Gov. JB Pritzker appears skeptical as he takes a reporter’s question about a transit bill filed in the Illinois House the evening prior to his Wednesday, Oct. 29, news conference in Taylorville. (Capitol News Illinois photo by Jerry Nowicki)
Article Summary
- JB Pritzker spoke out against multiple proposed new revenue sources to fund public transportation, including a tax on billionaires’ assets and allowing speed cameras to be installed outside Chicago.
- House Democrats filed a bill Tuesday night that would raise between $1.5 billion and $2 billion in revenue for public transportation.
- Pritzker said the bill will not move forward in its current form, setting up an uncertain future for public transit.
- The bill would also raise taxes significantly on entertainment.
This summary was written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
SPRINGFIELD — Gov. JB Pritzker said he is emphatically opposed to several revenue solutions House Democrats introduced Tuesday night to fund public transportation in Illinois.
Speaking at an event Wednesday morning in Taylorville where he met with Illinois farmers, Pritzker declared an amendment to Senate bill 2111 dead before it could even be called for a hearing in a House committee.
“As it is, it’s not going forward,” the governor told reporters. “There’s got to be a lot of discussion between the House and the Senate in order to come up with a final bill because it isn’t going to look like what the House has put forward.”
The transit funding bill introduced by Rep. Eva-Dina Delgado, D-Chicago, would raise between $1.5 billion and $2 billion to plug a funding gap for Chicago area public transit agencies in the coming years by raising taxes on entertainment, taxing billionaires’ investment assets, and allowing speed cameras to be installed around the state.
Pritzker said, “They sprung a whole bunch of things that have never been seen before” that makes the bill hard to evaluate and demonstrates lawmakers still have a long way to go before there’s a solution that can pass the General Assembly and earn his signature.
But Delgado characterized conversations with the governor’s office and Senate differently.
“All of these ideas should not have been a surprise to them,” she told reporters after the House Executive Committee advanced the bill out of committee.
A spokesperson for Pritzker told Capitol News Illinois that’s “not true.”
Speaking in the House Executive Committee early Wednesday afternoon, Delgado said “we cannot allow it to just fall apart because we do not agree on how to get” $1.5 billion in revenue.
Proposed taxes and funding
Most of the revenue raised by the proposal would come from a 7% amusement tax that would apply to a wide variety of entertainment, from streaming services to concert tickets and sporting events. In Chicago, that tax would be levied on top of a 10.25% tax on streaming, a 9% tax on other forms of entertainment, and a 3% tax on tickets.
Delgado also proposes establishing a $5 surcharge on large events in the Chicago region with a capacity of at least 10,000 spectators.
In addition, the measure would tax billionaires on unrealized gains on investment assets at a 4.95% rate — the state’s current income tax rate. But Illinois’ billionaire governor said it raises too many questions.
“It’s never been done before,” Pritzker said. “Never been done before by any state. Never been done before by the federal government. So once again, you’ve got to do a whole lot of work before you can pass a bill that … you don’t even know how it would work or if you could actually collect on it.”
Another portion of revenue would come from allowing municipalities to install speed cameras near churches, parks, schools and hospitals like Chicago currently does. Rep. Kam Buckner, D-Chicago, told Capitol News Illinois on Tuesday that municipalities have been asking for permission to install the cameras. They would be allowed to keep half of the revenue.
“It’s a bad idea,” Pritzker said. “We’ve had so many problems with speed cameras in this state. There’s been corruption around them.”
Bill on thin ice
With Pritzker opposed, the bill faces a major uphill battle over the final scheduled days of the General Assembly’s fall veto session, which is the last time lawmakers are scheduled to convene this year.
Delgado characterized the bill during an interview Tuesday as the House’s best solution. The Senate passed its own plan in May that was not considered by the House before it adjourned. It’s not clear whether the Senate was consulted when the House bill was crafted.
Illinois labor unions support the bill, however.
“The time for talk is over,” Illinois AFL-CIO President Tim Drea told the House Executive Committee on Wednesday. “We have to get this finished. We respectfully ask everybody in this House, this committee … to vote this bill out so we can advance it to where we can look at differences.”
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
