Welch on Veto Session: "This is Sausage Making"
House Speaker Chris Welch speaks on the House floor Thursday. (Photo: Speaker’s Office)
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After the conclusion of a marathon second week of the fall veto session, House Speaker Chris Welch tells The Illinoize Democrats had a goal to “get some big things done while we were [in Springfield.]”
In an interview conducted Friday morning, just hours after the House and Senate adjourned for the calendar year, Welch said he was proud Democrats advanced legislation reforming and funding mass transit and a bill they claimed will reduce electricity rates across the state.
By Wednesday afternoon, comments from Governor JB Pritzker throwing water on the House mass transit proposal had reverberated through the Statehouse. A reported late-night meeting between Pritzker, Welch, and Senate President Don Harmon apparently revived the bill, which passed each chamber in the early hours of Friday.
“The Senate passed a proposal in May that the House didn't like. In veto session, we filed a bill, passed out of committee, that the Governor and the Senate President didn't like,” Welch said. “The Senate President said he couldn't get that passed in his chamber. And the Governor and the Senate President offered other ideas, and I offered other ideas. That's how a legislative process works. I said it all along. We had time and we were able to continue to meet and work through it. And we got some big things done by working together.”
Welch defended the choice to raise tolls on the Illinois Tollway system and the RTA sales tax, especially in a time of high cost of living concerns around the state.
“We have said all along, for over a year and a half, that it was important to save our transit system. And we said to do that, we were going to have to do something that we had never done before: we were going to have to do reforms, governance, and funding in the same package if we were going to get it done right,” he said. “In the long term, saving public transit and reforming administration is something that we all agreed that we needed to invest in. It's important. We need to keep trains running on time, busses running on time, people employed. All of that is critical to a state's economy. Allowing the public transit system to collapse and not address the issues that we addressed would have been far worse for our state. It was critical.”
After a summer where energy consumers saw bills that doubled and tripled in places this summer, Welch defended energy legislation passed this week that didn’t directly help reduce energy prices. Welch called the energy bill that focuses on battery storage and energy efficiency programs “historic and monumental.”
“People have been scared to open their utility bills all over the state, pick a region. It was important for us to get something substantive done, and that's what we did. And that can't be understated,” Welch said. “It's going to help people. It's going to make Illinois a better place. And I hear your frustration, just like I've heard frustration of regular folks at the doors. That's why I believe that this was the right thing for us to do this week.”
Welch didn’t specifically address congressional redistricting, but he did say lawmakers weren’t expected to return to Springfield this year.
You can watch our one-on-one conversation with Speaker Welch below or at this link.
