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Will County committee debates 'living' legislative agenda and lobby-day planning
Summary
Committee members discussed creating a "living" state legislative agenda, returning to a concise bill-tracking format from prior lobbyists, broadening distribution of weekly reports, and improving lobby-day preparation and scheduling.
Will County Board Legislative Committee members debated whether to redesign the county's state legislative agenda into a "living" document, and they discussed changes to how lobby materials and lobby-day planning are prepared and distributed.
Chair Ortiz said she would send out weekly updates with assigned pages for committee members to review and acknowledged a suggestion by Member Bullock to split the review load and ask committees to submit legislative proposals. "I will be sending out an email today, and we get weekly reports," Ortiz said, adding the reports would be sent to all members going forward.
Member Bullock urged that the document become a persistent record of the county's priorities rather than being rebuilt each year: "I would like to see this document kinda become a living document so that we're not taking things off of it when we're redoing it because we have these beliefs, these things that we want to see happen in our county." Several members said they preferred a short, clickable list with links to bills and one-sentence descriptions like the prior lobbyist's reports; one member asked staff to restore that format.
Members also discussed lobby-day logistics. Several said past lobby days were crowded or scheduled during committee hearings when legislators were unavailable. Member Freeman and others asked that the county and its lobbyists coordinate timing and that written materials (paper and digital) be prepared in advance. Vice Chair Agala and Member Hickey suggested creating topical narratives or fact sheets for the agenda (for example, explaining local effects and unfunded mandate concerns for proposed gun-storage rules or detailing local acreage and permit activity for solar farm policy).
The committee agreed on two operational directions: Chair Ortiz will reach out to each committee chair to solicit legislative proposals for the state agenda, and the standard practice will be to send weekly legislative tracking reports to all board members. Members did not take formal votes on policy positions during this discussion.
