'What a difference a governor makes'
Pritzker, Lightfoot take office with ambitious progressive agendas as new highs beckon and a record low goes in the books
Gov. J.B. Pritzker and his wife, M.K., have their first dance as the state’s first couple at the inaugural ball in Springfield in January. (One Illinois/Zachary Sigelko)
By Ted Cox
“What a difference a year makes. What a difference a governor makes.”
It wasn’t just state Rep. Kelly Cassidy of Chicago who was saying that this year, but she said it as much as anyone — usually with the passage and signing into law of any of the several progressive pieces of legislation Gov. J.B. Pritzker saw through the General Assembly.
A new state minimum wage, legal weed (get ready for midnight, Illinois), a $40,000 minimum teacher salary, a balanced budget, the fair tax, the Reproductive Health Act, pension consolidation, and a record $45 billion capital bill for statewide infrastructure: those were just the high points of the legislative accomplishments achieved by the governor and the General Assembly.
It was quite a difference from two-year budget impasse Gov. Bruce Rauner imposed on the legislature — until he was finally overruled by the General Assembly on a new education funding formula and subsequently voted out of office last year.
Diana and Bruce Rauner attend Pritzker’s inauguration in January. (One Illinois/Ted Cox)
Pritzker took office in January and almost immediately passed a bill setting a $15 minimum wage, starting with a raise to $9.25 with the new year and then in annual increases until reaching $15 an hour in 2025. Within just over a month, he signed that bill into law, then shut down Sterigenics, the company blamed for a cancer cluster in the southwest suburbs of Chicago over emissions of carcinogenic ethylene oxide.
At the end of the General Assembly spring session in May came the flurry: legalization, the Reproductive Health Act, and the Rebuild Illinois capital plan.
Along about the same time, Lori Lightfoot took office as Chicago’s mayor after winning every ward in a battle of progressive politicians in a runoff with Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle. Lightfoot too advanced an ambitious agenda, and by the end of the year she had passed her first budget, filling an $800 million deficit without a major increase in property taxes.
It wasn’t all rosy good news this year. Farmers were hit with heavy rains and flooding to delay the spring planting season and never really recovered, all while struggling with President Trump’s ongoing trade wars, which saw Illinois corn and soybean farmers targeted with retaliatory tariffs. Trump himself continued to sew chaos in immigration and on the environment, while lying openly about Chicago and its murder rate on a visit to the city in October.
A sign of the times for Illinois farmers: a soybean field next to a field left unplanted after heavy spring rains and flooding. (One Illinois/Ted Cox)
After an impeachment inquiry built throughout the year in Congress, Trump was formally impeached by the U.S. House in December. The trial in the Senate is next year’s news.
Income inequality remained a pernicious problem, as demonstrated in the latest U.S. Census figures on the Gini index, a new tool to point out social ills.
But it was a good year to cover the news in this state. Our top story by readership at One Illinois featured the release of the latest U.S. News & World Report college rankings, which placed Northwestern and the University of Chicago in the top 10 nationally and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the top 50.
But our top story in the pure joy of covering it had to be the series of protests conducted by Illinois Youth Climate Strike. They marched thousands strong through Chicago in September in support of Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg, then returned in October and December. Led by young women in high school from across the Chicago area, they spoke eloquently and forcibly against climate change and in support of the Clean Energy Jobs Act in Illinois. They’ll be back next year, in March, and so will CEJA, still pending in the General Assembly.
Almost equally inspirational, politicians and young women raised the issue of the World Cup-champion U.S. Women’s Soccer Team getting equal pay with their less-successful male counterparts.
Even the lows were highs, as Mount Carroll reclaimed the state title for lowest temperature ever recorded at 38 below zero on Jan. 31.
One Illinois celebrated its one-year anniversary and went on to top 500 stories and move on toward 1,000 as we close in on our second birthday at the end of April.
What a difference a year made indeed, and next year figures to be no different in that regard. We’ll be the covering it.