuing banks, credit unions, and processors cannot be implemented in a mere 13 months.”

But Pritzker on Wednesday said he doesn’t “foresee any changes” to the revenue measure and intends to sign it before July 1.

“I will say that the interchange fee issue is certainly something we’re always willing to discuss, revisit, have a conversation about,” he said. “There’s time to do that through the rest of the year and I’m happy to listen to them.”

Other tax hikes in the measure include raising the state sports betting tax, now a 15% levy on post-payout revenue, through a tiered structure that would see the largest sportsbooks paying a 40% tax and the smallest paying 20%. The change is expected to bring in $200 million in new operating revenue.

The largest share of the new revenue would come from continuing to cap the losses large corporations can write off on their state income taxes, a move that the state says would bring in an estimated $526 million.

On Wednesday, Pritzker and Democratic leaders stuck to the items those hikes will help pay for.

In education, the governor’s office noted an outlay of $45 million for the second year of a three-year pilot program to fill teacher vacancies; an increase of $10 million to a total of $711 million for Monetary Award Program grant funding for college students; and an additional $75 million in grant funding for preschool enrollment.

The budget increases funding by $90 million to over $290 million for a state program to combat homelessness, with some of that money aiding migrants; provides more than $50 million to the Department of Children and Family Services for nearly 400 new employees;  and provides for a $50 million child tax credit that would cover families with children under 12, according to the governor’s office.

The governor also has touted a move to end the 1% statewide grocery tax. But the tax won’t be eliminated until Jan. 1, 2026, to give local governments, who receive the revenue from the tax, time to prepare, and it likely won’t go away for all residents. Legislators passed a measure granting municipalities the ability to levy their own 1% tax on groceries, while towns without home rule would be able to tack on an additional 1 percentage point tax on general retail sales without a voter referendum.

“Education, health care, housing, child care. These are some of the most important issues at the top of mind for Illinois families and this budget goes a long way toward addressing them,” Pritzker said. “Our tax cuts, debt reductions, grants and scholarships are providing breathing room and support when people are feeling the pinch of inflation.”

Among criticisms of the budget within Pritzker’s party was the $350 million annual increase in funding for elementary and secondary education, the minimum amount under the state’s school funding formula. The Chicago Teachers Union and Mayor Brandon Johnson sought over $1 billion for the Chicago Public Schools alone and Democratic Rep. Will Davis of Homewood had repeatedly suggested increasing the school funding formula to about $550 million statewide would be adequate.

And while the budget makes the legally required pension payment of about $10 billion, it does not include a Pritzker-backed proposal to manage the state’s massive pension debt by increasing the funding target to 100% from 90% and extending the payment deadline by three years, to 2048.

“I certainly will make sure that (the pension proposal) gets a hearing and I expect that we’ll be able to do something that will put us in even better fiscal shape than we already are in,” Pritzker said.

Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza on Tuesday took to social media to say that while “there’s a lot of good in the new state budget” she would have liked to have seen “perhaps some more cuts across the board.”

This prompted pushback from two of Pritzker’s top aides.

“We keep hearing that word—bloat. However, I’ve yet to see a specific list of bloat, let alone someone doing the work of drafting & filing legislation to cut the bloat,” Deputy Gov. Andy Manar, Pritzker’s budget point person, said Tuesday on “X.”

Mendoza spokesman Abdon Pallasch said Wednesday that Mendoza’s phrasing of “across the board” was in reference to state agencies and constitutional offices, such as hers and the governor’s, not to various state programs funded under the spending plan.

Next year, Pritzker and lawmakers will have to deal with issues including a $730 million fiscal cliff for Chicago-area public transportation agencies. But Sen. Elgie Sims, the Senate Democrats’ chief budget negotiator, described the upcoming budget as “forward-thinking” and said “Illinois is on the right track.”

“Don’t let anybody tell you anything different,” said Sims, of Chicago. “The reality is we are making the investments necessary to grow our state’s economy but also make Illinois a better place for those who live, work and call Illinois home.”

“We are going to try to filter as many new ideas or as many new perspectives through the committee process as possible so that we have a really good bill when it’s all said and done,” state Rep. Dave Vella, a Rockford Democrat and former Winnebago County assistant public defender, said Monday.

Vella filed a bill last month aimed at addressing the lack of public defense resources in rural areas, many of which don’t have public defender’s offices, and resolving disparities in resources provided to county prosecutors and public defenders. In Cook County’s 2024 budget, for example, the public defender’s office got about $102 million while about $205 million was set aside for the state’s attorney’s office.

One major issue remains funding, Vella acknowledged. The $53.1 billion state budget that awaits Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s signature appropriates $10 million to the state Supreme Court for county public defenders, the same as in the current budget. Advocates say far more is needed for a statewide public defender office to be effective..

Champaign County Public Defender Elisabeth Pollock said the state’s public defenders have been meeting for months about what a new statewide office should look like and agreed that $10 million isn’t enough for a statewide office to succeed.

“There has really been kind of a historical underinvestment in the public defense sector, in general,” Pollock said.

Vella’s bill was an offshoot of legislation filed in April by Senate President Don Harmon, an Oak Park Democrat. Public defenders did not support that bill because it was an initiative of the Illinois Supreme Court, raising concerns about whether the statewide public defender’s office would be free of interference from the judiciary.

Vella said his bill aims to address that concern by taking away the power of chief county judges to choose public defenders, as they do in most Illinois counties — in Cook County the board president appoints the public defender —  “because obviously the whole point of this thing is to give autonomy to the public defenders.”

“We are committed to this. I think it’s a very important investment in the state,” Harmon said May 26 moments after the Senate adjourned for the spring. “That said, when you’re trying to help someone and they tell you you’re not helping them the right way, it makes me think maybe we step back and work even more closely with our public defenders over the summer to see what we can do better.”

The state Supreme Court’s administrative office for Illinois courts said in a statement on its website that it supports any outcome that ensures “every indigent defendant across our state has access to effective assistance of counsel and every public defender has the resources needed” to fulfill the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which mandates a defendant’s right to counsel.

Under Vella’s legislation, a statewide public defender would be nominated by a group “created by and composed of” public defenders in the state. The state Supreme Court would then approve a nominated candidate to a two-year term by majority vote.

When the term is up, a newly-formed state public defender commission composed of 11 members would select a state public defender for a six-year term. The governor would select four of the commission members, the state Supreme Court would choose three and the four state legislative leaders, two from each party, would each get one.

Commission members would be required to have experience defending indigent clients, and cannot have been paid as a judge, elected official, prosecutor, judicial officer or police official within two years of joining the commission.

The legislation would also create a process for the statewide public defender office to nominate candidates for the county-level public defender positions, and the new commission would make the appointments.

DuPage County Public Defender Jeff York believes the new legislation alleviates “a lot of the concerns” that he and other public defenders had compared to the initial legislation but he feels a term-limit provision in Vella’s bill for certain county public defenders needs further discussion.

“My fear is that the decisions that you would make running an office, you’re not looking at the long term. You’re like, ‘well, I only have a year left,'” said York. “The decisions you make may not be best for the office and ultimately not as good for the clients.”

The statewide public defender’s office would also provide training to county-level public defenders and support “with the assistance of attorneys, expert witnesses, investigators, administrative staff, and social service staff” and “maintain a panel” of private attorneys to represent indigent clients, according to the bill.

The legislation would allow any two counties within the same judicial circuit to combine public defender’s offices. Now, in certain situations, two adjoining counties can share a public defender.

Advocates have pointed to a report from the Sixth Amendment Center, which was commissioned a few years ago by the state Supreme Court, which said that as of 2021, Illinois was among just seven states that don’t have a state commission, state agency or state officer with oversight of trial-level public defense services in adult criminal cases.

The report, which focused on nine counties, noted the state had no oversight structure to assess whether each county had a sufficient number of lawyers with the appropriate training and resources to provide effective counsel at every stage of an indigent client’s case.

Vella said a measure such as the one he’s sponsoring “is long overdue.”

“All this really does is it puts the public defenders at an even keel with the state’s attorneys, which is the whole point of the process,” said Vella. “Public defenders are at an extreme disadvantage and if we don’t want people wrongly convicted, we need to give them as much as we can.”

But lawmakers in the final days also sent a number of other bills to Gov. J.B. Pritzker that will directly affect the state’s residents and communities. And, during the course of the four-month session they approved some less significant measures, among them a bill designating Calvatia Gigantea, colloquially known as the Giant Puffball, as the state mushroom.

Here’s are some of the bills heading to the governor’s desk:

Mobile state IDs

Residents would be able to keep digitial versions of their driver’s licenses and other state IDs in their cellphones under legislation pushed by  Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias.

“Whether it’s offering more services online, reducing wait times at DMVs or introducing products like digital driver’s licenses, we want to leverage new secure technology to better serve our customers,” Giannoulias said in an interview shortly before the Senate passed the measure in a 58-0 vote last week. It also passed in the House without any opposition.

Eligibility for a mobile identification card would be the same as for the physical credential and would most likely be accessible through an app, Giannoulias said. According to the bill, it would cost consumers no more than $6 to purchase the app needed to display the digital license or ID on their phone.

While the mobile ID would be acceptable in most situations, the legislation requires a person to show law enforcement the physical copy of their driver’s license or regular ID upon request.

Opposition was voiced by the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, which raised privacy and security concerns. ACLU spokesman Ed Yohnka said the bill fails to provide protection from deeper phone searches by law enforcement.

“We would have liked some additional specific statutory language that would create a consequence if law enforcement used the mobile ID as a pretext to access someone’s phone, in violation of the usual protections around unlawful search and seizure,” Yohnka said.

Yohnka said other concerns include potential discrimination by businesses over customer use of one form of ID over the other and the potential safety concerns over collection and storage of the mobile ID information.

Giannoulias stressed that having a mobile ID will remain a choice for residents and said that the option could actually bring additional privacy because people could choose to provide those checking the ID only the information necessary to their transaction.

“Digital IDs offer privacy control options that allow people to verify their age when legally purchasing alcohol, cannabis or renting a car, and it also allows us to do this while hiding other personal information like their address if they wish,” Giannoulias said.

If Pritzker signs the bill, Giannoulias’ office will need to work out more details about how his office will implement and enforce mobile IDs. The secretary said he doesn’t have a timeline for when they will become available to the public.

“We know that people in Illinois want this,” Giannoulias said.

Local journalism protections

Lawmakers attempted to give local journalism a boost with a measure that would not allow a local news organization to be sold without 120 days notice to employees and their representatives, the state Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, the county government in which the outlet is located and any “in-state nonprofit organization in the business of buying local news organizations.”

“What’s happening is big conglomerates are buying up small local news media and what’s happening is they’re shipping … their own news in, they’re not covering local news,” Rep. Dave Vella, a Rockford Democrat and the bill’s main House sponsor, said during floor debate. “And because local news is not being covered, people just don’t understand what’s going on in their communities. So, what this will do is make sure that any big corporation that tries to buy a local news media, at least we give notice to everybody.”

Opposing the bill, Republican Rep. Amy Elik said that as a certified public accountant for 29 years who has dealt with the sales of companies, 120 days “is a really long time” for interested parties to contemplate the impact of the transaction, and could jeopardize its negotiations.

“At 120 days before the date of a sale, it’s not even soup yet. Lawyers are still going back and forth setting terms. The value might not even be known yet. I caution this body to accept this (provision) of this bill because I think the unintended consequence here is that 120 days notice is given, employees are going to start dropping off one by one, leaving (and potentially destroying) the value of that local newspaper and now that newspaper will not be able to be sold to anybody.”

The bill also calls for the Illinois Student Assistance Commission to provide journalism scholarships to students who will work at a local news outlet in Illinois for at least two years.

Local news organizations are also likely to see tax credits, which were included as part of the larger budget package, over the next five years. A credit of $15,000 would be available for each journalist on a company’s payroll and $25,000 for journalists hired for newly created roles.

Any news organization with one full-time reporter would qualify, with the credits for a single news outlet capped at $150,000 per year, and at $250,000 for larger corporations.

The number of journalists in Illinois has decreased 85% since 2005, according to a 2023 Northwestern University report, one of the biggest decreases in the nation.

Erasing medical debt

Lawmakers approved a key Pritzker initiative aimed at erasing as much as $1 billion in medical debt for more than 300,000 Illinois families. It would follow a similar effort launched in Cook County that was on track to wipe out medical bills for around 73,000 residents as of last year.

“Many walk away with unexpected pain” after receiving medical care, Pritzker said at an event promoting the initiative in April. “Not only the emotional, physical toll of the crisis they’ve been through, but a serious financial toll, too.”

The state legislation would partner with the nonprofit Undue Medical Debt to spend $10 million on buying up and erasing the debt.

Medical debt disproportionately affects people of color, Department of Healthcare and Family Services Director Lizzie Whitehorn said at the April event. It can also lead people to reconsider future medical care, she said.

However, a study released earlier this year in partnership with the same debt relief nonprofit — formerly known as RIP Medical Debt — found that wiping medical debt did not improve recipients’ financial distress or mental health.

Pritzker said he was aware of the study but noted it was conducted from 2018 to 2020, and said the organization has changed significantly since then.

Artificial intelligence

Bills spearheaded by Democratic Rep. Jennifer Gong-Gershowitz would protect artists and others in creative fields from unauthorized digital replicas, in line with the national conversation about artificial intelligence in pop culture.

One measure heading to the governor would largely ban unauthorized digital replicas produced through AI. It passed in both chambers without opposition following a debate during which lawmakers made references to actress Scarlett Johansson and hip hop stars Drake and Kendrick Lamar.

“Does this mean Kendrick Lamar could be sued for putting a digitally created version imitating Drake on his song as the two go back and forth talking trash?” Republican Rep. Dan Ugaste of Geneva asked during floor debate, an apparent reference to Drake’s controversial use of AI in the recent feud between the two artists.

Gong-Gershowitz of Glenview said she’d need more facts on the hypothetical situation to determine if it violated the law, but that the bill includes exceptions for “parody, satire and criticism.”

The bill is intended to protect artists from misuse “while still allowing sufficient exemptions to ensure that appropriate creative use is not stifled,” she said.

It’s also meant in part to prevent situations such as OpenAI’s recent use of an AI voice that many — including the actress herself — thought sounded very similar to Johansson, Gong-Gershowitz said. (OpenAI has said the voice was based off a different actress and put its rollout on “pause.”)

The Glenview legislator noted Johansson issued a letter after the incident calling for legislation to protect individuals from AI replicas.

That’s “exactly what we’re doing today, and I’m really proud that Illinois is leading on this front,” Gong-Gershowitz said.

Help for those with limited English

State agencies would be required to make sure Illinois residents who speak limited English are able to more smoothly access state government services in their native languages under another bill heading to Pritzker’s desk.

The Language Equity and Access Act would create a language access policy to be carried out by the governor’s Office of New Americans and other agencies such as the Illinois Department of Human Services.

The legislation was inspired, in part, by the difficulties many Asian-Americans have experienced while trying to access state services such as applying for unemployment benefits during the COVID-19 pandemic, said Grace Pai, executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice | Chicago.

Pai said that government agencies receiving federal funding are required to help limited English speakers with translation in various languages, but that requirement “is not strongly enforced” and not all state agencies are federally funded. So the legislation is a way of making sure there’s a standard requirement for all state agencies to provide translation or interpretation for the public, if necessary, Pai said.

“There are dozens and dozens of languages spoken in Illinois and people who may feel comfortable going to the grocery store and speaking English or navigating day to day life in English, that doesn’t mean that they can navigate complicated forms or application processes in English, or navigate state services, which can be complicated,” Pai said.

The bill would require the head of the Office of New Americans to work with state agencies to come up with language access plans, and the measure would also use U.S. census data to determine how many Illinois residents speak limited English but regularly use state services.

According to the legislation, a state agency’s language access plan would be determined by factors that include the number of limited English speakers who use state services, the frequency in which speakers use these services, the importance of these services and the agency’s available resources.

The bill also requires translation services of vital documents be made available for groups of limited English speakers.

The measure would go into effect with the governor’s signature, after which the Office of New Americans would have until July 1, 2025 to prepare and submit its first report.

Abortion protections

The federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act is being challenged in the U.S. Supreme Court, where justices will review whether it is being applied incorrectly when it comes to abortion. The law bars hospitals from transferring or turning away poor patients before they are stabilized, but it is interpreted by some as a protection for doctors who perform abortions on women experiencing a medical emergency.

In an effort to increase Illinois’ already robust protections of abortion rights, lawmakers approved a measure that would in effect provide a state equivalent of the federal law in the event that the high court rules it can’t be applied to abortion procedures, according to Democratic Rep. Dagmara Avelar of Bolingbrook, the bill’s main House sponsor.

The bill sparked some tense debate on the House floor. Rep. William Hauter, a Republican from Morton who is also an anesthesiologist, said he’s never heard of a case where an abortion was necessary to stabilize a patient.

“What we have here is confusion from clarity. This is what happens when lawyers try to practice medicine,” Hauter said. “We are changing decades of guidance and long, clear interpretation of EMTALA that always emphasized reasonable medical judgment, focusing the medical efforts on stabilizing the mother and her unborn. This bill adds conditions, confusion.”

Rep. Diane Blair-Sherlock, a Democrat from Villa Park, who noted that she is a lawyer, sought to refute Hauter’s argument.

“Just because it hasn’t happened in your presence or in your practice does not mean that it does not happen,” she said. “I practiced law for 30 years. I have not seen everything because that’s just not how life works.”

The bill passed along party lines in the House and Senate and now heads to the governor, who has made abortion rights one of his focal points in supporting President Joe Biden’s bid for reelection.

About 20 House staff members have pressured Welch, a Democrat from Hillside, to recognize their efforts to form a union for more than a year, leading the speaker to sponsor a measure that would allow legislative staffers working at the state Capitol to organize. The measure passed through the House last year but has since stalled in the Senate.

“We will not be put off, ignored or gaslit any longer,” the Illinois Legislative Staff Association said in a statement announcing the lawsuit.

Staff members who formed the group accuse the speaker of violating the Workers’ Rights Amendment, which declared forming a union as a “fundamental right” when it was enshrined in the state constitution after the November 2022 election. ILSA and Welch staffer Brady Burden are named plaintiffs in the lawsuit, which was filed in Cook County Circuit Court. Welch, who’s signaled his support for the amendment in the past, is the lone defendant.

At the time Welch filed the bill in September that would allow his staff to unionize, his office said that even with the Workers’ Rights Amendment, state law specifically prohibits legislative staff from forming a union, necessitating new legislation.

But the plaintiffs allege that the legislation violates their rights under the amendment by, among other things, not authorizing collective bargaining until mid-2026, “and seeks to ratify by law the Defendant Speaker’s deprivation of the constitutional right” prior to that time. They also accuse Welch of violating their constitutional rights by refusing to bargain.

The plaintiffs are seeking relief that includes the appointment of a mediator to “confer with the parties and assist them” in the collective bargaining process and an order barring Welch “from any act to forestall bargaining with the purpose or intent of depriving them of the constitutional rights guaranteed” by the Workers’ Rights Amendment.

“The Defendant Speaker has unlawfully created a climate of fear among the Speaker’s staff and within the ILSA and sought to chill the open exercise by the ILSA and its members and Plaintiff Brady (Burden) of their right to seek and demand good faith bargaining,” the plaintiffs allege in the suit.

A spokeswoman for Welch said the office has not yet seen the lawsuit and had no comment.

The lawsuit was filed after ILSA on May 21 released a lengthy statement that placed the blame on legislative leaders for allowing the legislation opening the door to efforts to organize to stall after it was passed by the House.

“It was not voted on, it was not debated, it was not assigned to a committee, it was not so much as considered,” ILSA said. “And when we reached out to (Senate President Don) Harmon’s staff to begin a dialogue on October 25, 2023, November 28, 2023 and February 9, 2024, we were ignored.”

“The handling of (the legislation)—and the return of leadership to their former policy of stonewalling us—confirms what we already suspected, that there was never any intention of this bill becoming law,” the association said. “It is clear to us that Speaker Welch and President Harmon had an understanding: Welch would pass a bill to deflect rising criticism, and Harmon would make sure that the bill went no further.”

Under the House measure, legislative employees would be allowed to collectively bargain “through representatives of their choosing on questions of wages, hours and other conditions of employment.”

The bill also says the General Assembly would establish an office of state legislative labor relations to manage the interests of the legislature in union-related matters with the employees. It would also give the state panel of the Illinois Labor Relations Board jurisdiction over collective bargaining matters between employee organizations and the legislature.

The proposal’s definition of “legislative employee” does not include upper-echelon staffers such as the chief of staff, deputy chief of staff, legal counsel or other staffers who work in high-profile supervisory roles.

“They’ve told us that this is a zero-sum game. And if something is good for Chicago, well, that means we’re taking something away from Peoria,” Johnson said in a joint address to the House and Senate. “It is a false choice.”

A little over a year later, the mayor has learned Illinois lawmakers still regard those choices as true.

He saw the state legislature reject his biggest agenda items during the session that concluded this week: more than $1 billion in state funding for Chicago Public Schools, and a nearly $5 billion proposal for a new Chicago Bears stadium.

Meanwhile, a bill drawn up to protect CPS’ selective-enrollment schools marched close to passage, against the wishes of Johnson and his close ally, the Chicago Teachers Union, until an eleventh-hour deal with Senate President Don Harmon halted it — for now.

Though the new state budget that passed early Wednesday morning contained some additional investments for Chicago, the overall cool reception in Springfield signaled that Johnson has work to do in building stronger rapport with lawmakers there. And those inroads need to be made fast, before other high-stakes issues arrive, such as a looming $730 million fiscal cliff for the Chicago Transit Authority.

“He didn’t get most of what he wanted,” Delmarie Cobb, a Chicago political consultant, said. “And I think a lot of what his defeats have been have not necessarily been a referendum on him as much as it’s been a referendum on his approach. … Part of what you have to do is the groundwork. You have to work the crowd.”

The mayor said Chicago did receive substantive investments in the 2025 budget that begins in July, but characterized the current amount of funding the state is set to kick in for CPS as “just not enough.”

“We’re gonna continue to organize and make sure that we have what the people of Chicago deserve,” Johnson said at a Thursday news conference. “There are a lot of things that we were able to walk away with. We’re gonna continue to fight for more.”

Asked Wednesday about Johnson’s unfulfilled asks for Springfield such as more CPS funding, Gov. J.B. Pritzker downplayed any “differences” on the issue.

“The truth is that we all think that education should be better funded,” the governor said. “But not just for the city of Chicago. The city of Chicago is 20% of the population of the state. So, we have a lot of other people and a lot of other kids across the state going to school. We need to fund their schools better too.”

Johnson pointed to “more resources” for domestic violence victims and violence prevention programs, plus $182 million toward migrant resources, as wins for Chicago in the budget. Pritzker’s administration did not provide specifics Thursday on how much Chicago would receive from the domestic violence and anti-violence funding pools.

The $182 million was secured by the governor as part of an agreement earlier this year with Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, a deal that at first did not include Johnson, due to his reluctance to pitch in another $70 million from city budget coffers until months later.

In addition, the budget injects more than $500 million in new funding for local governments, but it is not yet clear exactly how much of that Chicago will get.

The much-hyped reset between City Hall and Springfield when Johnson first took office was perhaps borne of low expectations following his predecessor Lori Lightfoot’s term that featured a fractious relationship between her and the governor. But one year in, the mayor’s Springfield agenda has made little movement while opposition has cropped up, including from within the Chicago delegation.

One Chicago Democrat who has resisted the mayor is North Side state Rep. Margaret Croke, lead sponsor of the bill that originally set a moratorium on closing selective enrollment schools but later expanded to include all CPS schools. That bill’s winding saga — which at one point featured a Senate committee advancing the legislation on the same day Johnson was making his rounds inside the Illinois State Capitol building — should be a warning sign for the mayor, Croke said.

“Him as well as his team should probably rethink how they want to approach the General Assembly …  if he wants to achieve his campaign promises,” Croke said. “They’re acting as if they were given a mandate.”

The lawmaker then critiqued what she described as a mindset from Johnson and his progressive coalition: “We’re going to say anything we can in order for you to feel like you have to side with us.”

“The problem is that’s a short-term strategy and in the long-term can burn a lot of bridges,” she said. “So I think that occurred, and it didn’t just occur with that particular bill. They had done that previously.”

Croke’s measure originally focused on just selective-enrollment schools, but the amended legislation added a districtwide moratorium on school closures until 2027, when the school board transitions to fully elected. The CTU labeled the legislation “racist,” but it breezed through the House in a 92-8 vote. Still, following Johnson’s promise not to shut down any selective enrollment schools, Harmon acquiesced to pulling the bill’s Senate vote last week, days before the session was to adjourn.

Ald. Andre Vasquez, 40th, a progressive who has at times critiqued the Johnson administration, praised the mayor for clinching the deal with Harmon. “It could have gotten very contentious and continued at that tenor, but it seems like at the end of session, cooler heads prevailed,” he said.

“There are always gonna be difficult conversations, but it feels to me like the beginning of a relationship,” Vasquez said. “It’s pretty clear that Springfield needs Chicago, and Chicago needs Springfield.”

Cobb said the mayor should take advantage of this pause in statehouse activity until the fall veto session to curry favor with lawmakers before thorny questions such as how to plug the CTA’s projected $730 million shortfall by 2026 come to a head.

“If he actually wants to win these victories, he’s got to do the legwork,” Cobb said. “You have to see who’s in your corner before you push your agenda. And if you find that you don’t have the votes, then you back off, and maybe you come back to it later.”

Johnson has many opportunities in the near term to succeed or fail in Springfield.

In addition to the transit funding woes, a bill to consolidate the CTA with Metra and Pace could be taken up in the fall, as part of the growing defiance in Springfield over conditions inside Chicago’s mass transit system helmed by embattled head Dorval Carter. Johnson’s $800 million package of new revenue proposals from his mayoral campaign also still remains at the starting line, and many of his bold ideas for new taxes would need approval from the state.

Other outstanding matters that may arise later in Johnson’s term are evergreen pension reform efforts as well as fresh legislation to legalize video gambling, perhaps at the expense of the revenue expected from the opening of the city’s first casino.

But with Chicago legislators a minority in the statehouse, the mayor will need to take off his city-centric lens to pull off victories there. Johnson, speaking Thursday on his recent Springfield wins and losses, appeared to nod to that when recasting his CPS funding pitch as part of a larger demand across Illinois school districts.

“Keep in mind that the funding formula is falling short for the entire state,” Johnson said. “And so this is not just a Chicago dynamic. There are other cities — East St. Louis, Kankakee, Waukegan — there are a number of cities that are underfunded. The strategy is what it’s always been: We keep demanding.”

ayin@chicagotribune.com

jgorner@chicagotribune.com

After earlier passing the Senate without any no votes, the bill passed 15-0 through the House Judiciary Criminal Committee on Tuesday night. But Jaclyn Driscoll, a spokesperson for House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch, said lawmakers ran out of time to consider it in a full vote while focusing on priorities including a $53.1 billion budget.

But even if it had been called and passed, it’s uncertain whether Gov. J.B.  Pritzker would have signed it into law. He’s indicated that while he supported parts of the bill, he took exception with the way it was written.

“There are aspects of that bill that are fine and some aspects of it, frankly, that are just unacceptable. It’s not about transparency to be honest with you. It’s about what’s actually possible, what’s doable,” Pritzker said Wednesday about six hours after the House concluded its spring session. “Also, funding. There was no funding for any of the things that they suggested that we should do.”

Pritzker in March suggested there could be changes to some of the board’s practices after the panel released a parolee, 37-year-old Crosetti Brand, who authorities say then killed 11-year-old Jayden Perkins and attacked the boy’s mother, with whom Brand once had a relationship. The woman had also accused Brand of being violent to her years earlier. Days after the March 13 killing of Jayden and attack of his mother, the board’s chairman, Donald Shelton, and board member LeAnn Miller, who drafted the order authorizing Brand’s release, resigned.

The bill would require the board to publish on its website information for victims about how to submit victim-impact statements for the board to consider in its deliberations. This would apply to victims of domestic violence who’ve filed orders of protection against their abusers, who may be considered by the board for early release.

The bill would also require the board to make more hearings available to the public via live broadcast on the board’s website, where recordings of the hearings would have to remain available for at least 18 months. This would include mandatory supervised release revocation hearings, which could run to hundreds or even thousands of recordings each year.

By July 2025, a task force put together to improve the review board would report to the governor and legislature “on whether additional open meetings of the Board shall be available to the public for live broadcast along with an implementation plan to accomplish this.”

Jordan Abudayyeh, a Pritzker spokesperson, has said the proposal would be difficult for the review board to manage “given the volume of work they are expected to process every month.” She said the governor’s office supports increasing transparency at the board and is working on an executive order to incorporate some of what’s in the legislature’s proposal.

As of Wednesday, the bill had more than 70 House sponsors. Supporters included conservative Republicans and progressive Democrats, an unusual show of unity between two parties on a high-profile criminal justice issue.

The bill’s main House sponsor, state Rep. Kelly Cassidy, called it “a disgrace” that the legislation could not be passed during the spring session and said Jayden’s mother’s struggle to be taken seriously by the legal system leading up to her son’s killing and her attack “is actually unbearably common.”

“We as leaders and lawmakers had an obligation to take action. Instead, we abandoned victims, once again,” Cassidy, a Chicago Democrat, said in a statement. “I am aware that the Governor’s office expressed concerns with the language of the Senate amendments that I believe could have been addressed through the task force proposed in the bill. We should be convening that task force this summer and doing the detailed work that two weeks at the end of session can’t accomplish.”

“Instead, we have to wait until we reconvene in the fall to try again to make meaningful and lasting change that will actually make us safer,” Cassidy said. “Everyone claims to support victims and survivors. Everyone claimed to stand ready to take urgent action to ensure Jayden’s death wouldn’t be in vain. I urge our leaders to prove to victims and survivors that those were not just empty platitudes.”

The measure in its initial form passed 106-0 in the House on May 20 before sailing through the Senate six days later in a 58-0 vote, the same day the Senate adjourned for the summer. But due to changes made to the legislation in the Senate, the bill had to again go through the House.

Driscoll acknowledged on Wednesday the legislation could still be considered by the House when it returns for its fall veto session later this year.

The early morning chaos reflected the difficulty in trying to maintain unity within House and Senate Democratic supermajorities  that encompass a broad range of ideological and geographic perspectives and priorities.

An election-year budget that included tax increases on sportsbooks, retailers and other businesses along with 5% pay raises for lawmakers and other state officials set up a series of tough votes, particularly for Democrats who are up for reelection this fall in more moderate to conservative suburban and downstate districts.

Last week, the legislature blew through its self-imposed Friday deadline to send a budget to Gov. J.B. Pritzker, and while lawmakers trimmed the nearly $900 million in tax increases their fellow Democrat laid out in his February budget blueprint, they also boosted spending by $400 million from what he proposed.

Pritzker, who was involved in negotiations, praised the final package and vowed to sign it when it officially reaches his desk. He sidestepped questions about Democratic defections and focused on defending the plan against Republican critics.

“It seems like every year there have been the usual naysayers with their false narratives about our budget,” Pritzker said Wednesday from his ceremonial office in the Illinois State Capitol. “Our record of fiscal responsibility and responsible investments is well established.”

Pritzker spoke just hours after the House approved the spending plan in a 65-45 vote taken at about 2 a.m. by members who returned to Springfield following a truncated Memorial Day weekend. The Democratic-controlled Senate gave its approval late Sunday on a 38-21 vote, largely along party lines.

Between the two chambers, nine suburban and downstate Democrats — seven in the House and two in the Senate — joined Republicans in opposing the main budget bill. While the opposing Democrats largely remained silent during debates, the GOP aimed its ire at expenditures including aid for migrants and legislative pay raises, which they will nonetheless receive.

Asked about GOP criticisms that the budget could be setting the state up for an uncertain financial future, Pritzker said: “Every year, particularly Republicans, say things like that. They say, ‘Oh, we’re careening toward a brick wall.’ It hasn’t happened. Six years in a row we have balanced this budget. And we have made sure that we’re thinking about and lowering costs for working families every time we put a budget together.”

While the budget itself passed relatively comfortably, Democratic leaders struggled — and initially failed — to marshal the votes needed to pass an accompanying revenue proposal that included the package of tax hikes. Opposition came from several fronts, including an eleventh-hour lobbying push from banks, airlines and credit card companies against a last-minute move to eliminate transaction fees charged on sales taxes and tips.

It took three votes — enabled by a motion to suspend a House rule limiting lawmakers to one do-over — for Democrats to round up the bare minimum 60 votes necessary to pass the measure containing the tax increases. Eleven of the chamber’s 77 Democrats voted against the plan, and six others were either absent or did not vote.

“Well, good news, there’s 78 Democrats,” Pritzker said with a smile when asked about the close call, glossing over the fact that Democrats have one vacant seat.

Republicans who uniformly voted against the measure were livid over the Democratic maneuvers to push it through.

“I think it should be clear to everyone in this state what this supermajority is willing to do to ram a tax increase down the throats of the citizens of Illinois at 4:30 in the morning,” GOP Rep. Patrick Windhorst of Metropolis said just before the final vote.

During the earlier House debate over the budget, Rep. Jehan Gordon-Booth of Peoria, the House Democrats’ chief budget negotiator, emphasized that the spending plan maintained the state’s priorities in education, after-school programs, health, and public safety, including funding community-based violence prevention groups and Illinois State Police cadet classes.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is a budget that prioritizes all of our communities. We’re funding housing. We’re funding rental assistance. We’re providing over $500 million in new funding for local governments,” Gordon-Booth said on the House floor. “I know that we stand committed to continuing in the vein of moving our great state forward.”

Republicans, outnumbered by a ratio of nearly 2-to-1 in the House and largely shut out of negotiations, made a point of noting that budgets have ballooned since Pritzker took office in 2019, when the approved budget totaled $40 billion.

House Republican Leader Tony McCombie issued a statement blasting the latest budget as a “negligent political document” that she said was filled with “bloated political projects, taxpayer-funded benefits for noncitizens, and politician pay raises, which come at the expense of the state’s most vulnerable residents.”

Rep. Norine Hammond, a Republican from Macomb in west central Illinois and the House GOP’s chief budget negotiator, said on the House floor that over the past several years, the budget has become “an exercise in bullying and absolute power” on the part of the Democratic Party that has total control of state government.

Pointing to the legislative pay raises and to pork-barrel projects that are monopolized by Democrats, Hammond said the members of the majority party have acted out of their own self-interest. “They’re here for what’s in it for them,” she said.

Rep. Lindsey LaPointe, a Chicago Democrat, pushed back, saying, “We all represent 108,000 people. I am not here for myself.”

“I don’t think anyone on that side of the aisle is here for themselves either,” LaPointe said. “We are here for a purpose: to fight for what we believe in.”

Highlights of the measures headed to the governor’s desk include a slight hourly boost for service providers who help the developmentally disabled and a more generous child tax credit.

Lawmakers approved the minimum $350 million annual increase in funding for elementary and secondary education laid out in the state’s school funding formula. The increase helps bring total K-12 spending from the state’s general fund to about $10.8 billion. The budget also calls for making the legally required pension payment of about $10 billion.

The budget also includes $14 million for the Department of Early Childhood, the new agency that both the House and Senate voted to create, and sets the salary for the new agency’s secretary at $215,000 per year.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson stopped in Springfield earlier this month to lobby for his administration’s requests, but the budget approved by lawmakers reflected little of a mayoral wish list that included a request for an $1 billion increase in funding for Chicago Public Schools.

The plan does include the $182 million Pritzker proposed to dedicate toward the ongoing migrant response as part of an agreement with Johnson and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle announced earlier this year.

Lawmakers and many top state officials will see 5% raises, boosting annual pay for all 177 members of the Illinois General Assembly to $93,712. Many lawmakers also receive stipends for holding leadership positions or chairing committees. The raises also affect all constitutional offices — the governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, attorney general, comptroller and treasurer — and heads of executive agencies.

Pritzker, a billionaire heir to the Hyatt Hotels fortune, does not collect a salary as governor and last year he used his veto powers to reduce pay increases for the lawmakers, statewide elected officials and agency heads after the legislature approved raises that were above limits set in state law.

Also tucked in the budget package was $900 million in capital funds to rebuild Stateville and Logan correctional centers, which the governor announced earlier this year. The Department of Corrections has proposed to move the Logan women’s prison onto Stateville’s campus as part of the multiyear plan.

Rep. Bill Hauter, a Republican whose district includes the Logan prison, said that while he agrees the facility that has been neglected for many years needs to be demolished, rebuilding it in a Chicago suburb is not the answer. He said he is pressing for the prison to be rebuilt in Logan County so the economic benefits generated are not lost from the region.

“This budget highlights a growing trend that our downstate communities will be ignored like Logan, then unfairly defunded and then depopulated of jobs in the majority party’s thirst to consolidate their power, their funding and jobs to the people and places that are most politically favorable to them,” he said.

To help support a budget that’s about $2.7 billion higher than the current spending plan, the tax package that squeaked by with 60 votes is expected to bring in an estimated $750 million in new revenue.

The final figure was lower than Pritzker’s tax hike proposal in part because lawmakers ditched the governor’s plan to bring in $93 million in additional revenue by lowering a built-in annual increase to the standard state income tax exemption, which would have resulted in slightly higher income tax bills for many taxpayers. Since the exemption is the same regardless of income, some experts previously said the proposal would have been harder on lower-income families.

But most of Pritzker’s flagship proposals for corporate tax hikes made it into the final package, including caps on sweeteners for retailers and other corporations. A portion of the tax increases would be offset by a series of new tax credits included in the revenue package.

The state sports betting tax — currently a 15% levy on post-payout revenue — would be raised using a tiered structure, with the largest sportsbooks paying a 40% tax and the smallest paying 20%. The change is expected to bring in $200 million in new operating revenue, about the same as the 35% flat across-the-board tax included in Pritzker’s original proposal.

The largest share of the new revenue — an estimated $526 million — would come from continuing to cap the losses large corporations can write off on their state income taxes.

The plan also would limit the tax discount retailers receive for collecting sales tax, which would bring in about $101 million in additional revenue.

While retailers have pushed back in the past when Pritzker and other governors have proposed capping the sales tax discount, the Illinois Retail Merchants Association went along this time because it struck a deal to eliminate credit card fees on the portion of transactions that includes sales tax and tips.

Rob Karr, president of the retailers group, said banks collect many other fees and that the change proposed by the legislature will result in a fairer system.

But banks and other financial institutions were incensed by the move, which they found out about only days before it was approved by legislators.

“To have one state come in and pass this and upend the global payment system as we know it, just for a fractional amount of monetary benefit for merchants, just is not an idea that should be done without proper consideration,” said Ben Jackson, executive vice president of government relations at the Illinois Bankers Association.

The proposal on credit cards was vigorously opposed by the banking association and the Illinois Credit Union League, along with American, United and Southwest airlines, which each operate their own credit card programs. Opponents say it would create a burdensome and expensive implementation process that would lead to a worse experience for consumers.

The three airlines on Monday sent a letter to Pritzker, Senate President Don Harmon and House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch, asking them to reject the proposal.

“This legislation would make Illinois a global outlier in how it treats payments to the detriment of businesses and consumers,” the letter said, because it would require payments to be split up into multiple parts: the merchandise, sales tax and gratuity.

Jackson called the credit card proposal an “eleventh-hour deal that’s been injected into a very important set of bills.” He said he heard from the governor’s office on May 23 — the day before the General Assembly’s self-imposed deadline to pass a budget — that it would be included in the package and was non-negotiable. The language was released on Saturday. Jackson said his organization had lobbied to have the legislature study the issue instead of implementing the change right away, but lawmakers rejected that proposal.

Opponents see constitutional problems, including interstate commerce issues, he said. That could set the stage for possible litigation if the governor signs the measure into law.

Democratic Rep. Margaret Croke of Chicago voted for the revenue package but in a House committee hearing Tuesday night called the expected July 1, 2025, implementation date of the credit card change “crazy” and said the chamber needs to be open to amendments in the fall veto session.

“We need to be open to the fact that this proposal was done very last minute, and we need to be OK with amending it so that we can implement it,” Croke said in an interview. “I also think that there is the chance of legal challenges, and if we’re opening up the state to potential lawsuits, that’s something we’ll also have to address in the fall.”

Making good on a vow Pritzker made in his February budget address, the legislature voted to eliminate the 1% statewide grocery tax, something voters are sure to hear about frequently between now and the November general election, although the tax will remain in place until Jan. 1, 2026. The delay is intended to give local governments, who receive the revenue from the tax, time to prepare.

Residents in some parts of the state may continue seeing the tax added to their grocery bills, however. To make up for the lost revenue, municipalities — both those such as Chicago with broader home-rule powers to raise taxes on their own and non-home-rule communities — would be granted the ability to levy their own 1% tax on groceries. Towns without home rule would be given the ability to tack on an additional 1 percentage point tax on general retail sales without having to ask voters to approve the increase through a referendum.

As an added benefit for municipalities, the budget package also includes $600 million in funding for local road projects.

Another component that would benefit lower-income Illinois residents is the creation of a state child tax credit that will cost the state $50 million in the upcoming fiscal year and $100 million in following years, and would  cover families with children younger than 12. It was beefed up from Pritzker’s proposal, which was for families with children under 3 and was estimated to cost the state $12 million.

In another move that will bolster Pritzker’s and the legislature’s progressive bona fides, lawmakers approved a measure, championed by the governor, that would purchase Illinois residents’ medical debt at a discount, which the governor’s office says could fund exponential debt relief for hundreds of thousands of families.

“No Illinoisan should face financial ruin after receiving the medical care they need,” Pritzker said in a statement after the bill passed 73-36 through the House late Tuesday. “Together, we are on track to restore financial security to hundreds of thousands of Illinoisans who are suffering under the weight of unpaid debt as they recover from illness and injury.”

The legislature also passed some of Pritzker’s key finance initiatives, including a sweeping business development measure aimed at boosting Illinois’ standing in the quantum computing field, among other goals.

Petrella reported from Chicago.

“The mayor has always been emphatically clear with me that he does not intend to close schools, he does not intend to under-resource schools, he does not intend to undermine the selective enrollment schools,” said Harmon, an Oak Park Democrat. “I think his commitment to me is even more clear and more binding than the bill would have been.”

“This is a business based on trust and in my view the mayor promised more than the bill did,” Harmon said after the Senate adjourned until the fall Sunday night.

The legislation to extend by two years, to 2027, an existing moratorium on shutting down Chicago Public Schools buildings had breezed through the House in a 92-8 vote and also was passed by a Senate committee before Harmon put the kibosh on it.

The mayor, who along with the Chicago Teachers Union opposed the legislation, made a last-minute plea to Harmon in a letter last week asking him not to call the bill for a vote. In his letter Johnson offered assurances that the city’s school board, which won’t be fully elected until 2027, will not do anything that adversely affects selective enrollment schools.

“The District will not close selective enrollment schools nor will the District make disproportionate budget cuts to selective enrollment schools,” the mayor said in the May 23 letter. “The District will maintain admissions standards at selective enrollment schools. Any narrative to the contrary is patently false.”

The bill initially was aimed at protecting selective enrollment schools from closures before it was amended to all schools, including regular neighborhood schools. The measure was filed by state Rep. Margaret Croke after Johnson’s school board last year announced its intention to focus on neighborhood schools in a forthcoming five-year plan.

School choice advocates feared that approach would lead to selective enrollment schools being shut down, despite denials from the board which Johnson reiterated in his letter to Harmon.

Under Croke’s bill, the Chicago school board would be barred from approving “any school closings, consolidations, or phase-outs” until
Feb. 1, 2027, instead of Jan. 15 of next year. The measure also says that funding of selective enrollment schools should not be “disproportionate” compared to other CPS schools, and bars any changes to admissions standards at selective enrollment schools until Feb. 1, 2027.

“With regard to disproportionate budget cuts to selective enrollment schools, I can say unequivocally that there never has been any
statement by the Board or my administration that selective enrollment schools will be disproportionately harmed relative to neighborhood schools,” Johnson said in the letter to Harmon.

In a statement to the Tribune on Friday, Croke, a Chicago Democrat, said she hoped the Senate would realize that Johnson’s letter “falls horribly short from how it is being spun” and without the legislation, she worries selective enrollment schools would be vulnerable to changes to their admissions criteria and “disproportionate cuts” will be made to magnet schools and charter schools will eventually be closed.

A moratorium on closing CPS schools is set to expire in January under the 2021 state law creating an elected school board. But after extensive haggling on how to implement an elected board, Gov. J.B. Pritzker in March signed a measure that won’t put a fully elected, 21-member school board in place until January 2027. Beginning in January, the board will be composed of 10 elected members and 11 others, including the board president, appointed by Johnson.

Pritzker had expressed support for Croke’s legislation, saying any decisions about school closures should be made by a fully elected
board.

Last year, Harmon introduced legislation supporting a near-fully elected board to be installed by 2025. But in March he acquiesced to the House’s hybrid plan after receiving a letter from Johnson urging that model. The hybrid plan was also supported by the Chicago Teachers Union, where Johnson once worked as an organizer.

The Senate Executive Committee earlier this month passed Croke’s bill without opposition, the same day Johnson came to Springfield to lobby
Pritzker and lawmakers for more funding that’s critical to Chicago’s operations. Asked during a press gaggle if he felt snubbed that the bill passed through committee on the same day as his visit to the Illinois State Capitol, Johnson said, “there’s a process that the General Assembly goes through. I understand that process. And we’re going to stick to that process.”

Over opposition from the governor’s office, Senate Democrats, joined by their Republican colleagues, voted without opposition late Sunday to codify a series of changes to the Illinois Prisoner Review Board, a body that has been a source of long-running bipartisan tension between the legislative chamber and the Pritzker administration.

The discord, which began two years ago when the Senate rejected some of Pritzker’s appointments to the board, most recently flared earlier this spring after the panel released 37-year-old parolee Crosetti Brand. After his release, he was charged with killing 11-year-old Jayden Perkins and attacking the child’s mother, with whom he once had a relationship.

The attack occurred March 13 at the woman’s residence on Chicago’s North Side, a day after Brand was released from state custody.

Days after the attack, the board’s chairman, Donald Shelton, and board member LeAnn Miller, who drafted the order authorizing Brand’s release, resigned.

“We here in the Senate have wrestled for several years with the Prisoner Review Board and some of the consequences of decisions made there,” Senate President Don Harmon said while explaining the proposal on the Senate floor ahead of Sunday’s vote.

While the Oak Park Democrat said the “recent tragedy” of Jayden’s death had “spurred the House” to pass a measure seeking changes to the board, the Senate modified it to include several provisions Pritzker opposes.

The Senate proposal, which must return to the House for approval before being sent to the governor’s desk, would, among other provisions, require the panel to publish on its website information for victims about how to submit victim-impact statements for the board to consider in its deliberations. This would apply to victims of domestic violence who’ve filed orders of protection against their abusers, who may be considered by the board for early release.

The measure would create more robust requirements to notify victims before hearings and when prisoners are released, and it would require board members to go through special training related to domestic violence issues.

Among the main points of contention from Pritzker, there’s also a provision that would require the board to make certain open hearings available to the public via live broadcast on the board’s website, where recordings of the hearings would have to remain available for at least 18 months.

“This is a bill that has unified Democrats and Republicans across the ideological spectrum because it imposes commonsense discipline on the prisoner Review Board,” Harmon said.

Indeed, Senate GOP leader John Curran of Downers Grove was a co-sponsor of the Senate proposal.

Curran, a former Cook County assistant state’s attorney, said a task force created in the legislation to review policies and procedures would be an important force for driving changes to the board. The task force would be made up of administration officials, state legislators, advocates and representatives from the criminal justice system.

“We are not just leaving to a department,” Curran said. “We are independently acting and exercising to help reform.”

The governor’s office supported the original House proposal, which contained similar provisions related to training on domestic violence and was approved last week without opposition.

But Pritzker spokeswoman Jordan Abudayyeh said the Senate’s version amounts to “an unfunded and completely unworkable mandate on the PRB given the volume of work they are expected to process every month.”

The Senate ignored requests from the governor’s office to allow the task force created in its proposal to take up the issue of how to increase transparency at the board, Abudayyeh said.

The parole board “is committed to increasing transparency. Hearings are currently open and records of the hearings are available” via public-records requests, she said.

“It is an immense challenge to do nearly 5,000 parole revocation hearings a year and we would prefer to be a part of the conversation on how best to increase transparency instead of having requirements the board will not be able to fulfill foisted upon them,” Abudayyeh said.

Whether the Senate proposal makes it to Pritzker’s desk remains to be seen.

After lawmakers blew past a self-imposed Friday deadline, the House is scheduled to return to Springfield on Tuesday to take up the state budget plan approved late Sunday in the Senate.

Democratic state Rep. Kelly Cassidy of Chicago, who sponsored the original version of the parole board changes that had Pritzker’s support, did not respond Monday to a request for comment on whether she’s on board with the changes.

Tensions between Pritzker and the Senate over the parole board first came to a head during the 2022 election, when Democrats in the chamber joined with Republicans to reject two of the governor’s appointments during an election year when the GOP in Illinois and nationally sought to paint opponents as soft on crime.

The appointees the Senate rejected — Jeffrey Mears and Eleanor Wilson — had voted to grant early release to convicted murders. Some Democrats objected in particular to Wilson’s votes to release two men who were each convicted of killing a police officer.

The appointments of two other interim board members never made it to a Senate vote. Democrat Oreal James, resigned, while independent Max Cerda’s appointment was withdrawn by Pritzker.

This April, Pritzker appointed James Montgomery, a Massachusetts sheriff’s office official and former Illinois mayor, to a newly created position as executive director of the board, ​​with a mandate to expand domestic violence training for board members. The Senate has yet to take up the appointment.