🏘️🌎End of Session Wrap-Up, Part 3: My Legislative Wins

Dear Neighbor,

Continuing my wrap-up of the spring legislative session. We’ve already touched on the budget and some major bills that we sent to the Governor’s desk.

Today I’d like to share the bills I worked on that passed both chambers and are on their way to becoming law. If you’ve been a regular reader of this newsletter, some of these will be familiar to you! To be honest, it’s a shorter list than usual — in my new role as a budget negotiator, I was more focused on the dollars and cents this year and less so on the policy work. But we still got some important things done.

This year I passed three bills to improve the criminal legal system. One was a big “omnibus” bill of reforms to the Prisoner Review Board, an entity that has oversight of clemency and parole decisions. This package will professionalize the board, and it’ll ensure they’re focused on survivors of domestic violence when they consider terms of release for incarcerated people. It also makes improvements to the process of reviewing cases under the Joe Coleman Act, a very meaningful law I passed in 2021 to allow terminally ill people to be considered for early release from prison. That law hasn’t been implemented the way it should; this bill will help fix that.

I also passed legislation to get more data on civil asset forfeiture, to try to find out when police are taking people’s stuff and why. (Here’s a great John Oliver segment from 10 years ago on this topic.) And I passed a more technical bill clarifying how young people will be eligible for parole when a new law kicks in on that topic.

Two more bills I passed were focused on affordable housing. One extends a pilot program that incentivizes affordable housing development in high-cost areas downtown. It’s been hugely successful — nearly every developer building high-rises in the downtown area has taken advantage of the property tax credit to put affordable units on site in their buildings. So we’ll keep that running for ten more years. 

The other will require the state to gather data on “missing middle” housing — the vitally important slice of housing between subsidized affordable and market-rate luxury. There’s a huge gap in this kind of housing (hence the name), and we want to learn more about where it is and isn’t available so we can tailor good policy solutions.

Finally, I worked with our new State Senator Graciela Guzmán on a climate displacement task force. We know that climate change will cause huge population shifts across the country and around the world. We want to make sure Illinois is prepared for these changes. So we’re convening state leaders and policy experts to develop scenarios and plan for what’s coming.

One more wrap-up email coming: what issues we left unfinished this year. And if you're interested in discussing any of these topics with me and other progressive legislators, please scroll down for details about our upcoming town hall!

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Legislative Town Hall

Join your state elected officials for a community update on what they’ve been working on in Springfield these past few months. Come with your questions, share your thoughts, and enjoy some tacos while you're at it! RSVP here.

• Date: Wednesday, July 9

• Time: Free Tacos & Refreshments 5:30 - 6:00 pm | Town Hall 6:00 - 7:30 pm

• Location: Prosser Career Academy, 2148 N. Long Ave

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