Illinois Valley Times

Less than 24 hours after the House Democrats approved the plan to address the unemployment trust fund deficit, Sen. Win Stoller (R-Peoria) urged his colleagues to vote no on it.

In a floor speech on March 23, Stoller laid out what he described as failures of the Ilinois legislature and Governor to address the issue of the unemployment trust fund deficit, and pointed to how other states had handled that issue, using federal funds. 

"Today, the majority party in Springfield chose to turn its back yet again on our state's employers by shortchanging our unemployment insurance trust fund debt," Stoller said on the Senate floor.

"This has been a complete train wreck - not just the last 48 to 72 hours of negotiations – over the last year this has been a complete and unmitigated disaster of the governor's making and it was completely avoidable," Stoller said. "I remember asking right here on the Senate floor two weeks ago when we pushed through the first version of this bill, I asked the question 'what's the rest of your plan?' Unbelievably, the same question is appropriate this afternoon. We are trying to pass a bill that does not come close to fixing this problem and we have no agreement in place and there is still no plan. Let's take a minute to understand how we got to this point." 

Stoller recounted the hardships businesses faced during the pandemic.

"Because of COVID, we ended up with a big hole in our  unemployment insurance trust fund, $4.5 billion. Our employers did not create this problem," Stoller said. "Our businesses were forced to close, in fact. They followed Gov. Pritzker's orders and closed their doors, and some of these businesses have not reopened yet. Some are permanently closed and others are still struggling; not just because of the four shutdowns, because of supply chain issues, labor shortages, inflation, and all that on top of already some of the highest tax rates in the country and some burdensome regulations. It's been an incredibly tough two years for our business and now we're asking them to bear the brunt of fixing this problem."

Senate Bill 2803 allocates $2.7 billion to the unemployment trust fund deficit. It also allocates funds to pay other debts, like pensions, and group health insurance bills.

“Illinois will still have the fourth largest UI trust fund deficit in the entire country,” said Senate Republican Leader Dan McConchie (R-Hawthorn Woods), as reported by WGEM. “And this proposal is only going to get us to the point that we were in the Great Recession of 2008.”