Page 22 - June2021

Redistricting is underway
The Illinois legislature had a very busy spring session. As of this writing, it is not quite wrapped up, as they plan to return later in June to address energy policy and the elected Chicago School Board issue.
The House and Senate passed their new legislative maps for the next de- cade. This redistricting process is to happen every 10 years using the new census data. It appears to be a map that
will continue to favor Democrats and passed with
only Democratic votes. In addition, they passed new
maps for the downstate Supreme Court seats. They are hold- ing off on redrawing the Congressional seats until final cen- sus data is delivered. As you recall, Illinois is losing one Con- gressional seat in the new map. As part of that process, next year’s primary election has been moved from mid-March to June 28.
The legislature passed more than 650 bills covering a va- riety of other issues, including a $42 billion budget, some ethics reform measures, a constitutional amendment to ban so-called right-to-work laws, modifications to the pot dis-
pensary law, affordable housing measures and many others. In the area of policing, an omnibus bill (HB 3443) was passed to attempt to address some of the items with a July 1 effective date. There will continue to be ongoing discussions about other matters in the law that passed last January on policing. Some members of the Black Caucus were upset with these changes, and many Republi- cans are still upset with the original bill from Jan-
uary, as well as with how the process worked then. A couple of key items had their effective dates pushed back from July 1 to next January, including the three calls provision for detainees and training. Oth- er items that were addressed included tightening the lan- guage regarding the legal liability of officers for turning off body cams, law enforcement misconduct and duty to inter- vene. It was a long negotiation led by Senator Sims and Rep- resentative Slaughter. We had strong support for changes from Senators Cunningham, Martwick, Hastings and Crowe and Representatives Manley, Hurley, Guerrero-Cuellar, Ste- phens, Moylan, LaPointe and others. The discussions will
continue.
DAVE SULLIVAN
22 CHICAGO LODGE 7 ■ JUNE 2021