But after anti-war, pro-Palestinian demonstrations roiled college campuses this spring and led to clashes between protesters and police, the specter of the chaos surrounding that summer’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago looms as the party returns in August to mark the renomination of President Joe Biden.

To be sure, the landscape is vastly different than it was in the late 1960s, even amid resurgent political violence driven predominantly by the far right. Nevertheless, the influx of potentially tens of thousands of protesters into Chicago during the Aug. 19-22 convention, some of whom have vowed to take to the streets without city permits, raises questions about how prepared Chicago police are for any ensuing unrest.

While similar concerns arose ahead of the last Chicago DNC in 1996, as well as the NATO summit in 2012, divisions among the Democratic coalition are deeper this year, with progressives upset over Biden’s ongoing support for Israel in its war against Hamas as well as his recent order clamping down on migrant crossings at the southern border.

Policing has changed substantially over the past several decades, especially for large gatherings such as national political conventions.

Still, with the whole world watching Chicago once again, avoiding any echoes of 1968 — when blue-helmeted officers beat protesting Yippies and working journalists alike in what a government report later termed a “police riot” — will be an important test for a department that remains under a federal consent decree over its long-running “pattern and practice” of civil rights violations.

In the lead-up to this year’s convention, organizers and police officials have downplayed concerns about possible unrest and sought to dispel any comparisons to the events that culminated in the infamous “Battle of Michigan Avenue.”

“This will not be 1968,” said Chicago police Superintendent Larry Snelling while acknowledging he understands the comparison given national protests of the Israel-Hamas war. “Our response as a Chicago Police Department will be a lot more deliberate … a lot more controlled because our officers are being trained in the best way possible to respond to any level of civil unrest.”

It’s not just the Police Department that has a lot riding on a peaceful convention.

The political stakes are high, both for Biden as he seeks to again defeat former Republican President Donald Trump and for local Democrats who will play prominent roles at the party gathering and in managing the situation outside.

That’s particularly true for Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who was pivotal in bringing the convention to Chicago and will use the event to elevate his national profile as a key Biden surrogate and potential future White House contender, as well as Mayor Brandon Johnson, who has perhaps a greater affinity with those planning to protest than with the police under his command who are charged with keeping order.

“If you’re Biden and the Democratic Party and the mayor of Chicago, you just want peace and calm and stability,” said Andrew Baer, a University of Alabama at Birmingham history professor who studies policing and social movements. “You don’t want the bad optics of either suppressing a protest or the protest embarrassing the coronation of Biden.”

Despite changes in both policing practices and the political environment, “there’s clearly a through line from ’68, through the (Cmdr. Jon) Burge era, into the 2000s and up to the present day,” said Baer, author of “Beyond the Usual Beating: The Jon Burge Police Torture Scandal and Social Movements for Police Accountability in Chicago.”

Today, as then, there is a sense among many police of feeling “misunderstood and kind of unnecessarily tampered with” by outside forces, Baer said.

“That degree of always-simmering resentment felt by police rank and file, and the Fraternal Order of Police and the unions, and the supervisors and administrators of the Police Department always makes for a potentially explosive environment, whether it’s at a street arrest or a public protest or national political convention,” he said.

‘2020 snuck up on us’

One need not look all the way back to 1968 to see what can go wrong when hordes of protesters and lines of cops meet in the streets.

Indeed, the training Snelling’s officers have been undergoing ahead of the DNC was spurred not only by Chicago’s selection as the host city but also by the department’s response to widespread civil unrest in 2020.

Officers in Chicago were unprepared for the simultaneous and unpredictable nature of large protests and chaos that erupted over three days after George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer in late May of that year. While the department improved its response to other incidents in the weeks that followed, protests over the city’s Christopher Columbus statues and also high-profile police shootings highlighted similar struggles.

“2020 snuck up on us,” Snelling acknowledged in a recent Tribune interview. “Let’s tell the cold, hard truth. We did not have the level of preparedness to deal with something that was that random that popped up on us.”

The department is applying lessons learned from the 2020 response in preparation for the DNC, Snelling said.

While CPD took issue with some of the findings in a recent inspector general report on policy and training updates since the 2020 unrest, Snelling said any use of force or pepper spray during the DNC would be “proportional” to the reality on the ground.

“We’re not just going to walk in and spray a crowd of people. Even if they’re breaking the law, if they’re peaceful, we’re not going to use OC (pepper) spray,” Snelling said. “Now, if we have an all-out fight, where people are attacking police officers, are attacking each other, and we need to use OC spray, that call will be made by a higher authority based on the totality of circumstances and what’s occurring in the field in that time.”

The situation on the ground should be much different in August for a number of reasons, not least of which is the major role the U.S. Secret Service will play in controlling the areas surrounding the major convention venues, the United Center and McCormick Place.

Like every major party convention since 2000, this summer’s DNC — along with the Republican National Convention a month earlier in Milwaukee — is designated a National Special Security Event, making the Secret Service the lead agency for security planning. Each convention host city also received $75 million from Congress to help cover equipment and other security costs.

“We’ve got a tremendous working relationship with Chicago police, as well as a multitude of other agencies, both local and federal, that will be contributing to this whole-of-government approach that we’re taking,” Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle told reporters during a visit last week that included tours of the convention venues.

Outside the yet-to-be-finalized security zones around the venues, where most if not all the protests are expected to take place, Chicago police will be running the show, however. The convention will come near the end of what are typically more violent summer months as well as after large-scale events like Lollapalooza and the NASCAR street race.

In an effort to relieve some of the tension building ahead of the DNC, lawyers for the Johnson administration indicated in federal court Thursday they were preparing to offer a deal to protesters who’d sued the city over its alleged efforts to block marches within “sight and sound” of the convention venue.

While private negotiations remain ongoing, the city indicated protesters would be offered a “United Center-adjacent route.”

Regardless of the outcome of those discussions, the city will have to manage the movement of an estimated 50,000 delegates, staff and public officials to and from the convention venues south of downtown and on the West Side, in addition to handling security checkpoints and traffic rerouting to accommodate Biden, who is expected to attend the convention on the final day.

CPD’s task of working with other organizations and maintaining order will come with the city under a national and international spotlight it didn’t have to contend with in 2020 when protests were taking place across the country, said Cara Hendrickson, the former chief of the Illinois attorney general’s public interest division, where she helped negotiate the consent decree.

“The way CPD and other law enforcement agencies respond will be very visible to Chicagoans and the world,” she said. “It’s a very public test of law enforcement’s current ability to keep people safe.”

Trying to assure the public

Despite assurances of readiness from the top brass, one veteran CPD supervisor, speaking on a condition of anonymity for concern of reprisal, gave a blunt assessment of the department’s readiness to tamp down on summer gun violence on top of its DNC responsibilities.

“Our strategy is eight hours ahead, right?” the supervisor told the Tribune in mid-May. “It’s very short-term and there’s no long-term planning to this, but if you ask them then they’ll say there is, but they won’t tell you what.”

In 1968, of course, Mayor Richard J. Daley also sought to assure the public and his fellow Democrats the situation in Chicago would be under control, though he focused more on maintaining order than allowing room for dissenting voices.

That year’s gathering at the International Amphitheatre in the New City neighborhood came amid widespread protests over the Vietnam War, a backlash so strong that President Lyndon Johnson chose not to seek reelection. It also came just months after the assassination of Democratic presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy and violent uprisings that April in Chicago and elsewhere in the wake of the Rev. Martin Luther King’s assassination.

“Leading in, Daley was talking about how he was going to uphold law and order in Chicago,” said Heather Hendershot, a Northwestern University communications professor and author of the recent book “When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America.”

While Daley was “Mr. Democrat,” his rhetoric echoed that of GOP nominee Richard Nixon, whose campaign capitalized on the ensuing disorder in Chicago to win in November, Hendershot said.

“(Daley) sent out this message that, ‘We are prepared to do whatever we have to do to maintain order in Chicago. We will keep our city safe,’ this kind of thing,” she said. “And people knew there was going to be a lot of violence, and it really scared a lot of people away.”

The result was a crowd of only about 10,000 predominantly white protesters during the 1968 DNC, Hendershot said, a group that was outnumbered by police and members of the National Guard.

The protests this year could be substantially larger, Hendershot said, pointing to the more than 100,000 people who protested President George W. Bush and the Iraq War during the 2004 RNC in New York.

Somewhat encouraging, though, is that this year Johnson and police officials are “not releasing a bunch of press releases to scare people or to say, ‘We’re going to have law and order,’” she said. “They will occasionally say something like, ‘We will engage in constitutional policing, which, obviously, is what all policing should be.”

‘Whac-A-Mole’

But what policing should be doesn’t always match reality when officers are confronted with large groups of protesters in unpredictable settings.

The George Floyd protests in 2020 created a no-win for cops, protesters and nearby businesses, according to three separate reports — CPD’s own after-action report, a scathing probe by the city’s inspector general, and a 464-page special report covering the summer’s incidents from the independent monitoring team responsible for tracking the city’s progress in the court-ordered consent decree.

Cops were left vulnerable, exhausted and under-resourced, in part because the department had not prepared for that scale of unrest since 2012, when Chicago hosted the NATO summit.

Officers struggled to control disorganized crowds and distinguish between protesters protected under the First Amendment and those responsible for looting, vandalism or assaulting cops. Many cops were deployed without protective gear, radios or bullhorns to communicate dispersal orders. At times, equipment failed in the field during lengthy shifts. Some cops were left without adequate or timely transportation to transfer arrestees or move other cops to a place to rest, use restrooms, eat or drink.

One officer described the department’s strategy during the George Floyd protests as Whac-A-Mole, with self-guided platoons of officers putting out metaphorical fires while still leaving others smoldering.

Accountability measures lapsed as well. Some officers were unfamiliar with the department’s mass arrest policies, resulting in some arrestees suspected of looting, arson or violence being released or having charges dropped. Some officers also covered or removed their name tags or badges, turned off their body-worn cameras, were deployed without them or had the camera batteries die on them in the field.

The independent monitoring team reported hearing from community members that “officers were verbally abusive toward them; pushed and shoved them; tackled them to the ground; pushed them down stairs; pulled their hair; struck them with batons, fists, or other nearby objects; hit them after they were ‘kettled’ with nowhere to go or after being handcuffed; and sprayed them with pepper spray (OC spray) without reason.”

Misconduct settlements stemming from the protests have been costly for taxpayers.

On top of tens of millions spent on overtime and damage to local businesses, a WTTW analysis found the city had paid $5.6 for settlements and attorney fees. As of April, 32 lawsuits related to officer misconduct had been paid out. Thirteen were pending in federal court.

Following 2020, CPD has been “training, working, preparing, revising orders,” and working with parties involved in the consent decree to update mass arrest and use of force policies, Snelling said. The department is also working to ensure officers “get as much time off as possible” in the weeks leading up to the DNC to ensure “we have the maximum manpower that we can have out there” while not pulling officers from the city’s most violent neighborhood beats.

Command staff members have been through “multiple days of training for field force operations” to know how to guide manpower. The department has set aside 1,370 “flex” body cameras across several area offices, purchased 40 passenger vans, and additional radios to distribute to each police district.

Lessons of 2020

Even so, the city’s inspector general recently highlighted shortcomings in those plans, including opaque written policies about the use of pepper spray and kettling, which is the act of corralling crowds into a closed space. The city’s crowd-control policies also contain “outdated” theories that assume bad actors are present and that people in mass gatherings are inclined to act like a mob, the IG said.

Snelling denied the department used kettling tactics but nonetheless said the lessons of 2020 are being applied to this summer’s preparations.

DNC training has already been tested at protests, including at several college campuses across the city, Snelling said, noting that most “ended with no violence.”

“Even in situations where we’ve had to make arrests, we gave these people multiple, multiple opportunities to voluntarily comply and leave,” Snelling said. “Only as a last resort we made arrests.”

CPD on Thursday invited members of the press to McCormick Place to observe about 150 officers take part in training exercises tailored for the expected protests and potential unrest during the DNC. Drills focused on defensive tactics, crowd control and medical aid, as well as officer wellness.

Snelling said the department also will use a “line relief” tactic to provide cops reprieves when needed.

“These are human beings who are standing out here, having insults hurled at them, probably things thrown at them,” Snelling said Thursday. “At some point, the human nature kicks in and the possibility or the likelihood of making a mistake becomes greater. This is why now we have that line relief where we can take those officers off the front line and bring in a fresh batch of officers who can deal with the situation.”

Given the possibility of mass arrests, officers also are receiving training on properly processing suspects taken into custody in potentially volatile situations.

Will there be mass arrests?

But some planning to protest the convention are taking issue with comments Snelling made at a separate media briefing earlier last week.

“First Amendment protection is only there if you’re not committing a crime,” Snelling said. “You can be acting out peacefully and still breaking the law.”

Hatem Abudayyeh, executive director of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, said after a court hearing Thursday that Snelling’s words were “very concerning.”

“This sounds like nothing more than a threat from a police department that has a history of violence against protesters,” said Abudayyeh, whose group is one of the organizations suing the city over its previous plans to keep protesters away from the main convention sites.

Civil liberties advocates also have taken issue with the department’s latest policy on mass arrests. In April, a coalition of the community groups that triggered the consent decree asked the judge overseeing the agreement to block the Police Department from implementing the mass arrest policy drafted earlier this year.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois and other groups argue the new proposal is overly broad, fails to make proper accommodations for people with disabilities and non-English speakers, and marks a step back from a First Amendment policy negotiated after the “violent and unconstitutional response” to the 2020 protests, according to the filing.

The groups are asking Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer to intervene swiftly because “CPD officers are already being trained on the infirm policy for the DNC.”

Meanwhile, Hendrickson, now the executive director of the public interest group Impact for Equity, notes that police leaders will have the complex task of not only coordinating with other city departments but other law enforcement entities.

CPD “is going to be called upon to make difficult judgment calls rapidly, in real time, over the course of many days or weeks. And understanding who has responsibility for making those decisions, who is the backup to the person who has the responsibility to make those decisions if they’re not available. … I don’t know the answers to those questions at this point,” Hendrickson said.

Snelling said plans are still being worked out for the role outside agencies — the National Guard, the Cook County sheriff’s office, Illinois State Police or other local police departments — would play, but said they would not be charged with managing crowds.

“We want to put them in other areas where they can protect certain venues,” he said. “That frees up Chicago police officers who have been very well trained to go out there and deal with the possibility of civil unrest.”

‘We’re ready’

If the past is precedent, Johnson — an organizer who has said he values demonstrations — would be directly in charge of making major decisions on how to respond to potential unrest.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot made the final call to raise downtown bridges, use pepper spray, enact a citywide curfew, and call in the National Guard during the 2020 protests. Johnson has repeatedly said violence or vandalism would not be tolerated, but has emphasized “the fundamental right of our democracy, the First Amendment, is protected.”

Snelling said he is in “constant contact” about preparations with Johnson and his deputy mayor for community safety, Garien Gatewood. Raising bridges and enacting curfews in 2020 were a response to riot activity, not protected First Amendment protests, he said.

“We will not allow people to come here and destroy our city,” Snelling said. “We’re ready. We’re prepared to deal with whatever comes our way. But we would love for everything to end peacefully. Do we expect that that’s going to happen? No. That’s our wish.”

On the political side, Democrats have been quick to voice their support for Chicago police and the larger security effort — and to shift the focus to the GOP convention in Milwaukee, which could attract some of the same right-wing groups that instigated the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

The Democratic National Convention Committee declined to make convention chair Minyon Moore available for an interview. But in a statement, convention spokeswoman Emily Soong echoed what organizers have been saying for months in response to questions about protests and possible disruptions:

“Peaceful protest has been a fixture of political conventions for decades, and while Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans stoke political violence, we will continue to support the ongoing security coordination at all levels of government to keep the city safe for delegates, visitors, media, and all Chicagoans, including those exercising their right to make their voices heard.”

For Pritzker, who courted the convention before the deadly Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel sparked a war that has divided Democrats, the gathering is a chance to show his mettle on the national stage, said Chris Mooney, an emeritus professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

That will be particularly true in the face of possible mass protests, he said.

“Even though he … didn’t expect this, didn’t think of it when he was lobbying for this (convention), he has earned himself the opportunity to show how excellent he is as a public leader,” Mooney said.

Chicago Tribune’s Jake Sheridan contributed. 

The measure in question, which was set to expire at the end of 2024, smoothed the way for small cell transmission equipment to be placed throughout Illinois by limiting local governments’ ability to regulate where the equipment was placed and also by capping how much towns could collect from telecom providers that installed the equipment that helps boost cellular service.

With little debate, the Illinois House voted without opposition late Tuesday to approve an extension of the law to Jan. 1, 2030, as part of legislation pushing back sunset dates on a variety of state laws.

Amended onto a bill originally titled “Campground Hot Tubs,” the legislation was approved 58-0 on Sunday in the state Senate. With House passage, it now goes to Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who previously signed an extension of the law in 2021.

During a brief House committee hearing Tuesday, sponsoring state Rep. Larry Walsh Jr., a Democrat from Elwood, did not discuss the circumstances surrounding the bill’s original passage and only noted a minor change to the law that allows local governments to charge an annual fee of $270, up from $200, for the small cell micro-towers to be located on utility poles and elsewhere in public rights-of-way.

Despite being described during the Senate debate as a “boring bill,” the measure gives longer life to the law whose origin could play a pivotal role in the upcoming corruption trial of a former AT&T official ensnared in the federal investigation of Madigan.

The allegations involving the small cell legislation surfaced recently in court filings ahead of the scheduled September trial of former AT&T Illinois President Paul La Schiazza, whom a federal grand jury indicted in October 2022 on charges that included conspiracy and bribery.

Although the indictment focuses on a separate bill to end landline service, prosecutors say the small cell bill was part of the same overarching scheme and want to present evidence about its passage to a jury. U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman could take up the issue during a pretrial conference on Thursday.

Madigan, who also faces a federal criminal trial this fall on bribery and racketeering charges that also involved utility giant Commonwealth Edison, helped push the original measure through the House during the General Assembly’s fall veto session in 2017 and helped block an amendment the following spring “that would have been harmful to AT&T’s interest,” according to a court filing from federal prosecutors.

La Schiazza approved a deal to secretly funnel $2,500 a month to former state Rep. Edward Acevedo — once a member of Madigan’s House Democratic leadership team — through a lobbying company already doing business with AT&T Illinois, according to a statement of facts. The move came as AT&T was pushing a bill that would allow the company to end landline phone service in Illinois.

That measure passed in the spring of 2017, but prosecutors allege Acevedo, who later pleaded guilty to tax evasion, performed no actual work for AT&T.

In an email exchange from July 2017 highlighted in the court documents laying out evidence prosecutors hope to present in La Schiazza’s trial, he and another AT&T official discuss the need to stay in Madigan’s good graces even after the company succeeded in passing the landline legislation.

The other AT&T official underscored the connection between “AT&T’s legislative success” and requests from Madigan and Michael McClain, a longtime confidant of the former speaker who is now a co-defendant in Madigan’s criminal case, according to the court documents.

“There is a sensitivity in that office about us going away now that we got” the landline legislation, the unnamed AT&T official wrote, according to the court filing. “That is something to keep in mind in rest (of) 17 and in 18 regarding budget and profile with the Speaker’s office.”

La Schiazza replied: “I will emphasize that to leadership. … Especially if we expect to pass a small cell bill.” The small cell bill passed months later.

Attorneys for La Schiazza are seeking to have the email exchange and other evidence in the court documents excluded from his upcoming trial, arguing in their response that prosecutors failed to show La Schiazza or any other AT&T employee knew “that seeking to influence Mr. Madigan was forbidden,” as required by current Chicago-area case law.

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule next month in a case involving James Snyder, the former mayor of Portage, Indiana, that could redefine the word “corruptly” in the federal bribery statute, potentially jeopardizing cases like those against La Schiazza and Madigan.

AT&T Illinois this spring session took no official position on the legislation extending the law, and a spokesman on Wednesday declined to comment about its passage.

The extension did have the support of the Illinois Municipal League, which represents local governments across the state.

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.

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.

The Senate worked through most of Memorial Day weekend to resolve differences among the Democratic majorities in both legislative chambers before voting 38-21, largely along party lines, to approve a plan that includes some cuts to the governor’s proposal but is undergirded by almost $750 million in tax hikes.

Amid Democratic squabbling, lawmakers blew past a self-imposed Friday deadline to pass a spending plan for the fiscal year that begins July 1. The Illinois House went home Saturday night with plans to return after the holiday weekend.

With the Senate not planning to return to Springfield until fall, the path ahead will test the unity of the Democratic Party that has full control of state government as the House, led by Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch of Hillside, needs to sign off on all pieces of the budget package without changes in order for them to land on Pritzker’s desk.

“I’m confident the House will be able to pass this budget the way the Senate passed it,” Senate President Don Harmon of Oak Park, who called the budget “a doozy,” said late Sunday. “The governor, the speaker and I agreed that was our path forward. I have no lack of faith in the House’s ability to do it.”

Republicans, who are outnumbered 40-19 in the Senate and lack any significant leverage to influence state spending decisions, argued the Democrats’ plan — particularly items related to the ongoing migrant crisis — ignores important priorities in favor of catering to Pritzker’s political aspirations.

“While this budget is undeniably complicated, the message the governor is sending with it could not be more clear. He’s raising taxes on the people of Illinois, who are already struggling to afford basic needs, and the many job creators fighting hard to keep people employed to pay for the migrant crisis that he has created,” said Senate GOP leader John Curran of Downers Grove. “Unfortunately for Illinois taxpayers, Gov. Pritzker’s political ambitions to position himself on the national stage as the country’s most progressive governor has far (exceeded) state tax revenues.”

Two Democrats, Sens. Suzy Glowiak Hilton of Western Springs and Patrick Joyce of Reddick, joined all 19 Republicans in voting against the budget. In a brief interview, Joyce said he wanted “to keep our spending in check” and also would have liked to have seen more investments that would ease the property tax burden.

Some of the biggest highlights of the measures senators passed, with changes made from Pritzker’s initial budget proposal in February, include a slight hourly boost for service providers who help the developmentally disabled, a more generous child tax credit and a refusal to lower a built-in annual increase to the standard state income tax exemption, which experts said would have harmed lower-income families.

As negotiators continued working through late tweaks to the budget Sunday, the Senate also voted to send Pritzker a controversial environmental measure that would regulate carbon capture and sequestration.

Details of the budget plan were revealed at a roughly hourlong hearing Sunday morning, where Sen. Elgie Sims of Chicago, the Senate Democrats’ budget point person, said his caucus’s spending plan comes out to about $53.1 billion, about $400 million more than Pritzker’s proposed $52.7 billion in spending. The legislation emphasizes education, public safety, combating homelessness, and a wealth of other state services, Sims said.

The Senate budget, for example, includes more than $290 million for the Department of Human Services’ Home Illinois plan to prevent homelessness, which is more than Pritzker’s initial proposal.

“Especially as we’re dealing with other challenges surrounding people arriving in Illinois, we need to double down on our investment in those folks who’ve been here for a long time and have not seen the support of state government in ensuring that they have adequate housing,” Harmon said Sunday, referring to the influx of migrants to the Chicago area.

Glossed over in the budget debate was a 5% pay hike for lawmakers that would boost annual base pay for all 177 members of the General Assembly to $93,712. Many lawmakers receive additional stipends for holding leadership positions or chairing committees.

Pritzker last year used his veto powers to reduce pay increases for lawmakers, statewide elected officials and agency heads under his purview after the legislature approved raises that were above limits set in state law. The spending plan this year also includes raises of about 5% for the governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, attorney general, comptroller and treasurer and the heads of executive agencies. Pritzker, a billionaire Hyatt Hotels heir, does not collect a salary as governor.

Focusing on the full budget plan, one Republican, Sen. Chapin Rose, complained that the Democrats’ fiscal proposal calls for spending too much, including for noncitizens receiving health care, as well as on funds for the migrant crisis in Chicago.

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

“That’s an interesting budget,” Rose said.

Rose also said the Senate’s plan didn’t do enough to fund direct service providers who help the developmentally disabled, saying “it becomes harder and harder for these providers of these vital services to find anybody willing to do the job.” Those workers would receive a raise of up to $1 per hour in the proposed budget, which is short of the $3-per-hour raise they’ve sought.

Sims, meanwhile, insisted the Senate sought to make a “considerable effort” to invest in the workers “because we recognize the tremendous work that they do.”

“We understand that they are engaged in immensely challenging services and they are really doing God’s work, and we appreciate that. But what we are also trying to do is ensure that we have competitive wages, and we have done that,” Sims said. “We are trying to invest in this community to make sure that they have everything they need to be successful. We’ll continue to do that.”

Even though the measure was approved by a healthy margin, the debate on the Senate floor was dominated by criticisms and calls for increased spending in certain areas — both from Republicans who opposed it and Democrats who supported it.

Democratic Sen. Willie Preston of Chicago, for example, said the state could do more to address youth unemployment and other issues affecting young Black and Latino residents of the city.

“We have infinite needs and finite resources. I acknowledge that,” said Preston, whose district stretches from the South Side to the southwest suburbs. “But we have to hit our mark when it comes to helping young people in the city of Chicago because they are deserving and they are desperate.”

The spending plan includes the minimum $350 million annual increase in funding for elementary and secondary education laid out in the state’s school funding formula and makes 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.

Despite Johnson’s sojourn to Springfield earlier this month, the Democrats’ budget plan didn’t change significantly to reflect City Hall’s wish list, including the mayor’s request for a $1 billion increase in funding for Chicago Public Schools.

Sims said that while the budget doesn’t give Johnson the CPS funding boost, the plan’s tax package includes additional assistance for all municipalities across the state, including Chicago.

“There were significant resources … from the changes that we made in terms of the local government package,” Sims said. “Just like all the municipalities, (the) city of Chicago would see a significant share of those revenues.”

That measure includes a deal to eliminate on Jan. 1, 2026, the 1% statewide grocery tax, which flows to local governments.

To make up for the lost revenue, municipalities — both those, like 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 improve the increase through a referendum.

The arrangement also includes $600 million in additional funding for municipalities for local road projects.

The proposal on the table was enough to win the support of the Illinois Municipal League, which represents local governments across the state.

Republicans, many of whom were supportive of Pritzker’s proposal to eliminate the grocery tax, balked at the final agreement, however.

On the Senate floor, GOP Sen. Andrew Chesney said the Democrats’ plan simply shifts who is responsible for taxing groceries.

“Only in Springfield are we going to do a victory lap that really just reassigns the blame and responsibility to local municipalities and call it a tax cut,” said Chesney, of Freeport. “This is again a Democrat majority that is running this state off of campaign slogans that provide no real relief to the people of Illinois.”

A separate revenue package also approved in the Senate on Sunday includes most of Pritzker’s flagship proposals for corporate tax hikes, including caps on sweeteners for retailers and other corporations. It also proposed raising the state sports betting tax in a tiered structure, with the largest sportsbooks paying a 40% tax and the smallest paying 20%.

The sports betting structure as proposed in the Senate bill would bring in a little more than $200 million, a Pritzker spokesperson said, similar to the estimate with the flat tax Pritzker proposed earlier this year.

Republican Sen. Donald DeWitte of St. Charles criticized Pritzker as a governor who “refuses to control spending and continues to view the taxpayers of Illinois and the business of this state as his personal ATM machine to fund a political wish list as he shines his lights on his trek to Washington,” referring to speculation about the Democrat’s presidential ambitions.

“In my view there was no attempt whatsoever to build this budget around revenue numbers that the adults in the room, the accounting professionals, told us were falling,” DeWitte said.

Other changes from Pritzker’s proposal would give some in Illinois more financial flexibility.

The concept of enacting a child tax credit had received bipartisan support, though all Republicans and three Democrats voted against the revenue package that included the credit. The Senate measure includes a larger amount than Pritzker’s February proposal.

It calls for a child tax credit that will cost the state $50 million in the upcoming fiscal year and $100 million in following years, Sen. Celina Villanueva, a Chicago Democrat, said. It would also cover families with children younger than 12; Pritzker’s proposal was for families with children under 3 and was estimated to cost the state $12 million.

A Pritzker proposal to lower a built-in annual increase to the standard state income tax exemption — a $93 million revenue booster for the state that would have cost taxpayers a small amount of money on their income tax returns — did not appear in the measures approved in the Senate. Because the exemption is the same regardless of income, some experts previously said the proposal would have been harder on lower-income families.

In other business, a controversial bill regulating carbon capture and sequestration projects is heading to Pritzker’s desk after long debates in the House and Senate. The legislation, which passed the Senate 43-12 Sunday and the governor is expected to sign, would also place a two-year moratorium on all carbon pipeline projects as the state awaits federal guidelines.

An aspect of the bill that has faced opposition from House and Senate Republicans, in addition to some Democrats, involves the Mahomet Aquifer as a potential location to construct pipelines. The aquifer supplies drinking water to about 500,000 people across 14 counties in central Illinois.

Rose, of Mahomet, said he wants the aquifer excluded from development projects, in part because he doesn’t trust that state environmental regulators will ensure the water supply will be protected from carbon dioxide contamination during any work. The senator spoke passionately on the Senate floor about a methane gas leak into the aquifer in 2016 that still has yet to be fully rectified, spouting the F-word at one point during his remarks.

“I don’t want to hear a damn thing about cleaning up the environment when these people can’t drink their water,” Rose said after apologizing for the earlier profanity.

Bill sponsor Sen. Laura Fine, a Democrat from Glenview, said she understands concerns about the importance of the aquifer for many Illinoisans and said that there are protections in place to make sure potential projects do not lead to future contamination. To address these issues in addition to other worries over compensating landowners in potential cases of eminent domain when implementing carbon capture, Fine agreed to hold meetings over the summer with concerned legislators and advocacy groups.

Pritzker praised the measure in a statement, saying, “Illinois now lays claim to some of the most ambitious and equitable climate and clean energy laws in the United States.”

In another key legislative area, several Pritzker proposals on health care were sent to his desk. His package of insurance reforms, including restrictions on so-called step therapy and certain short-term, high-cost health insurance plans, passed with bipartisan support in both chambers.

And as part of an administration initiative aimed at improving Black maternal health outcomes in Illinois, a bill expanding insurance coverage of doula and midwife services made it through the General Assembly and is set to be signed into law. Pritzker included $23 million in his proposed budget for “birth equity efforts.”

The bill requires insurance coverage of services provided by doulas and licensed midwives in regard to births, miscarriages or abortions, including home visits and home births. The cost to the state was an estimated $260,000.

Another measure prohibiting the use of artificial intelligence to create child pornography, regardless of whether it involved real children or fake images that evoke obscene imagery, passed the Senate without opposition and heads to Pritzker’s desk.

And, fulfilling a top priority of the Illinois AFL-CIO, both chambers also voted to prohibit employers from holding mandatory meetings with anti-union or otherwise political or religious messages for employees. The bill passed nearly on party lines, and, if Pritzker signs it, Illinois would join a handful of states with similar legislation.

In another closely watched piece of legislation, the General Assembly without any opposition passed a measure to tighten identification standards for human remains that are being handled by funeral homes and enhance punishment for businesses that break the law. Among other measures, it tightens funeral home regulations to ensure human remains in their possession are identified properly.

The bill, which now awaits Pritzker’s signature, comes after a funeral home in central Illinois last year was found to have given dozens of families the wrong remains.

With state lawmakers still grappling with the state budget after blowing their self-imposed Friday deadline, state Sen. Bill Cunningham of Chicago, the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate, said there would be no action on the team’s request before the legislature adjourns for the spring.

State Rep. Kam Buckner of Chicago, a member of House Democratic leadership, likewise said the team’s quest for a new home to replace aging Soldier Field, which lies in his district, isn’t on the legislative agenda in the waning days of session.

“It’s fair to say that there won’t be any Bears action … in this legislative session, which I think is fine,” Buckner said Saturday at the Illinois State Capitol. “I think a proposal of this magnitude deserves sunlight and scrutiny. And very often what has happened in this building is that things get rammed through at the last minute without much public input or transparency.

“So I welcome conversations that will probably begin to happen once we’re done here.”

Cunningham also said there would be no movement during the spring session on the Chicago White Sox requests to get public assistance for their new stadium proposal. No legislation was even formally announced during the spring session for either the Bears or the White Sox stadium proposals.

Despite the full backing of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who stood with team officials when they unveiled their proposal last month, the Bears’ plan faced a cool reception in Springfield.

It’s the second year in a row that talks about public support for the charter NFL franchise have stalled at the statehouse. A proposal last year that would have helped the team relocate to Arlington Heights also failed to gain support in the Democratic-controlled General Assembly.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s office called the team’s latest bid to stay in Chicago a “nonstarter” in its initial form, and the team’s efforts to round up support among legislative leaders and rank-and-file lawmakers were met with reactions ranging from firm and outspoken opposition to indifference.

When the team showed off its plans with great fanfare in April, Bears President and CEO Kevin Warren attempted to put pressure on legislators to take action this spring.

“If we are approved in May, then that will allow us to be able to start construction, to put people to work, next summer,” Warren said in response to a question about whether the team’s proposal could wait until the legislature’s fall session. “And that would allow us 36 months later to open our building in 2028. So this is truly one of those adages that time is money.”

The Bears’ plan calls for the team to bring $2.3 billion in private financing to the table, including a $300 million stadium loan from the NFL, but the stadium itself is projected to cost $3.2 billion.

To fill in the gap, the team wants the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority to issue $900 million in new bonds to cover the remaining cost. Each year that the project doesn’t move forward, the funding gap would increase by about $150 million due to rising costs, team officials said.

Additionally, the team wants ISFA to refinance about $430 million in outstanding debt for previous projects at Soldier Field and Guaranteed Rate Field, where the White Sox play.

The Bears also want the state agency to borrow about $160 million more to set up a liquidity fund to cover future shortfalls in the dedicated 2% city hotel tax that’s dedicated to repaying the bonds. When those revenues fall short, as they have in recent years, the difference gets taken out of the city’s share of state income tax revenue.

Bears officials say the roughly $1.5 billion in new borrowing, which would require legislative approval, could be paid off over 40 years without raising the 2% hotel tax. Including interest and other long-term costs, taxpayers would end up spending about $4.8 billion over four decades, according to ISFA.

The Bears’ proposal would leave little, if any, room for funding other stadium projects at a time when the White Sox also have looked to Springfield for help financing a new stadium at The 78, a proposed development along the Chicago River south of Roosevelt Road.

At the same time, framing it as an issue of equity, Pritzker and some Democratic lawmakers have said any stadium funding discussions should include professional women’s teams, such as the Chicago Red Stars soccer club, which also is in the market for a new home to replace SeatGeek Stadium in suburban Bridgeview.

Sen. Robert Peters, a Chicago Democrat whose district covers Soldier Field, said on Thursday that the Bears and White Sox need to work together to have any chance for securing new stadiums, and that women’s professional sports teams, such as the Red Stars and the WNBA’s Chicago Sky, should also be in the mix for those discussions. Legislation that would authorize bond authority for the construction of a stadium for a women’s pro sports team was introduced earlier this month without any movement so far.

” I don’t think there’s necessarily an appetite to just give billionaires a whole bunch of money,” Peters said. “I think there’s just a series of things: People need to work together. They need to be realistic (in) what they ask for. They need to think about equity in that conversation.”

On top of the borrowing to pay for the stadium itself, the Bears are looking for another $1.5 billion in public money for infrastructure improvements to the lakefront to fully realize the team’s vision, including plans to demolish most of Soldier Field and create more lakefront green space. The latter proposal could be a key component in fending off advocates who previously defeated “Star Wars” creator George Lucas’ plans for a lakefront museum of narrative art.

While the state has helped finance previous projects for the Sox and Bears, public sentiment largely has turned against public assistance for professional sports stadiums, which economists generally agree fail to deliver promised benefits for taxpayers.

Further complicating the issue for the Bears is the team’s previous $197 million purchase of the former Arlington International Racecourse, where the team planned to build a stadium and mixed-use development before getting mired in a property tax dispute with local school districts in the northwest suburbs.

Despite advantages over Republicans of 77-40 in the Illinois House and 40-19 in the state Senate, it took Democrats until late on the final scheduled day of the truncated election-year spring session to introduce the initial version of a more than $50 billion spending plan.

A full day after Senate Democrats unveiled a 3,374-page proposal, there had yet to be a vote on the spending plan or related tax increases, and the House adjourned late Saturday, sending members home for the rest of the holiday weekend. The Senate was expected to be in session Sunday.

As it stands, the earliest lawmakers could send a final budget to Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s desk is Tuesday.

After several years of unexpectedly high revenues, lawmakers faced perhaps the most challenging budget season since the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and there was pushback from various fronts to aspects of Pritzker’s proposed $52.7 billion spending plan and accompanying tax increases of more than $900 million.

Despite the delays, however, Democrats sought to downplay divisions, with House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch saying in a statement after sending members home that “the House and Senate are very close to an agreement on a final budget.”

“It’s just a matter of getting everybody comfortable in where we’re at — what spending, what revenue,” said state Rep. Bob Rita, a veteran Democrat from Blue Island who chairs the powerful House Executive Committee. “Each session is different, but as you come closer to adjournment, it’s not unusual to be doing what we’re doing.”

Sen. Laura Murphy of Des Plaines put it more succinctly: “We’re going to get it done,” she said, declining to comment further as she headed to a committee hearing.

Even as negotiators continued hashing out a final agreement among House and Senate Democrats and the governor’s office, details of the budget framework became clearer Saturday as components were filed throughout the afternoon.

Overall, the final spending plan for the budget year that begins July 1 likely will hew closely to what Pritzker laid out in his February budget address.

While Senate President Don Harmon said Friday that Pritzker’s tax proposals had received pushback, key pitches from the governor largely made it into the Senate’s revenue proposal unscathed. Senate Democrats estimated their proposal would generate $750 million in new operating revenue.

A $500,000 cap on losses large corporations can write off on their state income taxes, which Pritzker previously estimated would bring in $526 million in revenue, appeared in the Senate bill, as did a $1,000 monthly limit on the discount that retailers receive for collecting state taxes. The retailer proposal would generate another $101 million, Pritzker previously said.

One proposal that changed slightly from Pritzker’s initial proposal in the Senate bill was the increase in the state sports betting tax, which sportsbooks forcefully lobbied against in recent weeks.

In the bill the Senate introduced, the tax would be graduated into several tiers with the largest sportsbooks paying a 40% tax and the smallest paying 20%. Pritzker had initially proposed flatly raising the sports betting tax from its current rate of 15% to 35%.

The structure as proposed in the Senate bill would bring in a little more than $200 million, a Pritzker spokesperson said, similar to the estimate with the flat tax Pritzker proposed earlier this year.

The additional revenue would largely go to the state’s general fund, rather than its fund for capital projects, also in line with Pritzker’s February proposal.

Rita, who also sits on the House Gaming Committee, said he hadn’t looked closely into the proposed Senate language but that a graduated tax makes sense for sportsbooks.

“The idea is to generate revenue without putting them in jeopardy,” Rita said. When the legislature first passed sports betting legislation, it was fairly new across the country, but now the state has a “very, very successful program,” he said.

Pritzker spokeswoman Jordan Abudayyeh in a social media post dismissed the idea that sportsbooks might leave Illinois due to higher taxes.

“The ‘I’m going to stop making money because I have to pay more in taxes’ line is one of the weirdest arguments people make under this dome and people still repeat it like it’s a real threat,” Abudayyeh wrote.

Spokespeople for the trade association representing FanDuel, DraftKings and other sportsbooks did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.

A late addition to the tax mix was a proposed 1% increase on video gambling devices at bars, restaurants and truck stops. Revenue from the machines helps pay for capital construction projects.

Harmon, an Oak Park Democrat, on Friday pointed to the late-emerging issue as one of the causes for delayed action on the budget.

“We need to make sure the spending priorities reflect the will of the body,” Harmon said shortly before the Senate’s initial spending plan was filed. “And this year, we’ve had to look at a variety of the revenue items the governor proposed. And there’s been some pushback, some suggestions to do things in slightly different ways.

“It requires some nimbleness here late in the game to unpack those and see if they’ll work,” he said.

Flagship spending proposals the governor laid out in his February budget address were part of the Senate measure released Friday, which Pritzker spokesman Alex Gough said reflected “an agreement in principle” among the governor, Harmon and Welch. Few changes were expected to those items.

Among Pritzker’s priorities that found their way into the Senate measure were a pilot program to 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. Also included were funds for the Department of Early Childhood, the new agency that both chambers voted to create this session.

There also appeared to be consensus on raising funding for elementary and secondary education by the minimum $350 million laid out in the state’s school funding formula, a likely disappointment for Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union, which pushed for a much larger increase.

It also drew criticism from Rep. Will Davis, a Democrat from south suburban Homewood who leads the appropriations committee overseeing K-12 funding. Davis, who has pushed for greater funding for years, said lawmakers have become accustomed to the minimum funding level.

“We know there’s a lot of money being spent,” Davis said Friday night of the Senate’s proposed budget. “There are a lot of increases in that budget in a lot of other places other than K-12, and I guess that seems to be everyone’s priority where K-12 is not.”

One area where lawmakers are looking to raise the ante from Pritzker’s initial proposal is a state income tax credit for families with children.

Pritzker had proposed a credit totaling $12 million, but a measure filed Saturday would create credits totaling $50 million for the current tax year and $100 million for future years, said Sen. Omar Aquino, a Chicago Democrat who has advocated for creating an even larger credit.

“It’s always a victory when we can get monies back into the taxpayers’ pockets, especially working-class folks that certainly could use it, especially during these inflationary times,” Aquino said.

Another issue on which there appears to be broad agreement is repealing the 1% statewide sales tax on groceries. Ditching the tax won’t affect the state’s bottom line because the money all goes to local governments.

Pritzker, who included the proposal in his budget blueprint in February, dug in his heels in the face of strong opposition from local leaders who worried about the impact it would have on their coffers.

Eliminating the tax has both progressive and populist appeal in an election year when voters remain concerned about high prices at the checkout line, and it comes after Pritzker and Democrats, along with reluctant Republicans, suspended the tax for a year amid the 2022 election.

The GOP criticized that move as an election-year gimmick, and Pritzker has used that line of attack to argue he took Republicans up on their suggestion to make the change permanent.

Under the budget framework that Pritzker and the Democratic legislative leaders agreed on, the tax would be permanently eliminated on Jan. 1, 2026.

To make up for the lost revenue, municipalities — both those 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.

Along with other concessions, the proposal on the table was enough to win the support of the Illinois Municipal League, which represents local governments across the state.

“We are pleased with the overall framework of the issues affecting municipalities,” Brad Cole, CEO of the Illinois Municipal League, said in a statement. “Local leaders have long advocated for greater authority to provide for the programs and services their residents rely on every day, which they will be granted under this budget agreement.”

Even as the details of the budget were cobbled together, several lawmakers continued to push for specific programs.

Behavioral health advocates expressed concerns about maintaining funding for what they see as vital programs to address difficulties in accessing care and workforce shortages. At a news conference Friday afternoon, several state representatives stressed the need for a $13 million program providing campus mental health services at public colleges and universities throughout the state.

“We are here to remind everyone that we are in a mental health crisis across the lifespan,” Chicago Democratic Rep. Lindsey LaPointe, who chairs the House Mental Health and Addiction Committee, said during the news conference. “Our budget has to reflect that.”

The Senate’s proposed budget allocated $7 million for the Illinois Board of Higher Education and $6 million to the Illinois Community College Board for implementing the program. Some advocates said they wanted to fund the program to $22.5 million, but LaPointe said she is satisfied with the $13 million total.

Other lawmakers were hesitant to draw any conclusions about the budget until seeing the final details.

Rep. Curtis Tarver, a Democrat from the South Side of Chicago, said Saturday evening he still didn’t have a strong grasp of  what was in the budget.

“We don’t have any idea until we see what’s on paper,” he said.

That sentiment was shared by Republicans, who also were largely in the dark.

“We’re all frustrated,” said Sen. Chapin Rose, a Republican from Mahomet.

“Where is it? What’s in it?” Rose asked. “Do they have their act together?”

In a letter to Harmon on Thursday, Johnson wrote that the legislation, originally aimed at protecting selective enrollment schools from closures, “seeks to solve problems that do not exist,” and promised that selective enrollment schools are not being targeted.

“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 letter. “The District will maintain admissions standards at selective enrollment schools. Any narrative to the contrary is patently false.”

The bill had passed overwhelmingly in the House and had no opposition in a Senate committee. But sources said Harmon is not likely to call the bill for a vote before the full Senate before the General Assembly adjourns its spring session. Both Johnson, who once worked for Harmon as an aide, and the Chicago Teachers Union have staunchly opposed the legislation.

A spokesman for Harmon, an Oak Park Democrat, declined to comment on his plans for the bill.

But Sen. Robert Martwick, an ally of Johnson and the CTU, said he was glad to see the issue resolved without the city’s hands being tied by legislation, because “the mayor has made it very clear that his intention is to wait for the fully elected school board to take place before major changes are made.”

“As the mayor has publicly provided assurances that there will be no dramatic changes to the role of selective enrollment and magnet schools in the school district, the need for the legislation is obviated,” Martwick, a Chicago Democrat said. “We don’t need it anymore.”

Under the 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.

The legislation 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.

“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. “My vision for CPS is not one where some students suffer at the expense of others. It is to ensure that we have a system that is geared toward the benefit of all students, and this of course includes our students enrolled at selective schools.”

As for the provision of the bill calling for no changes to the admissions processes for selective enrollment schools, Johnson wrote “the Board has made no mention of eliminating testing and other criteria for admission to selective schools.”

“What I and the Board are committed to is ensuring that testing remains an important part of the admissions process and that we will fulfill our responsibility to CPS families to continually evaluate our system to ensure that our schools offer every student a chance to succeed,” Johnson wrote. “A system that has seen a precipitous decline in Black and Latino students as well as those who qualify for free or reduced lunch at some of our highest-performing and most well-resourced schools is not a system that reflects my values as mayor, or our values as a city.”

In a statement to the Tribune, Croke, a Chicago Democrat, said she hopes “the Senate realizes that (Johnson’s) letter falls horribly short from how it is being spun that they will reconsider and run this bill.”

“I am deeply disappointed to learn that President Harmon may not call this bill. While his letter agreement with the mayor contains some concessions, it does not protect magnet or charter schools and still allows for changes in admissions criteria for selective enrollment schools,” Croke said. “The CPS school budgeting process has been hidden from both the public and from Springfield legislators, and I fully expect that disproportionate cuts will be made to magnet schools and charters will eventually be closed.”

At an unrelated news conference Friday, Johnson did not answer when asked if his promise to not close or cut funding for selective enrollment schools will extend to magnet and charter schools. He said the ultimate goal is for more equitable state education funding, while also referring to his past activism in opposition to Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s school closures in the early 2010s.

“No one should lose at the expense of someone else winning. But I can tell you this,” Johnson said. “For a very long time, I can tell you who has been losing. It has been Black and brown families. You know how I know? Because I’ve fought against school closings. I have taken arrest for them. I have gone on a hunger strike.”

He also did not answer when asked how Harmon responded to his letter. He said that selective enrollment schools were initially designed to confront segregation.

“Instead, you have an even greater stratified school district,” he said. “Who wants to be responsible for creating a stratified school district where those few individuals get to have and everybody else gets to lose? Who wants that kind of school district? I certainly don’t.”

Without new legislation, a moratorium on closing CPS buildings 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.

Croke’s bill was passed by the House in a 92-8 vote on April 18, with all eight “no” votes coming from Democrats. The vote was viewed as a resounding slap at the CTU, which labeled the legislation “racist,” much to the consternation of legislators who supported it.

Earlier this month, the Senate Executive Committee 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.”

In Thursday’s letter, Johnson sought to assure Harmon that no selective enrollment school would be closed before the fully elected board is seated in January 2027. He also said none of those schools would experience “a disproportionate resource decrease” if budget reductions are required to be made before the seating of the fully elected board.

“Selective enrollment schools will remain among the highest achieving schools in the state while the district strives to improve diversity and expand opportunities for ALL of Chicago’s students and schools,” the mayor wrote.

The issue over selective enrollment schools revolves in part around school funding.  Since CPS began finalizing its budget for next school year in recent weeks, CEO Pedro Martinez has repeatedly said a new, “more transparent and more equitable” funding model will benefit schools of all types, by guaranteeing minimum numbers and ratios of educators and support staff.

“No category of schools are being disproportionately impacted by this new model,” Martinez said at the April Board of Education meeting, adding that the district was working with “outlier” schools with budget concerns. Johnson echoed the sentiment in his letter to Harmon, writing twice that no selective enrollment school will be subject to a disproportionate resource decrease.

But some parents have said the shift in emphasis to neighborhood schools has translated to funding cuts for their selective enrollment and magnet school students. Whether cuts at any school are disproportionate is unclear, as CPS does not make school-level budgets, districtwide, publicly available for comparison.

With the state facing a tighter financial outlook than in recent years, when revenues have routinely outperformed projections, a budget agreement had yet to surface as of Thursday evening. That doesn’t leave enough time for the House and Senate both to approve a spending plan before Friday, when the spring session was scheduled to end.

Negotiations for the budget year that begins July 1 have been rocky as some Democrats have expressed reluctance to accept at least some of the tax increases proposed by Pritzker, which include hikes for sportsbooks, retailers and corporations.

Without the benefit of unanticipated revenue windfalls to look forward to and billions of dollars in federal coronavirus relief money already allocated to one-time expenditures from past years, some lawmakers are pushing for a more cautious approach going forward.

“I’m afraid that we’re making decisions now, today, that are going to complicate things next year. So rather than using all these revenue enhancements this year, I’ve suggested, maybe use one or two, make some cuts, and save some of those tools for next year when you know we’re going to have to come up with additional revenue,” Democratic state Rep. Fred Crespo of Hoffman Estates said.

One point of contention has been Pritzker’s plan to raise the taxes on sports wagers — paid by sportsbooks out of their post-payout revenue — to as much as 35% from 15%. The Pritzker administration projects the change would generate an estimated $200 million in additional revenue. The governor has emphasized that the tax on sports betting would be on companies such as DraftKings and FanDuel, not “against sports bettors themselves.”

Pritzker on Thursday sought to downplay the resistance he’s met from fellow Democrats, instead attributing the pushback to sports betting companies, which through a coalition have hired a stable of high-powered statehouse lobbyists to advance their cause with lawmakers.

Sportsbooks “have made literally tens of millions of dollars from the state of Illinois, and all we’re asking is that they pay a little more of their fair share,” Pritzker, who signed a measure legalizing sports betting during his first year in office in 2019, said Thursday at an unrelated event in Pontoon Beach in the Metro East area of Illinois outside St. Louis.

Metro East is home to two entertainment venues that both recently changed their names to reflect the importance of sports wagering to their business: DraftKings at Casino Queen in East St. Louis and FanDuel Sportsbook & Horse Racing in Collinsville, formerly Fairmount Park.

State Sen. Christopher Belt, a Democrat from nearby Swansea, raised concerns that the proposed tax increases would have a negative impact on East St. Louis, a blighted community that depends on the casino as an economic driver. Belt said the casino contributes a sizable percentage of the city’s general revenue fund.

“Any hit from the casinos plays over directly to the city of East St. Louis. Then that impacts public safety. That impacts everything. And so, I would love to see another alternative,” Belt said.

But Belt also disagrees with budget cuts as an alternative to the tax increases on sports betting, a suggestion made earlier this month by Deputy Gov. Andy Manar in a memo to the heads of state agencies. Manar cautioned that if the tax hikes don’t make it through the legislature,  the departments should prepare for $800 million in cuts to various state services.

“This is why we’re burning the midnight oil,” Belt said. “And again, it’s the governor’s proposal. So he’s open, probably, to maybe suitable alternatives and that’s what we’re looking for now.”

Rep. Jay Hoffman, who is part of House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch’s Democratic leadership team, echoed Belt’s concerns, saying the casino and racetrack have been able to stay above water thanks to DraftKings and FanDuel. Hoffman worried a tax increase could have a negative trickle-down effect on the operations of the venues.

“For me, it’s really a local issue because those entities that have a bunch of employees; they were able to stay afloat by hosting FanDuel and DraftKings,” said Hoffman, also of Swansea. “In order to ensure that the hundreds of people who work at Fairmount racetrack, and everything from training the horses to cleaning up after the horses to working in concession stands … in order to make sure that they keep employed, I think it’s difficult to vote for the tax increase.”

But the opposition doesn’t just come from downstate. Democratic Rep. Curtis Tarver of Chicago also said Thursday he doesn’t like the proposal to hike taxes on the relatively new business of legal sports betting.

“For an industry to be in its nascence and to have a business model that increases the taxes by 100% in four years isn’t a good signal to other businesses that might want to come to Illinois,” Tarver said.

Rep. Marcus Evans of Chicago, who is also part of House Democratic leadership, however, said he doesn’t think higher taxes would adversely affect the sports books.

“Some people just say the taxes may be too high, but on the East Coast the taxes are a lot higher. And I think people are still going to bet,” Evans said.

The sports betting tax in New York state is 51%, for example.

“So I don’t think that the taxes that have been proposed are that onerous,” Evans said. “I think people want to sports bet, so I don’t anticipate sports betting to go away because of higher taxes.”

The Sports Betting Alliance, which represents sportsbooks, takes the opposite view, arguing that Illinois’ lower tax rate allows the companies to offer better odds and promotions that draw gamblers away from illegal bookies.

Rep. Will Guzzardi, a Chicago progressive who is part of House Democrats’ working group on budgetary matters, acknowledged a diversity of opinions in his caucus about how the state should generate revenue but believes “there aren’t that many sticking points left” before a budget agreement can be reached.

While lobbyists for sportsbooks made compelling points, “someone’s going to have to wind up paying more” as the legislature funds its priorities, Guzzardi said.

“Better it be the most profitable corporations in the state than working people,” he said.

Crespo, the Hoffman Estates Democrat, said he and other moderates in the House have “embraced the idea of maybe a revenue enhancement or two,” though he declined to comment on specifics of which of Pritzker’s proposals were likely to earn their support.

As for places to trim spending, Crespo suggested eliminating coverage of weight loss drugs including Ozempic for state workers — a provision quietly added to the budget last year — as one option.

Also on the table is a proposal from Pritzker that would extend a cap on losses large corporations can write off on their state income taxes, which the governor estimates would bring in $526 million in revenue.

Pritzker has also resurrected a previously unsuccessful plan to limit the tax that discount retailers receive for collecting sales tax, which his office estimates would generate another $101 million. And the governor has proposed raising taxes on individuals by reducing the standard exemption for state personal income taxes, which would raise an estimated $93 million by increasing tax bills for Illinois residents.

Despite it becoming evident that lawmakers will miss their self-imposed deadline to pass the budget, Sen. Robert Peters, a Chicago Democrat, expressed confidence that the new budget would include funding for a number of issues important to Illinois residents.

“Currently, violence prevention work is very important, small business support, our hospitals, particularly when it comes to Medicaid,” said Peters, whose district boundaries include a swath of the South Side and the downtown area. “And it seems like we’re in a good spot here.”

Like almost everyone outside the Democratic caucus, including the press and the public, House Republicans were still waiting Thursday to see the Democrats’ spending plan.

House GOP leader Tony McCombie of Savanna, who’s complained that her caucus has not been included in budget discussions with House Democratic leadership, said she and her team would rather see “structural reform” in the tax policies rather than tax increases.

One piece of Pritzker’s plan that appears almost certain to be included in the final budget package is a proposal to eliminate the 1% sales tax on groceries. The state can permanently abolish the tax — which it temporarily suspended amid record inflation in the 2022 election year — without hurting its finances because the money all goes to local governments.

While McCombie supports the concept, she and other Republicans have expressed concerns about how municipalities will make up the difference.

With the GOP calling for local governments to get some kind of public reimbursement for any resulting tax burden, McCombie suggested the state could figure out how to alter the gasoline tax, which is used to pay for road projects, so that municipalities would potentially take less money out of their general revenue funds to pay for that construction.

She also suggested the towns could be dependent on more money that could be set aside from the portion of the state income tax that goes to municipalities.

“We have had a couple of conversations with the governor’s staff, so that’s good. As for us, we haven’t shared our priorities,” McCombie said. “We’re a little gun shy when it comes to putting all our cards on the table because then there’s things that maybe we won’t get funded. I hate to say that people play politics with the budget, but they play politics with the budget.”

The remarks, made at a media gathering at the United Center in preparation for this August’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago, hinted at just some of the barbs certain to be aimed at Trump this summer and highlighted the attack-dog surrogate role Pritzker is playing in the 2024 presidential campaign.

The comments also continued to boost Pritzker’s national profile as he underscored Democrats’ efforts to draw a bright line between President Joe Biden’s record and plans for a second term and Trump’s often-tumultuous single term as president.

“It’s a choice between kindness and cruelty, between a president who stands up against hatred and extremism or a candidate who promises to be a dictator and makes excuses for white supremacists who chant, ‘Jews will not replace us,’ ” Pritzker said, citing participants’ shouts during the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, an event Trump described as including “very fine people on both sides.”

“It’s a choice between a president who wakes up every morning working to improve the lives of families across this country or a guy who spends all day watching TV or flatulating in a courtroom, waiting to become the first felon elected president,” the governor said, referencing rumors of the ex-president’s behavior during his ongoing hush money trial in New York.

Pritzker was joined by both local and national Democrats who gathered as part of a media walkthrough at the United Center, which along with McCormick Place will serve as the main settings for the Aug. 19-22 gathering. The two-term Illinois governor was instrumental in bringing the DNC to Chicago and he’s expected to use the event to raise his national profile amid speculation he’s eyeing a potential White House bid after 2024.

The Republican convention is being held in July in Milwaukee.

Pritzker even used Biden’s age — something even some Democrats are concerned about — as a rallying point. Biden is 81 and Trump is 77.

“Age isn’t what distinguishes these two candidates from one another,” Pritzker said. “Donald Trump was stupid and ignorant long before he got old.

“The contrast between these two is genuinely stark and I am truly excited to help remind the nation of that in August.”

Among those also on stage were Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison, Biden senior adviser Anita Dunn and convention officials.

Johnson, who has had a rocky early relationship with the City Hall press corps, told the assembled members of the media that his goal for the convention is “to show off to the rest of the world why the city of Chicago is a beautiful place.”

“I’m looking forward to your collaborative approach to how we can carry that message so that people around the globe will also come to know the truth around why President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris deserve four more years,” Johnson said.

Harrison, who as DNC chair will preside over the convention, said the gathering aims to inspire committed Democrats along with independents and young voters who could be key to a potential Biden victory in November.

“While the Republican convention will be mired in chaos, fear and division, the Democrats will host a hopeful convention, providing all Americans an important moment to celebrate our freedoms and come together as a nation,” Harrison said. “It will be a historic celebration of the work behind us and a preview of the work still to come.”

Despite the Democrats’ efforts to convey messages of hope and unity, however, Biden and the party continue to be dogged by disunity among some core constituencies, particularly over the president’s support for Israel in its war against Hamas in Gaza.

Both Wednesday’s media preview at the United Center and a Tuesday evening gathering at Garfield Park Conservatory on the West Side drew protesters critical of Biden’s Israel policy. Some of the groups involved have vowed to protest during the DNC without the required permits from the city.