Advocates hoped that this would be the year that lawmakers overhauled how higher education is funded in Illinois. Alas, it was not to be.
The spring legislative session just ended without action on a new higher education funding formula. A recent version of the plan would add about $1.7 billion in state spending to higher ed over the next 10 to 15 years. It would distribute that new money using a needs-based formula, similar to one now used in K-12 education.
It was one of several big-ticket items that advanced but didn’t reach final passage during the spring session, along with an energy bill, transit bill, and Tier 2 pension reform.
WCBU spoke to state Rep. Sharon Chung, a Democrat from Bloomington, about what got done and what didn’t this spring. The following transcript of our conversation has been lightly edited.
WCBU: What do you think is the most impactful thing that lawmakers accomplished during this spring session?
Chung: One thing we were not shy about letting everybody know from the very beginning was, we knew it was going to be a tough budget year, so we knew that there were going to have to be some tough decisions made.
But one of the things that I'm really proud of is the commitment that we've made into investing into health care systems. We have increased our funding to federally qualified health centers. We've increased our funding to safety net hospitals, to free and shareable clinics, given direct service professionals a bump in their wage pay, and same with community care providers. So all of those things are really great investments into the overall health care system in our state.
The narrative coming out of this session has been a lot about what didn't get done versus what did get done. Do you think that’s fair?
I mean, I guess so. I think we all do that in anything that we do. You kind of think about what could have gotten done, what we could have done better, you know?
I get it. I mean, I'm not sure if the criticisms are all totally warranted, but I do understand that some things were left on the table. I think transit is a big looming issue, the energy bill, things like that, and then other sort of outstanding issues, like Tier 2 pension fix and along with higher education funding. Those things I knew were probably going to be a bigger lift this year. So when a lot of people came and talked to me about those things, I said, “I'm really not sure if we're going to be able to tackle all of those this year.”
In what ways did what's happening in Washington, either through Congress or the Trump administration directly, impact what was happening in Springfield this spring?
That was something that we always knew in the back of our heads, because of a lot of the chaos that's happening there.
We still don't really know what's going to happen to Medicaid, same with SNAP. You know, there's still talk about us possibly coming back in the summer, even though I don't think that's probably going to happen. That we would have to be prepared to come back during the summer to try and figure out what was happening with Medicaid, if we had to try and step in to help fund that.
It was a lot of things up in the air. And I think that's what made this year's budget especially tough, because we didn't know what was on the horizon, and yet we had to be able to pass the budget by May 31. It was a tough year overall. And I still think that we are probably going to be dealing with a lot more uncertainties here in the coming years, to be honest.
The exact shape of the state budget and the revenue portions of it didn't really become public until just hours before they faced a final vote. There’s very little time for public scrutiny from the media or the public at large. That’s kind of a weird way to do all that, isn’t it?
I understand that. We had, as a caucus, been talking about a lot of the revenue ideas. Maybe with two weeks of session left to go, we had been presented a number of different revenue ideas. And from what I'd heard, it was including what the governor had introduced in his budget, the different revenue ideas he had. I think there were four. And I think the Senate maybe was presented with, I don't know, fewer than 10. And then the House, we were presented with close to 20.
But I think what was pretty, pretty widely agreed upon was that we did not want to do anything like an overall sales tax hike or an overall income tax hike or anything like that. That that was off the table for so many of us. So it's trying to figure out, do we figure out how we tax the wealthy more? Dr do we figure out how to carve out revenue from a smaller subsection of people?
All those sorts of things were really discussed, and then negotiated between the governor's team and the Senate team. And that's why it took a while for it to come all together, because they were meeting every day for quite a few weeks.
Say what you will about the One Big Beautiful Bill, but at least the public has weeks or even longer to digest what’s in it, to offer feedback on it, at least to the senators who are going to be voting on it after U.S. House passage. Doesn’t doing it this way in Springfield rob the public from being able to weigh in and lobby you about what’s being considered?
Yeah, and I understand that. I got quite a few emails at the last minute from different groups who were saying, ‘Pass the energy bill’ or, ‘We don't want to see the sports betting fee to go in.’ And I honestly think I got over 100 emails about that.
But what's hard about that part was that it was part of the larger revenue package, so we could not just take that one piece out. Though, at the last minute we were able to take one piece out. That was the digital ad tax. It wasn't discussed with the House Democratic caucus. It was sort of put in by the Senate. We had no idea. Some folks caught it. And then a group of legislators, myself included, we actually went into the speaker and we said, ‘How is this in here?’ It's something that we never discussed as a caucus, that we agreed on, so we would like to see it taken out. And to give Speaker Welch quite a bit of credit, he listened to us and was able to take that out.
I think that all of us are sent to Springfield to represent our districts, and I feel like I do that fairly well, considering a lot of the feedback that has come over to me throughout session, just me knowing the makeup of the district that I feel like I am able to make the best decisions that I know on behalf of my district.
Let’s talk about education. One of the issues that did not reach the finish line during this spring session was a new funding model for higher education. Why not?
It was a big price tag.
And legislation takes a long time sometimes to really come to fruition. This is one of those things I know the advocates and the bill sponsors, they have been working on for some time, but now to be able to put it out into public, get a lot of education on the idea, and then to be able to take feedback from people on it, and then to be able to figure out how we're going to pay for it, that's going to take a while.
We're in our two-year General Assembly. We just finished the first year, so I'm hopeful that we can get it done next year.
The University of Illinois came out publicly against the funding formula plan, saying it essentially wouldn't be getting its fair share. What impact do you think that had on the prospects for this?
I have to say, I did hear that from some of my colleagues. They have constituents who have a hard time even getting into the U of I right now. And if it is sort of the crown jewel of our state higher education system, what does this mean if they aren't getting their fair share of funding?
We're looking at this as trying to fund education fairly and equitably throughout the state. We're talking about Illinois State. Illinois State has always, historically, gotten less money per student compared to all the other universities. And I've brought up many times this year in our appropriations committee that ISU tends to sort of be punished for being good at what they do. They're good at keeping their enrollment steady. They've been very good at teaching special education teachers to be able to go and teach in schools. They've also had a really big veterans recruitment program. Those are costs that aren't really funded well by the state at all. And so ISU ends up eating that cost a lot of the time.
There was a lot of discussion about this with EBF, or evidence-based funding, funding for K-12 schools. That took quite a while to come together. So again, this is still a work in progress.
One thing that did pass this session was a bill that will mandate high school seniors and community college students automatically be offered enrollment at state universities when their GPA qualifies them. You sponsored that. What impact do you think that will have?
We always have talked about, what can we do to get students to stay in Illinois to go to college? And sometimes there are students out there who maybe might not feel like they're “college material.” Maybe they're also the first-generation to go to college. So, to be able to get that acceptance letter can mean a lot to somebody so that they can feel like, oh, maybe I can do this. Maybe I can go to college.
Let's talk about data centers. A bill that you sponsored passed, which will allow the Bloomington-Normal Water Reclamation District to sell treated wastewater to private companies, like those that run data centers which need water for cooling. What do you think the impact of that will be?
I don't think there are any active data centers who are trying to come here right now. But I think that we see it as an economic development sort of enticement.
We are not using clean drinking water that could be used for people, but we're using treated wastewater to be able to do that. Water is such a scarce resource, and especially it's gotten a lot of attention this year with the Mahomet Aquifer.
It's one of those things that I think it's a really good boost for economic development.
The flip side of data centers is that they also require a lot of electricity. Electricity rates for most Twin City residents are about to increase considerably this summer. How do you think that we should balance our economic interest in attracting data centers with not creating a supply and demand problem on electricity that raises costs for everyone else?
Absolutely. That has been a very big conversation that we've had throughout Springfield this whole year — the strain that we have on energy, and then finding out that our energy prices are going up this summer.
This is something that, we just see the wastewater piece of it as being a one part of the discussion. The municipalities, the county, or whoever – if a data center does come here -- it's something that we'll all have to consider as a whole to see the impact that would be in our community. But at least this one part I was happy to help out with.
I know that this is one of the sticking points for the energy bill, as to why it didn't get over the finish line this year, because of lot of these concerns about higher rates this summer, trying to figure out how we balance strains on our grid. And then also just making sure that we're making responsible decisions. I think that that's one of the reasons why it did get stalled up. We thought that it was going to be a smaller energy bill, and it kind of grew into a bigger energy bill. And in talking with leader Jay Hoffman about it as the negotiations were going on, I knew it was going to be a bit tricky to get there.
