SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Illinois lawmakers worked through the night, finally passing a more than $46 billion budget in the early morning hours on Saturday.
The budget will include a list of roughly $1.8 billion in temporary tax relief for Illinois residents.
Included in that will be lifting the one percent grocery tax for a year and delaying a scheduled increase in the gas tax until January. The gas tax increase was scheduled to go into effect in July.
The budget also doubles the property tax rebate up to $300 and sends a one-time payment of at least $50 to most individuals and $100 dollars per child.
On top of all that, the earned income tax credit, which helps low income working families, will be expanded and there will also be a sales tax holiday for back to school purchases.
The hand outs are meant to help Illinois residents with the impacts of inflation.
“Is this the perfect answer? I will be the first one to say ‘no, it is not’ (however) I will not go home to my constituents and say I did nothing,” said Democratic State Representative Sue Scherer (D-Decatur).
However, there are plenty of critics of the plan.
Republican critics in Springfield suggest the tax relief is just being used to placate voters. They assert it should be made permanent.
“This really is a missed opportunity for the people of Illinois to get their money back,” said Chapin Rose (R-Champaigne), “They’re the ones busting their butt every day, getting out of bed to go to work to pay these taxes. They’re the ones getting hit with the price at the pump. And (the tax relief) is going to expire as soon as the election’s over, wow.”
State Sen. Win Stoller (R-Germantown Hills) criticized the budget process, saying lawmakers barely had enough time to read the nearly 35-hundred page budget bill.
“In what has become all too common for the General Assembly, Democrat lawmakers have rammed through yet another major piece of legislation while the people of our state are asleep in their beds,” Stoller said.
There is also some concern about $140 million in state funding that is being moved to cover the delay in gas tax increases.
The money was meant to help property owners afford the cost of clean-up and remediation of leaky fuel storage tanks buried underground across the state.
According to NBC 5 in Chicago, Pritzker’s EPA maintains an online database of 30,046 sites targeted for leaking storage-tank cleanup
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