North Cook News

Rep. Deanne Mazzochi on March 4 hosted a video webinar about Illinois infrastructure, touching on the Rebuild Illinois program and noting that Gov. Pritzker has suggested temporarily pausing the gas tax increase scheduled for July. 

"We also voted for - and I certainly voted for this in 2019 - it was a historic rebuild Illinois infrastructure and capital improvement plan called 'Rebuild Illinois.' That's a situation where we've had, again, desperate need for some infrastructure improvements and infrastructure funding in the state of Illinois, so I'm very glad that we have that Rebuild Illinois program, so we can finally start investing some of the funds that we need into necessary infrastructure," Mazzochi said. "One of the issues that's also been in the news today, or very recently, is in 2022 Gov. Pritzker proposed pausing certain increases that are automatically scheduled to take place for the gas tax, a .022 cents per gallon on July 1, to try to give families a little bit of relief, in theory, although unfortunately sometimes those types of things don't actually lead to meaningful changes at the pump." 

When Pritzker took office in 2019, he doubled the Illinois gas tax from 19 cents to 38 cents, costing Illinois taxpayers an additional $1.3 billion every year, Illinois Policy reported. Pritzker also instituted an automatic, annual gas tax increase. Before Pritzker took office, Illinoisans paid the tenth-highest gas tax in the nation. Pritzker's policies pushed Illinois to the third-highest gas tax.

U.S. News ranked the infrastructure in each state and placed Illinois at 26th overall, and 31st for transportation infrastructure.