The Illinois General Assembly concluded its spring session with a state budget that its architects are describing as balanced and tax-neutral for individuals, but which Wirepoints founder Ted Dabrowski told Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer contains at least a billion dollars in new taxes directed at corporations, and more immediately noteworthy, a 3.2 percent pay raise for state legislators. That increase brings annual salaries for what is technically a part-time position to $101,000, representing roughly a fifty percent nominal increase over eight years. The median full-time worker in Illinois earns approximately sixty-six thousand dollars annually.
Dabrowski said the budget perpetuates the slide Illinois has been in rather than changing its trajectory. He noted that state spending has been essentially flat for three consecutive budgets at around fifty-five to fifty-six billion dollars, which he acknowledged is semi-good news in the sense that Pritzker and the Democratic majority have lost the political capacity to keep increasing spending by multiple billions annually, having failed to pass a progressive income tax and facing other constraints. But he said there is nothing in the current budget that begins to address the structural fiscal problems that have been building for decades, and that the balanced budget claims Pritzker and Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton will be making on the campaign trail are the same misleading framing the state has used for years, never honestly accounting for the unfunded pension obligations that dwarf the annual budget.
On the Bears stadium situation, the General Assembly failed to advance the original proposal that would have allowed the team to negotiate a payment in lieu of property taxes for an owner-occupied stadium, but did pass a Senate measure that would allow the Bears to set up a local stadium authority in municipalities with populations over seventy thousand, such as Arlington Heights, which would finance construction, own the facility, and lease it back to the Bears with no property tax obligation. The measure did not clear the House, meaning nothing is resolved, but the framework remains available for a future legislative push requiring larger majorities. Dabrowski said this structure resembles more traditional publicly financed stadium deals common across American professional sports, and while privately financed stadiums like SoFi in Los Angeles, Gillette in New England, and MetLife in New Jersey represent a newer and more taxpayer-favorable model, most deals are still done through public authority structures. His core concern is not which financing model is used but that the opacity of these arrangements makes it essentially impossible for the public or even informed observers to assess whether the deal serves the taxpayer’s interest, and that in Illinois with its particular history of corruption, the presumption has to be skepticism.
The Build Act, which would have allowed state preemption of local zoning laws to mandate that developers be permitted to build up to eight-unit residential buildings on single-family zoned lots by right, without any local hearing or council vote, did not pass and will not be law this year. Dabrowski said the concentrated opposition from mayors across the state, including Naperville Mayor Scott Wehrli and the Illinois Municipal League, made a meaningful difference in stopping it. He said it is genuinely good news that the effort to reclaim local control over zoning decisions succeeded, and that centralization of power in Springfield on decisions that have historically belonged to communities is one of the most damaging long-term trends in Illinois governance. He said the Build Act will almost certainly return after the November elections when legislators feel less exposed to suburban voter backlash, but that the coalition that formed to oppose it this session provides a template for fighting it again.
On Brandon Johnson’s proposed tenants rights ordinance for Chicago, which would require landlords to show just cause before evicting or declining to renew a lease, restrict what the city would define as unconscionable rent increases, and create a fund for tenant legal representation against landlords, Dabrowski called it another example of the same centralizing, property-rights-restricting impulse that produced the Build Act, now applied to the landlord-tenant relationship. He said Chicago is competing with New York and California to see who can drive away productive economic activity fastest.
On what comes next for him personally in the Illinois policy and political arena, Dabrowski said decisions are being made but he is still working through the details. His broader observation is that there is substantial opposition to the direction Illinois is heading but it is fragmented and uncoordinated, and that the inability to bring disparate opposition groups together into a unified force is the primary structural obstacle to changing anything. He said he was encouraged by the Build Act fight as an example of what coordinated opposition can accomplish, and that he is looking for the moment when the pendulum can begin swinging back the other way.