End of Session Recap: My Initiativesđź’ˇ
Dear Neighbor,
One more email for you wrapping up the spring legislative session which adjourned on April 8. If you missed either of my previous two recaps, you can find my budget summary here and a deep dive into our public safety legislation here.
Today I’d like to talk to you about the initiatives I’ve been championing this session, and where they all ended up.
Let’s start with affordable housing. As the chair of the Housing Committee, I’ve been keenly focused for the last eighteen months on dedicating some of our federal relief funds to building and preserving affordable housing in our communities. I’m proud to report that we secured an investment of $150 million in subsidies for new affordable rental units. This is going to help build thousands of apartments across the state with rents guaranteed to be affordable for at least the next 30 years.
You may also remember me talking about fentanyl — the highly deadly synthetic opioid that’s often mixed into other drugs and gray-market supplements. Well, we passed landmark legislation legalizing fentanyl test strips for distribution at hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies. These strips will help enable young people who might be experimenting with different substances make sure that they’re not accidentally taking fentanyl too. Dr. Beth Weinstock, who lost her son Eli to an accidental fentanyl overdose, gave powerful testimony in support of our bill which you can see some of here.
Other measures I passed include a bill giving fee waivers to homeless students and making sure they’re able to participate in all school activities; a measure providing resources for college students with children so that they can access childcare support while they’re in school; and a new law that will give incarcerated people access to their records from their stay in the Department of Corrections, which had previously been denied to them.
All these bills are headed to the Governor’s desk, and we anticipate he’ll sign them all into law.
On a few other subjects, though, we came up a little short. I passed three bills in the House that didn’t get a hearing in the Senate before we adjourned.
One was on insulin affordability, which you’ve heard me talk about a lot by now. I was able to pass a bill with unanimous bipartisan support in the House to create an emergency insulin supply program, where folks in crisis could walk into a pharmacy and get a 30-day supply of insulin for only a nominal fee. Another was about gender violence protections, allowing survivors to hold employers responsible if they ignore or cover up repeated sexual assault or harassment by their employees. The third was an environmental protection for ethanol production, making sure that seeds treated with pesticides aren’t used in making fuels. This was done in Nebraska, with disastrous consequences, and we want to ban the practice in Illinois before it gets started.
These bills are all still alive! We’ll be going back down to Springfield in the fall for what’s called “veto session,” and we’ll be working really hard to make sure the Senate calls all three of these bills for a vote.
That’s all for now! We obviously didn’t cover all the hundreds of bills passed in the legislature this year, but hopefully this gives you a picture of what I’ve been working on, and what the General Assembly as a whole has been focused on.
If you have any specific questions, or ideas you’d like to share in person, we’ve still got some slots available for our Coffee with Will this weekend at The Brewed! Click here to sign up>>.
You can also save the date for our upcoming legislative town hall at Kosciuszko Park on Tuesday, May 24 at 6:00pm where we'll take a deeper dive into these bills, and more!
Thanks, and I’ll see you soon—
Will