The REALTORS® had tremendous success this week in keeping bad legislation from moving! Due to the Tuesday election, the House was the only chamber scheduled to meet as the Senate was on break.

Although the Senate was not in, it extended 705 bills that did not get out of committees by the March 13 deadline. The new extension deadline was set for March 27, aligning with the same committee deadline in the House. We are waiting to see which bills on our list for both the House and the Senate will be assigned to committees next week.

In the House this week, 106 bills from our tracking list were placed on House committee calendars. Of those 106 bills, we had 21 that were listed as priority bills on our opposition list. Thankfully, we were able to prevent all of these bills from being called in committee this week with the exception of HB 3596, which is a bill that creates onerous regulations for wetlands and includes a very broad definition of what is considered a wetland. As written, this language, could possibly force property owners to adhere to these stringent and costly regulations for small bodies of water located on their land.  The good news is that an agreement was made between the bill sponsor and the Farm Bureau allowing the bill to pass out of committee if the sponsor holds the bill on second reading so the sponsor can continue to work on the bill with opponents. This means that, for now, the bill will be stalled from moving through the process.

Next week, we expect another busy week as bills in both the House and the Senate are coming up against the March 27 committee deadline. If any of the bills are not voted out of committee by that date, they are technically dead. However, Illinois is a little like the Zombie Apocalypse where just when you think something is dead, it pops back up and starts threatening you again, so we will keep everyone apprised of our survival strategies as things progress!