General Assembly – Spring session
·
Lawmakers convene for 2018 spring
session. The first day of the spring session was
Tuesday, January 30. In addition to
considering appropriation bills to make up the FY19 State of Illinois budget (for
the fiscal year which starts on July 1, 2018), the Illinois House and Senate
will consider many substantive bills.
With Amazon.com considering Chicago as one possible location as the site
for its second headquarters, the lawmakers will be eager to prioritize measures
to improve Illinois as a place for job creation and enterprise. Continuing competition from other Midwestern
states, especially Indiana, Missouri and Wisconsin, is expected to be a major
theme of the session’s substantive bill work.
The spring session will continue through May; the lawmakers are
constitutionally required to attempt to wrap up their spring 2018 work by May
31. The Illinois House posts its
schedules on the public Illinois General Assembly webpage; the schedules can be
found here.
State of the State address
·
Gov. Rauner concentrates on health of
private sector. Illinois in 2018 represents what would be the
world’s 17th largest economy if the Prairie State were an
independent country – roughly equivalent, in national terms, to the economies
of Spain and Canada. The progress of
this economy formed the heart of Gov. Bruce Rauner’s 2018 State of the State address to a joint session of the Illinois
General Assembly on Wednesday.
Rauner reminded the lawmakers that Illinois is the
home of 1.2 million job-creating small businesses, 36 Fortune 500 companies and
72,000 farms that plow 27 million acres of agricultural land. Illinois has 12.8
million residents, almost one-half of whom – 6.05 million – are in the nonfarm
payroll workforce, making and producing goods and services that are in demand
all over the world. Support for public
and private education is a necessary part of continuing this record of
achievement, and the Rauner administration and the General Assembly have
increased funding for K-12 public schools by $1.2 billion. The administration last year proposed, and
the General Assembly enacted, the Invest in Kids program to create tax
incentives for donations to scholarship granting organizations that help
high-achievement students obtain financial help to attend competitive private
schools.
The Governor called upon the assembled legislators and the
Illinois public sector to live up to the standards set by the private-sector
innovators who are working hard and creating jobs all over the state. This was Rauner’s fourth annual State of the State address since his term began in January 2015.
Budget – Balanced budget
·
Rep. John Cabello files
balanced-budget enforcement bill. House Republican Rep.
John Cabello, who supports moving the state towards balanced budgets, has filed
a bill to enforce this movement. HB 4483 makes his own pay and the pay of his
fellow members of the General Assembly contingent upon the passage of a
balanced budget by June 30th of each year. Under current law, General Assembly pay is a
“continuing appropriation” – meaning the pay is automatically appropriated
whether or not a budget is passed.
Cabello filed HB 4483 on Wednesday, January 31.
Sexual harassment – State ethics
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Rauner issues executive order;
prioritizes fight against sexual harassment in State workplaces.
Executive Order 2018-02 makes the State Officials and
Employees Ethics Act the controlling document over state workplaces with regard
to state employee actions and personal conduct.
This clarifies that the Ethics Act has priority over all other laws, rules,
and regulations in the scrutiny and judgment of state workplace conduct. Labor-management collective bargaining
agreements are explicitly made subject to the Ethics Act. The Ethics Act will be interpreted in close
coordination with the state government workplace’s official Code of Personal
Conduct to create a seamless weave over state workplaces in the expectation of
professional personal conduct.
This week’s Executive Order creates a Chief Compliance Office,
within the Office of the Governor, to oversee and monitor employee and official
professional conduct. The Office shall
have a Chief Officer, a Chief Ethics Officer, and a Chief Diversity Officer. State employees are already required, through
their Personnel Code, to immediately report allegations of sexual harassment to
a supervisor, ethics officer, or inspector general. The Compliance Office will oversee whether
these reports are being investigated and whether alleged offenders are being
subjected to confidential internal identification and workplace remedial
action. The executive order was filed
on Wednesday, January 31.
Sexual harassment – Workforces
·
House Republican Rep. Barbara Wheeler
calls for investigative action against industrial sexual harassment.
Dramatic stories have been told of sexual harassment in Illinois
private-sector workplaces, with several factories that make and assemble motor
vehicles identified as locuses of this conduct.
Wheeler’s HR 783 responds to reports from the Ford
Motor Company plant complex on the far south side of Chicago. The resolution, filed on Tuesday, January 30,
urges the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Illinois
Department of Human Rights, and the U.S. Department of Labor to investigate the
culture of harassment within workplaces organized by the United Auto Workers
(UAW) labor union. The resolution
describes multiple reports from the Chicago plant complex of incidents where
UAW union representatives and union officials either allegedly ignored or
allegedly participated in collective actions of gender-based and sexual harassment
of women workers, and offers support for women workers who have endured such
experiences at Ford Motor.
Technology – Blockchains
·
New technology eyed for state
information security. Blockchain software is software used to
replicate unique digital identification data across distributed databases. The identification data is attached to
packets of information, and are used by the entities that own or control the information
for data filing and storage. Blockchain can
be designed so that the identifier gets longer whenever a data packet is moved
from place to place, and can identify where the data packet has been and who
has looked at it. One well-known
blockchain use is as a verification platform for users of the cryptocurrency
“Bitcoin” to examine a bitcoin and assay its history and value. Blockchain software is generated by
mathematical algorithms written through the use of a newly-invented family of
global computer code. Blockchain is customarily
wielded and used within the overall platform of a distributed-node or
“cloud-based” system of data storage transfer.
The General Assembly and Gov. Rauner’s administration are working
together to examine the use of blockchain to enhance Illinois informational
security. In a report to the General Assembly filed this
week, the Illinois Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Task Force told the
General Assembly that future Illinois citizens and residents will be able to
use a blockchain-powered platform to access and store their
identification information. Illinoisans
will be able to access parts of the information and use these parts to talk to
agencies that provide services and verify identity. The Illinois Department of Financial and
Professional Regulation and the Illinois Department of Innovation and
Technology worked with the Task Force to generate the findings and
conclusions. House Republican
Representative Keith Wheeler served on the Task Force and co-signed the
report. The report was filed on
Wednesday, January 31.
Illinois Bicentennial
·
“The Illinois Chronicles” published in
February 2018 as celebration of state’s 200-year history.
Meant to serve as a hands-on teaching aid and resource, “The Illinois Chronicles” centers on a five-foot-long foldout
timeline of the two-century history of the Prairie State and the doings of some
of the colorful personalities who have lived here. The timeline includes news-like articles to
describe long-ago events, such as the rise of politician Abraham Lincoln, in a
contemporary setting. The book and
timeline have been prepared by the private sector and looked over by Illinois
leaders in teaching and history, including executives at the Illinois State
Board of Education and the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. The publication date of “The Illinois
Chronicles” is February 14, 2018.
Week in Review
·
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