Gov. Pritzker: The first year

A balanced bipartisan budget, legal weed, $15 minimum wage, $45B capital plan, RHA, pension consolidation, education funding, fair tax…

By Ted Cox

Devoted readers might have noticed something of an ellipsis toward the end of Tuesday’s story on the preschool commission appointed by Gov. Pritzker.

The commission held its second monthly meeting, almost immediately after Pritzker himself held a news conference in the Blue Room of the Thompson Center, on the floor below, to tout a new property-tax reform for senior citizens in Cook County. Tuesday just happens to have been the one-year anniversary of Pritzker’s inauguration, and we wrote at the end of the commission story that it completed “an ambitious first-year agenda including legalized marijuana, the Reproductive Health Act, and the $45 billion Rebuild Illinois capital plan, to name just three top triumphs.”

But it was oh so much more than that.

What can we say? We were trying to get the story posted as soon as possible at the end of the day. But it strikes us now, at the start of the second year of Pritzker’s first term in office, that the accomplishments of that first year are worth a story in itself.

True enough, Pritzker figured heavily in our 2019 overview, which started with a quote frequently repeated over the last year by state Rep. Kelly Cassidy and other members of the General Assembly: “What a difference a year makes. What a year a governor makes.”

Former Gov. Bruce Rauner’s one term in office was marked by inaction and political impasse. For two years, the state went without a budget, resulting in hardship for higher education and chaos in critical programs like CCAP. He vetoed a $40,000 minimum teacher salary intended to address a statewide teacher shortage, unionization for paramedics, and measures attempting to protect immigrants from persecution by President Trump, again just to name three, and this time to hold to that, because who wants to relive the Rauner era in Illinois?

Contrast that, however, with Pritzker’s accomplishments: right away, the passage and signing of a $15-an-hour minimum wage, with the Illinois minimum already hiked to $9.25 this year and to rise again this summer on the way to reaching $15 by 2025. Then came the unprecedented flurry at the end of the General Assembly’s spring session as May turned to June: a bipartisan $40 billion balanced budget, which even Senate Minority Leader Bill Brady of Bloomington called “as balanced as any budget we’ve seen over the last couple of decades,” with its tax cuts and credits for small businesses and restored and enhanced funding for public education and higher education; the Reproductive Health Act bolstering abortion rights, the much-needed $45 billion Rebuild Illinois capital plan, legalized marijuana (already in effect) and sports betting (still working out the final details on the way to implementation), and setting the rates for the fair tax and sending it to voters for final approval this November.

Toss in gun control in the form of licensing dealers, a ban on private detention centers for immigrants, raising the state smoking age to 21, and a persistent emphasis on social equity in the marijuana law and other criminal-justice reforms.

During the fall veto session, he added pension consolidation for the state’s local police and firefighters.

And, again, those are really just the high points, failing to mention how he shut down the use of ethylene oxide at Sterigenics in Willowbrook barely a month into his term.

What a difference a year and a governor make, indeed.

Pritzker didn’t trumpet those achievements with a big anniversary celebration. Instead, he mentioned the anniversary in passing. He didn’t put out a formal news release, but he did list his accomplishment in a Facebook post in which he stated simply: “We’re confronting the failures of the past and putting people first.”

That sums things up as well as anything.

So, yes, there’s plenty left on the governor’s agenda going forward. The police and fire pension consolidation is just the first step in critical reform that is going to have to be executed, as the governor repeatedly insists, while keeping the state’s promises to its longtime employees. Corruption, which corrodes the faith citizens need to have in their government, is going to have to be blasted out and cauterized. The graduated income tax, so necessary to the reforms that have already passed and those that await, is going to have to pass a state referendum with a 60 percent supermajority in order to amend the state constitution.

The honeymoon might finally be over.

But what follows over the long haul is ensuring that state government continues to serve its people first and foremost, something it neglected for — let’s face it — far more than just the four years of the Rauner administration, going back through Pat Quinn and Rod Blagojevich and George Ryan and, well, let’s just call a halt there, shall we?

The Illinois government is functioning again to serve its people. That’s really what the last year was about, and what the Pritzker administration seems intent on going forward.