-- Connecting the dots between our economy, government and business --
Top Illinois Stories
“We must call this for what it is: voter suppression that will silence Black and Brown voters,” Gov. JB Pritzker said in a prepared statement. “The magnitude of this decision cannot be understated: It guts the Voting Rights Act and its very purpose of protecting all voices. Every American deserves an equal vote.”
“This Supreme Court decision addresses the very gerrymandering efforts the Democrats are hoping to codify into Illinois law with this Constitutional Amendment,” the Illinois Freedom Caucus, a group of far-right Republicans, said in a statement. “(House Joint Constitutional Amendment 28) is now, very clearly, unconstitutional.”
"But (Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson) argued the governor can get more credit than he deserves for being a progressive champion. 'Wealthy white men have a lot of cover,' Johnson says. 'The expectations of individuals of privilege are different than women and people of color, and I think that more politicians need to be challenged to push an agenda that’s responsive to the people who have been stuck in the margins.'"
Legal challenges would likely argue Illinois Democrats can't use the state constitution to sidestep the U.S. Constitution's prohibition on so-called racial gerrymandering. Essentially, Illinois and others have so far been allowed to use the race of voters to draw districts, so long as race was just one of the factors used, and not the predominant factor guiding the making of the map.
"Here’s the reality increasingly emerging from CEJA’s ill-conceived targeting of gas-fired peakers: Carbon-emitting plants the law slates for near-term mothballing instead are remaining open for nearly two more decades. Meanwhile, Chicago-area power-delivery customers of Commonwealth Edison by and large soon won’t be benefiting any longer from the juice they generate. Instead, that electricity will support growing needs outside of Chicagoland, perhaps even from new data centers."
More Highlighted Illinois Stories
McLean County Judge Rebecca Foley said the Strikebreakers Act does not apply to public universities, noting it was illegal for state employees to strike when the law was enacted. Further, Foley said denying the university the ability to provide clean, hygienic public spaces and dorms would compromise the health and welfare of students and employees. "It doesn't take a lot of imagination," she said, to predict what might happen without janitorial services over the course of a strike.
Springfield received just under $34 million. Ramona Metzger, director of the office of budget and management, listed some of those projects: “There were water fund capital projects, lead service line, tourism, Olde Towne Apartments, the demolition for that. The library, we replaced the elevators. There was also the firehouse and fire equipment."
"It's not a mask mandate," state Sen. Graciela Guzmán said. "It does not require anyone to wear a mask or any protective equipment. It protects the right of people who choose, need, or use protective medical equipment to do so without punishment or discrimination."
State Rep. Kam Buckner said, “I’ve heard many of my colleagues say this is a ballooning budget, but the truth is a balloon floats away when it has no anchor. … (This budget is) anchored in schools, anchored in healthcare, anchored in pensions, public safety, human services.”
Logan County zoning officer and planning director Alan Green said the ordinance will introduce restrictions on all data center projects in Logan County. Some of those restrictions will include energy generation, the type of properties used for the data center, noise level parameters, and more.
“There's no shame in admitting that you made a mistake. There is in not correcting the mistake. And in this case, these mistakes have proven to be very deadly,” Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza said. Gov. JB Pritzker, however, shifted blame away from the act as a whole, saying many cases have been because judges have made improper determinations.
Illinois’ gas tax is currently 48.3 cents per gallon, and another annual increase is slated to take effect on July 1.
The Illinois Economic Policy Institute estimated a 3 percent surtax on millionaires would affect 41,000 taxpayers in the state and generate $3.8 billion during its first year. That total would ramp up to $4.2 billion by 2030. The House Revenue and Finance Committee approved the resolution April 21, but it failed to get a vote in the full chamber. There is no similar proposal in the Senate.
“What I was talking about was the fact that a constitutional republic was torn apart in 53 days in Germany in the 1930s, and that we need to watch out for that in this country” and “much of what I said has been proven to be true, that the institutions of this democracy are being attacked by the Republicans and by Donald Trump," Gov. JB Pritzker said on CNN.
“Defendants claim Judge (James) Brown undermined public confidence in the judiciary,” attorneys wrote in the latest filing. “Yet Defendants allow other sitting judges to publicly speak on matters of public concern,” the attorneys argued, before summarizing some of Judge Ramon Ocasio’s comments. “His columns discuss myriad matters of public concern, including: the ‘abolition of policing’ through the lens of the Native American ‘indigenous resistance’ who view police officers as ‘foot soldiers of U.S. occupation, racism, and misogyny,” the filing stated.
The bill now under consideration in the Illinois House of Representatives would allow workers to begin receiving unemployment benefits after two weeks on
If the proposal, House Joint Resolution Constitutional Amendment 28, gets at least 36 of the 59 votes in the Senate before the May 3 deadline, it will appear on the November ballot. But the proposed language simply codifies the state’s current poor redistricting practice.
Dozens of bills introduced this year aim to address issues of social media addiction, age-appropriate content and age verification. “We all know that social media is having a real impact on our kids. From mental health challenges to exposure to harmful content, the evidence continues to grow. This is not a theoretical issue anymore,” state Sen. Sue Rezin said.
Gov. JB Pritzker said the Bears do not want a 9 percent amusement tax added to their ticket prices. “Obviously that’s something that they didn't expect, don’t believe is a good thing for Bears fans or for the Bears stadium. We’ll see what can happen in the Senate about that,” Pritzker said. The Bears have already notified fans that season ticket prices would increase by an average of 13.5 percent this year.
U.S. Reps. Delia Ramirez, D-IL, Chuy Garcia, D-IL, and Analilia Mejia, D-NJ, introduced the federal legislation, known as the ‘Living Wage for All Act.’ Ramirez was a co-lead on the 2019 state-wide wage increase, which brought it to $15 per hour.
As local governments confront water challenges, regional droughts have called attention to lax or nonexistent water management policies in Illinois. State lawmakers have caught on, too, especially as they consider how to regulate data centers, a new type of high-end water user that’s been spreading across the state.
This decision significantly reduces potential exposure by limiting plaintiffs who allege multiple, biometric data collections or disclosures to a single recovery, rather than per-scan statutory damages, even for actions that predate the amendment.
Property taxes have risen 27 percent under Pritzker’s watch. While driven by local decisions, state policy, particularly around pension and school funding, has pressured local governments and contributed to those hikes.
Through designated state licensing agencies, Illinois and other states recruit, train, license and support blind vendors, generating program revenue that funds those very functions. In December, the U.S. Secretary of Education gave the U.S. Army a broad, Army-wide exemption from the law, stripping away the opportunity for blind vendors to be prioritized in contracting to operate dining facilities, based on claims of cost concerns and isolated performance issues.
Nico Tsatsoulis the Libertarian candidate for Cook County Assessor: "The solution is clear: Illinois must adopt a model based on California’s Proposition 13. This policy caps property taxes on residential and commercial properties at 1% of the purchase price and limits reassessments until a property is sold. Since its adoption in 1978, it has provided the stability that families and businesses need to thrive."
The U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency proposed a rule protecting federally chartered banks from the controversial swipe fee law set for implementation in Illinois this summer.
"This is what the legislation says. You have to have those tickets in hand before you can sell them," state Sen. Steve Stadelman said. The House bill would also set up a complaint system for customers through the state attorney general's office. It also aims to scare potential scammers.
Romeoville Mayor John Noak told the committee that taking away local control does not do enough to address the drivers of Illinois housing costs. “Preemption certainly will not do enough to address those costs. A simple shift in homeowners insurance in one given year can wipe out any potential costs from these preemption approaches,” Noak said.
Two interim filings posted last week by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, an independent subsection of the U.S. Treasury Department, represent the latest twist in a two-year legislative fight. One of the filings specifically preempts the state’s first-of-its-kind Interchange Fee Prohibition Act, throwing the policy into further uncertainty by creating a second legal front and added pressure on state lawmakers amid an ongoing appellate court case.
In Illinois, the total number of firefighters decreased by 13 percent, more than 2,200 firefighters, between 2019 and 2023. House Bill 2136, also known as the Future Firefighters Act, would decrease the state’s age requirement for firefighters from 21 to 18.
Top Chicago Stories
Chicago’s home prices grew at more than five times the pace of the nation’s in February, according to today’s report from the S&P Cotality Case-Shiller Indices. Home prices here were up 5.04% in February, the index reports, compared with growth of 0.7% nationwide. 
The $2.8 billion in federal emergency funding that CPS received starting in 2020 helped mask continued structural funding problems.
“At one occasion, there was a half-dozen private security and a couple of law enforcement people at a major station at 9 a.m. in the morning. That’s not when the danger is for the average rider,” a spokesman for the Active Transportation Alliance said. “It’s at 2 a.m coming back from a concert, and you’re boarding the L at Harrison station, where the lighting is poor, and there are very few people around.”
At the same time, officials say they’re working through a backlog of roughly 91,000 tax refunds totaling some $200 million in overpayments that still need to be returned.
More Highlighted Chicago Area Stories
A team of local real estate investors has raised its bet on a downtown office recovery, buying a distressed Loop office building loan for roughly 84% less than the property was worth over a decade ago. It's the 23-story office property at 200 W. Monroe St.
"It absolutely needs to be amended because I think while the intention was good, not forcing people to sit in jail because they couldn't afford bond on minor crimes, it has been utterly manipulated and abused by dangerous violent repeat offenders who have no regard for the sanctity of human life, no regard for property, and no intention of ever following the law," Ald. Ray Lopez said.
The company will in turn be subject to tax breaks under the state’s EDGE, or Economic Development for a Growing Economy, tax credit program. Those would amount to $19 million over 10 years.
"Mayor Panic Attack, tipping is an American tradition. More specifically, it’s a Chicago way of life, we all know it and many of us do it with panache. Do us in the hospitality industry a favor and find another madeup grievance to cry about."
Venezuelan migrant Jose Medina, 25, is charged with first-degree murder and other lesser charges for the shooting that killed Sheridan Gorman on a Rogers Park pier March 19. Gorman's father said, "She is gone because systems that are supposed to protect the public did not do their job." Medina's attorney said he was bused to Chicago from Texas by Gov. Greg Abbot, and has been in the U.S. with his mother on asylum.
"CPS says it 'must divert between $400 and $500 million from the classroom annually to pay for debt service to fund school construction and repairs.' That makes little sense for a system with so many empty seats. Until CPS aligns its footprint with the number of students it actually serves, deficits will persist."
In 2026, CPD has a budget of $200 million for overtime. To finish 2026 on budget, CPD must reduce its spending on overtime by 30 percent as compared with what the department spent in 2025.
The proposal has gotten a lukewarm reception by the Illinois Federation of Teachers. Though they are not actively opposing the bill, union leaders have raised concerns about the possible cost and logistics of implementing the restrictions.
The plan shifts care into schools, transit hubs, community centers, and other nonclinical spaces while sending teams directly to residents who live outside traditional care networks. The dollars come from a mix of corporate contributions, state opioid settlement funds, and Ryan White Part A money that typically supports HIV care, and the rollout is expected to involve dozens of community and health partners.
“Electronic monitoring is not an alternative to detention. It does not keep people safe,” Cook County State's Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke said. “The states attorney’s office is going to continue to ask for detention each and every time we believe someone presents a danger."
Andrew S. Boutros, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, and Christopher C. Amon, special agent in charge for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ Chicago Field Division: "The next shooting will not be prevented by a case that will be indicted three years from now. It will be prevented by what happens in the next 24 to 72 hours."
The MetroSouth Medical Center closed in 2019; in the years since, the 12.5-acre property has been shopped as a potential film and TV production campus or a research hub. Builders Capital took ownership of the property after calling in a $44 million note on the property’s former developers.
"Her apparent offense was recognizing a truth that should be obvious to anyone not marinating in activist ideology: If you want to lock up gun offenders, dismantle trafficking pipelines, and keep repeat violent criminals off the street, you cannot afford to gratuitously torch your relationships with federal agencies. That is not corruption. That is called fulfilling your obligations to Chicago residents."
"Unlike Mayor Brandon Johnson’s belief, white supremacy does not run these streets. ... We have valued victimhood over merit, a strange fate, since none of us suffered slavery and most of us never lived under legal segregation. Yet we reach backward to the past for our identity instead of forward to a future where our talents and our character write our own story."
"(Mayor Brandon) Johnson is right that young people need support. But support without structure isn’t compassion; it’s abdication. The question isn’t whether to punish or support. It’s whether we’re willing to do the harder work of both."
"For Chicago, the shocking crimes are noteworthy contributors to its tattered national reputation — fair or not — for being unsafe and for criminal-justice policies perceived as being concerned more with the rights of those accused than the interests of those victimized."
“Officer Bartholomew would be alive today if this massively repeat offender of violent crime after violent crime were behind bars where he belonged,” said Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza. “No reasonable person breathing should think it’s okay to put an armed robber, carjacker on an electronic monitor and send them on their merry way.”
The program is funded by the American Rescue Plan Act through COVID-era federal recovery funds, which must be spent by the end of this year.
“Why are we paying these commissioners a large sum of money if they can’t identify efficiencies within their own department?” Ald. Anthony Beale asked.
After interviewing 60 witnesses and reviewing 100 hours of federal agent camera footage, the Illinois Accountability Commission accuses the Trump administration of militarizing streets, suppressing free speech and acting with a sense of impunity in the federal government’s monthslong immigration crackdown in the Chicago area.
David Glockner, who most recently served as Executive Vice President for Compliance, Audit, and Risk at Exelon, the parent company of ComEd, also previously spent more than 24 years as a federal prosecutor in Chicago. He has also been the s chief compliance officer at Citadel LLC, the hedge fund founded by billionaire Ken Griffin.
Alphanso Talley, 26, is the fifth person accused of killing or trying to kill someone in Chicago this year while on felony pretrial release. Since CWB Chicago began tracking such data in 2020, people on pretrial release have been charged with murdering two Chicago police officers, one Chicago firefighter, and trying to murder 30 Chicago cops.
The ages of the victims range from 16 to 57. Among those shot were two Chicago police officers, one of whom died.
Dolton officials submitted a plan to the court with three options to pay off a $33.5 million judgment it owes as a result of a fatal 2016 police chase that killed one man and left another severely and permanently injured. The judgment was awarded in 2022, and has accumulated interest in the four years since, bringing the total owed to families of John Kyles and Duane Dunlap to $40.6 million as of February 2026.
The mayor's Peacebook Executive Order invests $900,000 toward youth antiviolence programs, in which 50 peacekeepers between the ages of 16 and 24 will be hired part-time to teach their peers how to resolve conflicts and de-escalate violence.
Over the years, Chicago-area companies have become more reliant on foreign-born workers, according to federal data. In the Chicago-Naperville-Elgin market, 83,522 construction workers identified as foreign-born, 32.5 percent of the area’s workforce, according to the latest U.S. Census Bureau figures.
Wirepoints Research and Commentary
Summary and audio linked here.
Audio and summary 
If this bill passes, say goodbye to local control over all Illinois parks and expect to see open drug and alcohol use, needles, no sanitation and fire hazards, but no ordinary park users.
Chicago’s political leadership is floating a pension buyout program as evidence it is seriously addressing the city’s thirty-six-billion-dollar unfunded pension liability, but Mark Glennon, founder of the Illinois policy research organization Wirepoints, said that the proposal moves debt from one column to another rather than reducing it, and that the broader fiscal picture facing the city continues to deteriorate across every measurable dimension. Audio here.
SIGN UP HERE FOR FREE WIREPOINTS DAILY NEWSLETTER
FOLLOW US
WE’RE A NONPROFIT AND YOUR CONTRIBUTIONS ARE DEDUCTIBLE.
MORE WIREPOINTS ORIGINAL STORIES
Expect no retraction or apology. This what they do. 
The state's existing buyout program for its own pensions is the precedent for Chicago, which should be a warning: Look out for similar exaggerated claims and shoddy analysis. 
Illinois lost another 54,000 tax filers and dependents, net, according to the IRS. Since 2000, fleeing taxpayers have taken $94 billion of annual adjusted gross income with them. 
Borrowing for current and past operating expenses, blanks for use of funds and more make Chicago's bond sale planned for next week smell mighty bad. Mark Glennon's interview is in the first ten minutes starting here.
Recent Comments