However, state’s budget impasse continues.
Veto Session Brought Some Small Business Wins
In less than a month, Illinois’ new General Assembly will report to Springfield for the 2017 legislative session, and they will have a mess to deal with.
At this writing, Gov. Bruce Rauner and the legislative leaders had still not come to an agreement on a plan to fix the state’s budget crisis, despite several meetings. On the governor’s end, he said he would pass a stopgap budget if term limits and a property tax freeze were agreed to; on Speaker Michael Madigan’s end, he said the budget deal shouldn’t be dependent on the governor’s reform agenda. In the meantime, Rauner vetoed a $215 million Chicago Public Schools pension relief funding bill, which may further impact the budget negotiation difficulties.
Veto session, meanwhile, brought both good news and bad news for Illinois small businesses. The primary win was that labor unions’ efforts to override Rauner’s amendatory veto of the prevailing wage bill were unsuccessful. Although the Senate overrode the veto during the first half of veto session, the House failed to do the same, which left the governor’s amendatory veto in place.
The prevailing wage bill, SB 2964, would have required the Illinois Department of Labor to use collective bargaining agreements to set prevailing wage rates throughout the state. This would have inflated wage rates in nonunionized areas, deterring nonunion contractors from bidding on jobs, decreasing competition for public work, and increasing the costs of public works projects.
Other veto session wins included restrictions on tax increase measures during lame duck session. HJRCA 62, a constitutional amendment, passed the House but was not yet taken up in the Senate. The amendment would state that tax increase legislation may not be passed during a lame duck session unless it receives a three-fifths vote. Similarly, House Resolution 1494 was passed, stating that no tax increase legislation may be considered at all by the General Assembly during the lame duck period.
Additionally, an NFIB-opposed bill, SB 2814, passed, giving Exelon a bailout in exchange for the energy giant keeping 4,200 jobs in place at Clinton and Quad Cities plants. However, ratepayers will pay for the subsidy, increasing energy costs on small and medium-sized businesses.
