Scott Holland

1 week ago | shawlocal.com | Scott Holland

“These horrific actions of political violence must be condemned and never tolerated.”“Political violence undermines our democracy and our society and it cannot be tolerated in any form.”“Political violence has no place in our society.”It’d be easy to devote the rest of the space to public statements Illinois politicians and parties issued in response to the terrible weekend news out of Minnesota.

1 week ago | shawlocal.com | Scott Holland

Will Tier 2 pension changes be the defining political fight of 2025? I posed that question Dec. 18, exactly six months ago. And now, with a bit more than half the year remaining, we’re firmly in “reply hazy, try again” territory. For a while it seemed the title might land with attempts to regulate homeschool families. Then as the legislative session concluded a lot of focus went to city and suburban transit agencies.

1 week ago | shawlocal.com | Scott Holland

An email has been rattling in my brain since July. The reader, by his own telling, spent about 20 months in prison half a century ago stemming from addiction issues. He framed the debate over cash bail as landing “at the fringes of the fundamental problem with our criminal justice system, which is that we use prison as the punishment for almost every serious offense, and prison not only does not do most of those things well, in many areas it harms society.

1 week ago | shawlocal.com | Scott Holland

Generally speaking, the Department of Financial and Professional Regulation is not the most sensational component of state government. However, paying attention to IDFPR can be quite instructive in terms of what’s happening in a community and understanding the ways in which Springfield attempts (and sometimes fails) to operate. Every month, the agency posts an enforcement report listing actions from the previous month. The April report was posted May 20.

2 weeks ago | shawlocal.com | Scott Holland

It was a happy coincidence to open Tuesday’s newspaper and see my column, suggesting voters would benefit from more proposals being considered individually instead of bundled into larger packages, right underneath Capitol Fax’s Rich Miller asserting “Way too much fell through the cracks at the Statehouse.”Miller used a failed omnibus energy bill to illustrate a larger point: “the Legislature goes through this almost every year.