Working for Illinois Caucus

WREX — State Representative Dave Vella is bringing forward two new bills.

One focuses on homeowner and auto insurance, aiming to lower costs and ensure people are just paying for losses locally.

This comes as insurance plans have risen by nearly 30% in the last year alone, now creating a rate review process and requiring insurance companies to give a 60-days’ notice before double-digit rate jumps.

"Illinois is one of the outlying states. We don’t have any oversight at all for how rates are set so what this does is it gets a check on all different homeowners’ insurance and auto insurance and makes sure that if a rate is too high, they have to check with us and they also have to give notice to the people," Vella said. "So, the concern is if there is a hurricane in Florida or a wildfire in California, that those will be passed onto Illinois consumers. We just want to make sure that’s not the case. So, we will have some oversight now. We will keep the market open, but we’ll have some oversight to make sure that our constituents are not taken advantage of."

He also added one more benefit for older adults.

"A lot of people were coming to me and my office, I have an open office, and people come in and just talk about how hard it is to make ends meet now-a-days, especially older people and they talked about their homeowner’s insurance going up and their auto insurance going and it’s just been tough, right? So, I looked into it and you know, I had some concerns and as I looked into it, I realized we just don’t have a lot of oversight over the insurance company," Vella said.

Representative Vella is also aiming to give education a boost.

House Bill 2564 aims to give school districts a relief, excluding pay increases for additional work completed by teachers and taking away extra pensions costs for teachers later in the career doing so.

This comes amidst a teacher shortage.

"Rockford 205 came to me and said, hey we have to have teachers take extra shifts and the teachers want to take the extra shifts but because they are their salaries are going up and because if they’re at the end of their salary tenure time their pensions going to go up, but we have no other teachers to teach," Vella said. "This makes sure that the teachers can teach and take over. We have good, qualified teachers to teach and that the district doesn’t get penalized because they can’t find teachers who need to teach."

He also added more details on how far the challenges are reaching.

"Our school districts are really underfunded, right? We’re still trying to find funding in the budget to really up. Rockford needs more, Belvidere needs more, Harlem needs more and it’s hard to find teachers, right? So, this is going to keep good teachers in the classrooms, in the class periods, it’s going to pay them what their owed," Vella said.

Both of these bills are currently making their way through Illinois’ legislative system.

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