“Your Timely Roundup of Local, State, and Federal Updates”
Chamber members:
New rules have been released regarding a federal tax credit for scholarship that the state will need to decide if will become involved with, new information has been shared in a report on homelessness in Illinois, and Google is coming to the table in an agreement with Constellation to fund energy expansion.
*Government Affairs Roundup brought to you by CITGO*
Federal Scholarship Tax Credit Rules Released as Illinois Weighs Participation
New federal rules for a scholarship tax credit are now in place, giving Illinois officials more clarity as the state considers whether to participate in a program that could direct millions of dollars toward K–12 education.
Beginning January 1, 2027, the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit will allow individual taxpayers to receive a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit of up to $1,700 for qualifying contributions to approved Scholarship Granting Organizations, or $3,400 for married couples filing jointly. Those organizations will provide scholarships and educational assistance to eligible students.
The program is designed to benefit students attending both public and nonpublic schools. Qualifying expenses could include tuition, tutoring, special-needs services, books, computers, educational technology, academic supplies and other educational services.
However, Illinois must formally opt into the program for Scholarship Granting Organizations operating in the state to participate. Governors have until January 1 to make the decision for the 2027 program.
The Treasury Department recently released 181 pages of rules governing the program, addressing issues ranging from scholarship eligibility and income verification to requirements for participating scholarship organizations. The rules also provide several ways to verify family income, including participation in existing federal assistance programs.
The program allows families earning up to 300% of area median income to qualify for scholarships. Supporters say broad eligibility could provide assistance to a large number of students, while income-verification provisions are intended to help scholarship organizations target assistance to families who need it most.
The new rules also make it easier for individuals and businesses to contribute. Married couples can receive up to a $3,400 federal credit, while employers can establish payroll deductions for scholarship contributions.
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has previously raised concerns about accountability, discrimination and ensuring that the program benefits working families and students. His administration is reviewing the new rules before deciding whether Illinois will participate.
Supporters argue that opting in would provide Illinois taxpayers with an opportunity to keep charitable education dollars working in Illinois. Without participation, Illinois residents could still contribute to scholarship organizations in other states, but Illinois students would not directly benefit from the program.
The potential impact is significant. The federal Treasury Department estimates the program could grow substantially over the coming years, potentially generating billions of dollars for educational assistance. Exactly how the money can be used to support public school students, including tutoring, after-school programs and enrichment activities, will be addressed through additional federal guidance expected before the end of the year.
With the federal rules now established, the focus shifts to individual states. Thirty states have already indicated they intend to participate, while Illinois and other states continue to evaluate whether the program will provide meaningful benefits for students, families and schools.
What the ‘Home Illinois’ Plan Reveals about the State of Homelessness
Homelessness in Illinois decreased overall by 6% between 2025 and 2026, but chronic homelessness, when people have experienced homelessness more than once in the last year and have a disabling condition, rose by 28%, according to a new state report.
Five years after Governor JB Pritzker launched the Home Illinois Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness, the Illinois Department of Human Services released a new report outlining a roadmap for action from fiscal years 2027 through 2029.
In fiscal year 2027, the Illinois Interagency Task Force on Homelessness, a state group of agencies led by senior officials focused on the issue, expects to spend nearly $620 million combating homelessness.
The funding is organized around four primary goals: investing in housing, ensuring everyone has access to eligible benefits, ending unsheltered homelessness and building a stronger prevention system.
The goals address homelessness trends across Illinois’ Continuums of Care, or CoCs. A CoC typically includes multiple counties and coordinates and administers services for people experiencing homelessness in its region.
The report outlines specific agency proposals to achieve those goals, including increasing the supply of available housing and making housing services easier to find and access. It also calls for stronger partnerships among housing, health care, public health and behavioral health systems, as well as employers, workforce development programs and public benefits.
For example, IDHS plans to conduct outreach to people sleeping on public transportation and connect them with longer-term services and shelter.
While homelessness declined 6% statewide, the numbers varied significantly by CoC. Some communities saw increases, including a 43% increase in the Southern Illinois CoC and a 31% increase in the Central Illinois CoC. But the percentages need to be considered in context, the report noted.
CoCs conduct a “point-in-time” count on a single day in January, when volunteers go into communities to count people experiencing homelessness. “Many communities have a literal homelessness point-in-time count in the range of 150 – 350 people. This means that a shift of resources or conditions could cause the count to increase by a modest number of people but represent a large percentage increase or decrease,” the report stated.
In Central Illinois, the 31% increase was noticeable on the ground as well, said Joan Hartman, CEO of the Center for Human Services in McLean County. Hartman said part of the increase could be attributed to changes in how homelessness was counted. The most recent point-in-time count reached more rural areas that had not previously been included. Measuring homelessness is difficult because it can be challenging to determine someone’s housing situation simply by looking at them.
Beyond how homelessness is counted, service providers point to a more fundamental problem: finding affordable housing. “Being able to find stable housing that you could afford is really a challenge in our area,” Hartman said.
Illinois currently has a shortage of about 142,000 homes, and by 2030, the number of new units needed to keep up with demand is expected to approach 227,000. Many believe the main reason why we have homelessness in Illinois, and the rest of our society, is the shortage of affordable housing.
The Home Illinois Plan also found that rents increased 27% while home prices rose 54% between 2019 and 2024. Housing costs increased faster than inflation in 90% of Illinois counties between 2020 and 2026.
That economic pressure is worsening faster than service providers can address it, said Doug Kenshol, executive director of South Suburban PADS, a nonprofit focused on preventing homelessness. “Rents have increased so dramatically, and people’s incomes have not increased at the same rate. As a result, more and more people are becoming homeless every year, and we are struggling to keep up,” Kenshol said.
The result, Kenshol said, is a race for limited shelter space. South Suburban PADS can serve about 10 households, but on average, another 30 households are on the waitlist for those same spots. “Those individuals are struggling on their own, living in cars, living in the forest preserve, living in abandoned homes,” Kenshol said.
Governor Pritzker sought to address the state’s housing shortage during the spring legislative session through a proposal called BUILD Illinois. The plan would have created statewide zoning requirements aimed at encouraging housing development, but it stalled amid opposition from municipal leaders.
The General Assembly did approve $250 million in housing-related capital investments, including $100 million for new housing projects, $100 million for the Missing Middle and Affordable Homes program and $50 million for new and first-time homebuyers.
The BUILD Illinois proposal would have brought the state closer to addressing one of the key issues affecting homelessness.
Local communities also face challenges when trying to expand shelter capacity. Sarah Howe, a board member of the Central Illinois Continuum, said it can sometimes be difficult to obtain local zoning approval to open a shelter, particularly in rural counties with fewer social services.
But where shelter zoning succeeds, new models are emerging. In Bloomington-Normal, Home Sweet Home Ministries opened The Bridge Shelter Village in January. The shelter can accommodate more than 50 adults in separate living spaces, said Matt Burgess, CEO of Home Sweet Home Ministries. The village also includes a bathhouse and community center, according to an NPR Illinois report.
“We’ve demonstrated a new way for the state to be thinking about providing shelter to individuals who are experiencing homelessness. Rather than doing it in one big building with a bunch of beds lined up side-by-side, we have demonstrated the success of building a little enclosed community with individual sleeping cabins,” Burgess said.
Burgess said the report’s broad range of strategies is necessary to address homelessness, from expanding the housing supply and access to services to improving life expectancy, reducing health care costs and connecting people with jobs and income.
“We can’t think that doing just one thing is going to adequately solve homelessness. Homelessness is a complex set of circumstances. That means the way that we respond to it needs to be complex at some level,” Burgess said.
Google to Fund Billions in Illinois Nuclear Upgrades in Agreement with Constellation
Google is backing $4.3 billion in upgrades to Constellation Energy’s nuclear facilities across the PJM grid, with roughly half of that investment, about $2 billion, going toward four Illinois nuclear plants.
Under the agreement announced, Constellation will add 450 megawatts of electricity generation capacity at its Braidwood, Byron, LaSalle and Quad Cities plants. The upgrades will include modernization of turbines, steam generators and digital control systems, allowing the facilities to produce additional power.
The investment is part of a broader long-term agreement in which Google will purchase 2,700 megawatts of power from Constellation across its service territory over the next 15 years. Constellation will also use Google’s cloud-computing and artificial intelligence technology to improve power generation, reduce costs and increase operational performance.
For Illinois, the agreement comes as the state faces a changing energy landscape. Illinois currently produces more electricity than it consumes, but that surplus is expected to shrink in coming years as electricity demand rises and the state continues its transition away from fossil-fuel generation.
Google and Constellation also agreed to evaluate opportunities for additional clean energy generation, energy storage and demand-response projects. That could become increasingly important as Illinois looks to expand wind, solar and other clean energy resources while meeting rising electricity demand.
The agreement also comes amid growing attention to the enormous amount of electricity required by large data centers, particularly those supporting artificial intelligence. Illinois has not yet experienced the scale of data center construction seen in other parts of the PJM Interconnection, where some facilities can require more than 1 gigawatt of power — roughly the output of a nuclear reactor and enough to supply approximately 750,000 to 1 million homes.
PJM, the regional electric grid stretching from Illinois to New Jersey and south to Virginia, has seen significant growth in electricity demand from data centers. Because Illinois is part of the PJM system, demand across the broader grid can affect electricity prices paid by customers in the state.
That has helped fuel interest in a “bring your own power” approach, in which large new electricity users help finance the additional generation and infrastructure needed to serve them rather than shifting those costs to other customers.
Governor JB Pritzker and Illinois legislators are considering such a proposal for the fall veto session scheduled around Thanksgiving. Similar approaches are gaining attention among other states, grid operators and the federal government.
The Google agreement follows similar arrangements between Constellation and other major companies. Walmart in June signed a power-purchase agreement for 176 megawatts tied to a new distribution facility in Belvidere, with the deal supporting a 30-megawatt upgrade at Constellation’s Dresden nuclear plant.
Constellation also announced yesterday a 20-year agreement with Amazon to support $3 billion in upgrades at a Maryland nuclear plant.
The deals reflect a growing effort by major electricity users to secure reliable power while helping finance additional generation capacity as demand from technology, manufacturing and other industries continues to grow.
Congress Faces Tight Deadline to Fund Government After Elections
Less than a week into fiscal year 2027, Congress is already behind schedule in funding the federal government for the next 12 months.
Lawmakers avoided an October 1 government shutdown by passing a continuing resolution that keeps the government funded through December 11. However, neither the House nor Senate made significant progress in September on the 12 annual appropriations bills needed to fund federal agencies. None have passed both chambers, and only three have cleared the House.
The lack of progress leaves Congress with a tight timeline when lawmakers return following the midterm elections.
The House would normally be in session this week, but Speaker Mike Johnson sent members home two weeks early despite protests from lawmakers who wanted to take up AI safety legislation and advance a second discharge petition related to the Epstein files.
The Senate has also left Washington without approving the three House-passed funding bills or bringing them to the floor for consideration.
Congress is now in recess until after the midterm elections, leaving lawmakers little time to complete the fiscal year 2027 appropriations process before the December 11 deadline.
It also remains unclear how the outcome of the elections could affect negotiations over government spending. Appropriations talks have repeatedly broken down during the 119th Congress, contributing to several funding standoffs and record-long government shutdowns.
Congress is required to approve 12 annual appropriations bills to establish funding levels for federal agencies, but lawmakers rarely complete the process on schedule.
Instead, Congress typically relies on short-term continuing resolutions to keep the government operating while negotiations continue. In some years, lawmakers have passed multiple stopgap measures, effectively funding the government for an entire fiscal year, as they did in fiscal year 2025.
Chicago Fed Survey of Economic Conditions
We’re looking for businesses to share their feedback. If you currently fit the definition below, please register to receive the link for the monthly survey.
Do you…
- work for an organization that operates in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, or Wisconsin?
- track your organization’s performance measures?
- want to help the Federal Reserve understand current economic conditions?
If you do, we invite you to participate in the Chicago Fed Survey of Economic Conditions.
- The survey is conducted twelve times per year and takes about ten minutes.
- Results are shared with the Chicago Fed’s president and help inform monetary policy.
- Individual responses are kept confidential, but aggregate results are made public, so you can learn how you compare with your peers.
To join the survey, submit your contact information here: https://frbchicagodistrict.gov1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6EDcFIIXm3kR6R0
For more information and results of the August survey you can visit, https://www.chicagofed.org/research/data/cfsec/current-data
Federal Reserve’s 2026 Small Business Credit Survey
Owners and key financial decision makers of for-profit businesses, share your recent experiences about what financial conditions you face, whether and how you use debt, and more. Your perspective matters. Answers to these questions contribute to data that directly informs the Fed, federal government agencies, service providers, policymakers, and others, a public good ultimately benefiting your business and others like yours.
Survey closes November 13, 2026. Click below to take the 12-minute survey now:
https://fedreserveboard.gov1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_38k9xZy8ayEERue?orgID=20261024
Storm Relief Reminder
Individuals and businesses that were impacted in the region from the July 27 and August 9-11 storms can find resources and disaster assistance, and tax relief. A disaster declaration has been approved for Will County for damage resulting from the July 27 and Aug. 9-11 storms.
Residents in surrounding counties, including Kankakee, Cook, Grundy and Kane, are also eligible.
This declaration unlocks various resources for residents and businesses in our community:
Assistance through the U.S. Small Business Administration
• Business Physical Disaster Loans: Loans to businesses to repair or replace disaster- damaged property owned by the business, including real estate, inventory, supplies, machinery and equipment. These applications must be received by the SBA no later than Oct. 19, 2026.
• Economic Injury Disaster Loans: Working capital loans to help small businesses, small agricultural cooperatives and most private nonprofits meet their ordinary and necessary financial obligations that cannot be met as a result of the disaster. These applications must be submitted to the SBA no later than May 18, 2027.
• Home Disaster Loans: Loans to homeowners or renters to repair or replace disaster-damaged real estate and personal property, including automobiles. These loan applications are due Oct. 19, 2026.
Residents can apply for assistance in person at the outreach center listed below, online at sba.gov/disaster or by calling 800-659-2955.
Severe weather tax relief through the Illinois Department of Revenue
Disaster tax relief may also apply to residents and businesses in our area who were affected by the severe storms. Taxpayers can send a brief written explanation to the Illinois Department of Revenue requesting a waiver of tax penalties and interest, which can be submitted electronically to Rev.DisasterRelief@Illinois.gov. Find more information here.
Property damage
Taxpayers who experienced property damage should contact their county supervisor of assessments if they wish to apply for a reassessment:
• Cook County
• Will County
• Kankakee County
• Kendall County
Stay well,
Mike Paone
Executive Vice President
Joliet Region Chamber of Commerce & Industry
mpaone@jolietchamber.com
815.727.5371 main
815.727.5373 direct