North Egypt News

Sen. Terri Bryant opposes the plan for unemployment insurance by the Democrats.

In a press release on March 24, Bryant called the Democrats' plan to address the current unemployment insurance deficit "irresponsible."

"By shortchanging the UI Trust Fund, we are going to harm the people who need the most help within our state," Bryant said. "This will hurt our hospitality and restaurant industry, an industry who is still struggling to recover from the governor's imposed shutdowns, more than anyone else."

In the release, Bryant noted that Senate Bill 2803 appropriates only $2.7 billion from the federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) of 2021 funds for the state's UI Trust Fund. She did call some late additions to the bill positive proposals, including roughly $1.4 billion of the state's General Revenue Fund for paying old health insurance bills, a $300 million boost to pension payments and paying more than $200 million in College Illinois debt.

"What Democrats did today is simply not right," Bryant said. "It's wrong for our state to lay the burden of fixing this problem on our state's employers when they did absolutely nothing to create the debt. It's even more disgraceful that Democrats decided to force this upon them when our state was given nearly double the amount of funds needed to replenish this deficit. We could've and should've avoided this by allocating some of the billions of federal dollars we got from the federal government last year. However, when we asked Democrats and the governor to put the federal dollars into the trust fund, they chose to ignore us and claimed we had plenty of time to address the problem. Now, a year later, we are being told by those same people that we are out of time and that this is the best that our state can do."

Senate Bill 2803 was filed by Sen. Don Harmon on March 9, and was sent to Gov. J.B. Pritzker on March 24. He signed it into law on March 25. The bill had an immediate effective date.