Rock Island Today

Sen. Win Stoller (R-Peoria) voiced his concerns about Illinois’ unemployment insurance debt during a recent press conference.

“While other states took action, our governor did nothing except go on a spending spree using some of these American Rescue Plan Act dollars for pork projects and bigger government and another non-COVID related spending,” Stoller said at the event. “He sat on his hands instead of rolling up his sleeves and taking action, and now we're faced with billions of dollars in debt and no plan to solve it other than impending tax benefit cuts, tax increases and more debt. We had all the money we needed to solve this problem, and we didn't do it.”

The topic has garnered heat from Republicans.

“This action will lead to the largest tax increase on business in the state of Illinois in this state’s history,” Sen. Don DeWitte (R-West Dundee) said to WTTW. “Employers who have been treated with absolute disregard throughout this pandemic will literally be left holding the bag, and will be responsible for filing the remaining deficit to the unemployment insurance trust fund.”

“This has been an incredibly difficult year two years for employers,” Stoller said. “The last thing we should be doing right now is putting an additional burden on our employers with this tax increase that will cost us jobs. The third option which again is not a good option is to go into more debt. It seems that the Democrats always try to solve their overspending with additional debt, but that is not the solution.”

According to WTTW, the state will use $2.7 billion of the remaining ARPA funds to put toward the unemployment insurance trust fund debt the state incurred during the pandemic. The state will not fully fund the UI trust fund like other states have done.

Governor J.B. Pritzker signed the amendment to Senate Bill 2803 that allowed the state to use ARPA funds for the debt in March.

“The reason there is no agreement is that the governor and the Democrats decided to go ahead alone with only a partial fix of this trust fund deficit and it severely short changes the amount we need to put into the trust fund to get it back to solvency,” Stoller said. “In fact, it’s $1.8 billion short of what we need.”

The General Assembly has until April 8 to pass the Fiscal Year 2023 budget, which includes the funding for the unemployment insurance trust fund.