Travelers pass through Chicago's O'Haire Airport. Two republican legislators are calling on Gov. J.B. Pritzker to present his plan for getting business around the state up and running again once restrictions are lifted. | Wikimedia commons
Travelers pass through Chicago's O'Haire Airport. Two republican legislators are calling on Gov. J.B. Pritzker to present his plan for getting business around the state up and running again once restrictions are lifted. | Wikimedia commons
Illinois state representatives Brad Halbrook (R-Shelbyville) and Chris Miller (R-Oakland) are calling on Gov. J.B. Pritzer to outline his plans to offset the problems created for Illinois businesses by COVID-19-related shutdowns, the Illinois Review reported.
A statement from the two Republicans noted that when restrictions were first put in place, there was more uncertainty about how the situation would develop.
“We did not know how widespread this disease would be, and we did not know what parts of the country would be the most affected,” read the statement.
The representatives noted that most of the confirmed cases have been in the Chicago area for Illinois, while rural communities in the south of the state with lower density population appear to be less obviously affected.
The statement called for the less-affected parts of the state to be treated differently from the more densely populated areas now that officials have a better concept of how infections are progressing.
"We need a plan to bring businesses online and that plan needs to allow more flexibility for regions of the state not as impacted by coronavirus," Holbrook and Miller wrote. "Most importantly, we need target dates to help our local businesses.”
While they acknowledged that any dates set now could change due to the evolving nature of events, business owners would feel better if they had some idea of what the road out of the crisis is going to look like.
“People’s lives are being upended and the longer these shutdowns go on, the higher probability there will be no job for many people when this is all over,” they wrote, and the Illinois Review reported.
The representatives proposed several measures to begin working toward a full-functioning economy in Illinois.
They include freezing unemployment insurance rates for a year and ensuring businesses aren’t penalized by higher rates due to the crisis and freezing the state’s minimum wage for 18 months instead of allowing it to increase to $10 on July 1 as scheduled. They also recommended putting the light trailer license fee back to $18 from $118, offering a sales tax holiday through the duration of restrictions, and pro-rating abatement of property taxes to reflect the duration of restrictions.
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