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Champaign County officials say they are facing a host of critical repairs and improvements that need to be made at county buildings but have been deferred for years.
In response, they have proposed a 0.25 percent sales tax referendum they say will cost a median-income household only $20 per year.
The Champaign County Forest Preserve District is a week away from learning if voters will support its plea for an increase in taxes to support catching up on more than $4 million in backlogged capital projects.
The referendum proposes an increased tax levy of 0.0160 to 0.1033 percent. The district decided not to increase its tax levy before a tax cap implementation in 1996.
Long-standing Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky allocated about 75 percent of her spending during the 2019-20 election cycle so far on salaries, fundraising and a contribution of $292,632 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Her spending habits have remained consistent throughout her political career, with her annual Women’s Power Lunch as the biggest individual expense every year.
In his first-time incumbent election cycle, Rep. Sean Casten has spent only $3,157,127 this election cycle as of October 1, nearly half of what he spent last election cycle.
In the 2018 congressional election, Democrat Sean Casten spent upwards of $6 million to overtake the incumbent to become the representative for Illinois’ Sixth Congressional District, according to Federal Election Commission records.
Bobby Rush, Democratic representative for Illinois’ 1st District, has spent $402,044 so far during the 2019-2020 election cycle, with about $41,062 — one-tenth of his expenditures — going to his son, Jeffery Rush.
Isaac Wink, policy analyst at Reform for Illinois, said there may be a reason to keep close attention to these payments.
Democratic Congressman Mike Quigley has spent more than $631,000 so far as he runs for his seventh term as Illinois’ 5th Congressional District’s representative in 2020, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) data.
The expenditures in the 2019-2020 election cycle are a decrease from the amount he spent in the previous cycle, during which he spent over $1.2 million, according to the FEC.
Eight-term Illinois Congressman Daniel Lipinski, who lost his seat in this year’s primary, gave more than $17,000 in campaign money to Catholic schools and churches over the past four years.
Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, Democratic congressman of Illinois 4th congressional district, significantly decreased his re-election campaign spending from $1 million in 2017-2018 to only about half million so far in the 2019-2020 election cycle.
Andrew Mayersohn, committee researcher at the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit organization that analyzes political spending, said Garcia is spending less since he doesn’t face any “serious threats” in this campaign cycle. His opponent Jesus Solorio has only raised $755.
Congressional candidate Brad Schneider (D-IL 10th District) has sharply increased his donations to other groups from nearly $2 million in campaign funds as he seeks reelection in November.
According to analysis of FEC records, Schneider gave $53,825.48 to charities and medical workers, and $400,110.3 to the Democratic Congressional Committee, which uses those funds to support other Democratic candidates.
Last year, 233 criminal incidents occurred on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus according to the 2019 annual security and fire report, mandated by the federal crime reporting law for colleges known as the Clery Act.
But the university’s daily crime log routinely reports many more incidents.
Some law enforcement officials said the Clery Act guidelines can be confusing and unclear for crime reporting and can lead to ‘unintended harms’, especially in the wake of COVID-19, which may make campuses appear less safe than reality.
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign quietly announced on Tuesday an expansion of its Covid-19 testing by requiring students to be tested routinely even if they live in the community but do not plan to come to campus.
The decision comes during a week when two university epidemiologists recommended in a letter to city officials in Champaign and Urbana that they go back from current Phase 4 of the Illinois reopening plan to Phase 3 to limit the spread of the virus during the surge of returning students.