Illinois lawmakers face budget deadline, Bears stadium fight and insurance battle with 3 weeks left

SPRINGFIELD — With less than three weeks before the Illinois General Assembly’s scheduled adjournment, lawmakers are in a race to finish a multibillion-dollar budget while navigating threats from Washington, a simmering fight over soaring insurance rates, a stadium deal that could decide whether the Bears stay in Illinois and a cascading set of debates over who should pay for it all.

The annual spring sprint before the May 31 scheduled adjournment has interest groups, community advocates and lobbyists flooding Capitol hallways to claim their share of public dollars. Behind closed doors, lawmakers have been hashing out whether to grant the state more power to block insurance rate hikes, write new rules for driverless cars, lower electric bills inflated by the rise of data centers and clear a path for the Chicago Bears to build a new stadium in Arlington Heights before Indiana lures the franchise across the state line.

Threading through nearly every debate in the Democratic-controlled General Assembly is a fundamental disagreement about the state’s fiscal future. While progressive Democrats are pushing to tax billionaires and close corporate loopholes, Republicans are warning that squeezing job creators will severely damage Illinois’ economy. Amid it all is a standoff with the Trump administration, which has signaled it may withhold federal funding from blue states — a threat that could blow a hole in Illinois’ finances as soon as next year.

“As I’ve been out talking to people at town halls and at block club (events) and all those kinds of things, I’m hearing about that issue,” state Sen. Elgie Sims, of Chicago, who is the Senate Democrats’ chief budget negotiator, said about the issue of affordability. “I hear about it at the grocery store. I hear about it at the gas station. So this budget will continue to make sure that we address those issues because it’s critical that we do that on behalf of the people we serve.”

A state budget in progress

Right now, Illinois’ budget picture is steadier than many feared. A report last week from the legislature’s bipartisan Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability (COGFA) showed state revenues were stable. April deposits into the general fund totaled just over $7.3 billion, the second-highest month on record and a 2% gain over April 2025.

Over the first 10 months of the current fiscal year, general fund revenues were up 3.8%, or roughly $1.7 billion, compared with the same period a year ago, according to the report. Notably, the state’s largest revenue gain in April came from the federal government, which jumped from $94 million to $210 million year over year, despite Republican President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax-and-spending-cut law.

“We had a historically good month in some respects,” Sims said, referring to the April report.

But some hits have already begun. The Illinois Department of Human Services announced that as many as 120,000 Illinoisans could lose access to food assistance beginning this month due to new federal work requirements. And Sims was quick to add that the full brunt of Trump’s law likely won’t be felt by Illinois until next year, when drastic federal cuts to Medicaid and other federal social programs could hurt hundreds of thousands of state residents.

State Sen. Seth Lewis, a Republican from Bartlett, said the budget should be viewed as a purer test of Gov. JB Pritzker’s vision and free of budgetary constraints that the governor has repeatedly blamed since first taking office in 2019 — such as the residual effects of the state going without a budget for years during former Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner’s time in office and the strain put on state services during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Those issues are behind us,” Lewis said. “This budget reflects his vision of growth, which Illinois has been lagging (compared with other) states for many years.”

That lag has been measurable. According to COGFA, citing 2023 data, Illinois added 47,000 jobs, ranking 18th nationally in absolute job growth but near the bottom among states by percentage growth.

Who pays?

A coalition of progressive Democrats used a Capitol news conference last week to renew calls for higher taxes on the wealthy, including closing offshore corporate tax loopholes, severing the state from certain federal tax breaks for corporations under Trump’s new law and imposing a billionaire wealth tax.

The effort comes after Illinois House Democrats earlier this session failed to advance a proposed constitutional amendment that would have asked voters in November to approve an additional tax on income above $1 million per year.

“This is a red flag moment,” said state Rep. Lindsey LaPointe, a Chicago Democrat. “We can no longer afford a system where the people and the industries that have been raking it in continue to pay a smaller percentage of their income in taxes than a social worker or a preschool teacher.”

State Sen. Robert Martwick, also a Chicago Democrat, zeroed in on education.

“We have determined what the cost of an adequate education for every child in the state of Illinois is. Do we provide it? No. Why not? We can’t afford it,” Martwick told reporters. “We give massive tax breaks to people who don’t need them, and we ask all of the people who are already suffering and struggling to pay more. I am not anti-business. I want our business community to thrive. I want people to do well. I want them to provide jobs. But I want them to participate in solving our problems.”

After that news conference, Senate Republicans held their own press briefing, slamming the proposals.

“What we just heard, the never-ending requests year in, year out for more money, more money to just spend,” said Senate GOP leader John Curran of Downers Grove. He then reiterated a similar statistic from the COGFA report about Illinois’ struggle to improve job growth.

“More taxes on job creators and pushing capital investment out to other states is not going to grow the Illinois economy, is not going to create more jobs. We need more jobs in this state. We need better-paying jobs in this state. That’s how families in this state get ahead,” Curran said.

Bears stadium, insurance questions

Humming throughout the state Capitol’s corridors is the most intriguing question of the session: Where will the Chicago Bears next play their home football games? In Arlington Heights, in Hammond, Indiana, or nowhere new at all?

Last month, the House passed a so-called megaprojects bill, 78-32, that would allow the Bears to make special payments to local governments in lieu of higher property taxes. But the legislation has stalled in the Senate over concerns about whether its property tax relief provisions are meaningful for area school districts and residents.

“One of the subject areas we’re spending time on is the property tax relief element. There are some details there that we’re working through and that work will go on through next week,” state Sen. Bill Cunningham, a Chicago Democrat involved in stadium-related negotiations with the Bears, said Thursday.

The House bill that passed would require a municipality that hosts a megaproject to deposit half of the negotiated special payment into a locally held property tax relief fund. From there, 60% of the money would be used for property tax rebates for homeowners in areas where the megaproject is located, while 40% would be deposited into a statewide property tax relief fund.

But according to an analysis released by Pritzker’s office last week, the tax relief for homeowners would be negligible. For instance, if the Bears were to make a special payment in lieu of taxes of $20 million, $10 million would go to property tax relief, of which $4 million would reach all Illinois taxpayers, amounting to about $1.29 in property tax relief per homeowner, the analysis shows.

Cunningham said the Senate is taking that analysis into account and “seeing if there’s a way we can boost that number, or if we can better target the property tax relief to make it more meaningful.”

Amanda Kass, the research director at Good Jobs First, a watchdog group focused on state and local subsidies, warned that, as written, the legislation would have a broad reach beyond today’s Bears negotiations.

“This isn’t just providing a subsidy to the Bears; this is creating a new economic development incentive program statewide that would cut property taxes for projects of at least $100 million,” she said.

The use of tax increment financing, or TIF, across Illinois has already poked holes in the property tax base by tucking away billions into special funds that can only be spent within certain geographic boundaries.

“Creating this program is going to poke even more holes in that Swiss cheese,” Kass said, noting the legislation also limits how much local governments can tap into growing property values and pays relatively little back for property tax relief.

The current legislation will only “benefit one class of owners and that’s owners of these megadevelopment sites, who, again, in the case of the Bears, are billionaires.”

Despite Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson coming to Springfield last week, in part, to lobby against efforts that would better enable the Bears to leave the city, Cunningham said that right now the team’s move from the city is inevitable.

“At least right now, it seems to be a binary choice, either between the Bears going to Hammond or Arlington Heights,” he said. “I’d rather they stay in Chicago, but if faced with that binary choice, I’d rather they go to Arlington Heights.”

One possible silver lining for city sports fans: The Senate is exploring adding the Chicago Red Stars, the city’s professional women’s soccer club, to an amended megaprojects bill that could help the team build a new stadium.

The idea of including the Red Stars has periodically been floated at the state Capitol over the past couple of years, aligned with the Democrats’ theme of bringing equity to any stadium-building conversation.

The Senate is also expected to take up legislation that would give the state more authority to reject excessive homeowner and auto insurance rate hikes. The bill passed the House 66-40 in March. The push follows State Farm’s announcement last year that it was raising homeowners’ insurance premiums by more than 27%, citing rising repair costs and extreme weather, a move Pritzker publicly opposed.

The insurance industry has pushed back, arguing the bill would ultimately make coverage less affordable by impeding accurate pricing.

“Instead of targeting insurers with legislation that misses the root causes, states should work with the industry to lower risks for homeowners,” the Insurance Information Institute said in a policy brief.

State Sen. Michael Hastings, a Democrat from Frankfort and the main Senate sponsor, expressed confidence in the homeowners’ insurance language but said the auto insurance provisions, which were added in the House without Senate input, need more work.

“I spent two years studying, researching homeowners’ insurance policies. I am confident that the language we sent over for homeowners’ (insurance) was the right answer,” he said. “On the auto insurance side, it’s something that was just thrown on us and given to us.”

Pressing for attention

A slate of other legislation is competing for lawmakers’ attention in the session’s final stretch.

On energy and technology, a measure called the POWER Act would require data centers — whose power demands have strained the electric grid — to draw from local renewable sources and meet new water and electricity reporting requirements. Separate House and Senate versions of the bill have so far failed to advance.

Also being mulled by legislators are dueling housing-related proposals. One of them, from Pritzker, would require municipalities statewide to permit denser housing. The other one — pushed by municipal leaders opposed to significant portions of Pritzker’s bill — would make participation by local governments in pro-density policies optional.

The governor has also made a renewed push to ban cellphone use in schools, with certain exceptions. The proposal went nowhere last year, but the new iteration just needs Senate approval before heading to Pritzker’s desk.

Banks and financial services are also pushing lawmakers to repeal the state’s novel law banning certain credit card fees amid nearly two years of litigation, as the organization representing retailers seeks to keep it on the books. The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday vacated the previous district judgment in the case and canceled oral arguments that were set for later this week after the federal government intervened in the banks’ favor last month.

A bill championed by the Illinois secretary of state’s office to impose statewide regulations on electric scooters, bicycles and similar devices awaits House approval before the governor can sign it. And legislators could be pushing to pass a measure to help lower the cost of prescription drugs.

Lawmakers have also been trying to codify regulations governing driverless vehicles operating on roads in Chicago and other parts of Illinois. The move comes as autonomous car maker Waymo has been testing its vehicles on Chicago streets.

Hastings, who is carrying one of the bills related to Waymo, said he’s trying to create momentum with the measure. One point of contention, he said, was whether a “heightened protection” provision should apply to these vehicles if one of their passengers is injured, making the carmaker liable for the injuries. Hastings thinks it should, and he also said there are other issues to hash out with his Waymo bill.

“There’s some data privacy stuff that I have some concerns over that we’re working through,” he said regarding his Waymo bill.

Tribune reporters A.D. Quig and Olivia Olander contributed.

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