Editorial Roundup: Illinois

Champaign News-Gazette. June 23, 2021.

Editorial: Best thing about new elections law - a later primary

Next year's primary election in Illinois won't be held in March, as has been the norm for most of the last 50 years. Instead, it will be held June 28.

There are a host of election law changes in legislation passed this year and already signed by Gov. J.B. Pritzker. Among them: making curbside and mail-in voting permanent, requiring sheriffs to permit voting by people held in jail but not convicted, and making next year's general election date (Nov. 8) a state and school holiday.

But the change that may please the broad electorate the most is a more-than-three-month delay in the date of the primary election. Instead of falling on the third Tuesday in March, it will be held the fourth Tuesday in June. The change was necessitated by COVID-19 and delays in data collection from the 2020 Census. That, in turn, delayed the creation of new congressional district maps.

So instead of candidates circulating their petitions in late summer, they'll have to do it in January and file them in early March in order to get on the primary election ballot. That'll make it tougher on candidates but much easier on voters.

Not only is the weather much nicer in June than in March - remember early voting begins 40 days before Election Day - but holding the primary about four months before the general election compresses the entire election season. You won't be hearing and seeing campaign ads for candidates from January into November next year. Instead, they might not start until April or May.

We've been here before. It's only been for the last 50 years that Illinois held its primary in March (except for 2008, when it was held in February to give campaign momentum to presidential candidate Barack Obama). Before that, the primary election was mostly in mid-April, although it was twice held in mid-June in the 1960s, and from 1914 to 1918, it was in mid-September.

There already are complaints about holding such a late primary. Some election officials say they'll have a difficult time finding judges to work while people are vacationing or are busy with summer activities. And University of Illinois students won't be around Champaign-Urbana to volunteer and work for candidates here.

It's already written in the election law that next year's June primary is a one-timer. But if voters like the later primary and shorter election campaign season, and they let their elected officials know it, perhaps lawmakers will see the light.

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Chicago Tribune. June 28, 2021.

Editorial: The real headline on Pritzker's energy bill: Another Exelon bailout

Coal - as a fuel, as a source of jobs, as a prime driver of pollution - has dominated the debate over Illinois' proposed energy policy overhaul. Moving toward clean energy requires a coal phaseout, so it's understandable that the hows and whys of doing that would take up some of the oxygen in the room.

When should two coal plants that some suburbs and downstate communities lean heavily on, one in southern Illinois and the other in Springfield, be phased out? How much joblessness will the state's move toward clean energy create? How much more damage to the environment will coal plants inflict if they're permitted to continue operating?

But shunted off as a footnote has been a topic that should be the glaring headline: bailing out ComEd's parent company, Exelon. This giant utility company, again.

Lawmakers couldn't find agreement on the bill earlier this month but are expected to return later this summer to smooth out their disagreements. A big stumbling block has been a measure in the bill that would have set a timeline for the phaseout of the Prairie State Generating Station in southern Illinois, which got big investments from several Chicago-area communities. Those suburbs have resisted the phaseout. Unions, meanwhile, don't like Pritzker's proposal to lower carbon emission limits on natural gas plants, which could lead to shutdowns of those plants ahead of a 2045 closure deadline and job losses for their members.

But what's the biggest problem for our pocketbooks with Pritzker's proposed energy bill? If passed, it would slap on the backs of ratepayers $700 million in subsidies over five years to Exelon, the parent company of ComEd, to keep open three of the utility's nuclear power plants.

That's the same utility giant that won big subsidies from the General Assembly in 2016 for two of its nuclear power plants - after greasing the deal with jobs and contracts for allies of then-House Speaker Michael Madigan. ComEd admitted its actions in a deferred prosecution agreement and paid a $200 million fine. Indictments of top ComEd executives and lobbyists followed, along with Madigan's chief of staff.

Given the utility's outsize profit margins, it's impossible to justify yet another bailout.

We're glad it didn't make it out of the General Assembly yet and to Pritzker's desk for his signature. There are far too many unanswered questions and deals struck behind closed doors.

When lawmakers resume work on the bill later this year, the first thing they should forge is a consensus to leave out the subsidies for the billion-dollar utility company. Despite widely known corruption in the deferred prosecution agreement with the company, the fact that it's still on the table would be shocking in any other state. Not ours, though.

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Chicago Sun-Times. June 28, 2021.

Editorial: COVID-19 vaccines should be mandatory for all Illinois prison employees

Prisons and their surrounding communities would be safer. And a dangerous backlog of people in county jails awaiting transfer would be reduced.

As the nation fights to put a lid on the COVID-19 crisis, the pandemic remains a major problem in Illinois prisons - and it's time the Pritzker administration stepped in to fix one glaring failing.

Fewer than half of the 13,000 people who work in Illinois' prisons have been vaccinated against the coronavirus, as Kyra Senese and Jacob Geanous of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation's Documenting COVID-19 project, reported this week in the Sun-Times. Meanwhile, two-thirds of state prisoners are vaccinated.

That means thousands of state prison workers are at risk of catching the virus and spreading it in their workplace and communities.

Equally troubling: To keep unvaccinated state inmates and personnel safer from the virus, Illinois corrections facilities have slowed the intake of convicted prisoners from county jails. This has resulted in a backlog of some 1,000 inmates in county jails who are awaiting transfer to state prisons. Jails are facing overcrowding, ballooning costs and an upswing in inmate fighting.

For the past year, the Pritzker administration has done a pretty good job of managing the pandemic, but they're flatly failing here. The state should require vaccinations, as a condition of employment, for all state corrections employees.

Last week, San Francisco became the first big city to mandate its workers receive coronavirus vaccinations. And in Texas last week, more than 150 Houston Methodist Hospital employees refused vaccination - and as a consequence were required to quit or were fired.

These are the tough, but necessary actions needed to clear out the prisoner transfer backlog and to make safer the communities in which Illinois prisons are located.

An American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union spokesperson said it is urging members to get vaccinated, but clearly - more than a year into the pandemic - that effort alone isn't enough.

'œWhat happens in prison does not stay in prison,'ť Uptown People's Law Center Executive Director Alan Mills told WBEZ in May.

'œSo even if the prisoners are 100% vaccinated, which, by the way, they're not, the guards are still going to spread it among themselves and then they're going to bring it back to the community, back to their families,'ť Mills said. 'œIt's a disaster waiting to happen in the communities around (prisons).'ť

The Pritzker administration can and should fix this now.

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