HData CEO Hudson Hollister recently interviewed Illinois State Representative Will Guzzardi, who represents northwest Chicago and has been a champion for modernization in the Illinois State Legislature. Representative Guzzardi described challenges brought by the COVID-19 pandemic, technology remedies (and their pitfalls), and a business transparency proposal under consideration in Springfield to fix Illinois’ restrictive data practices.
Hudson Hollister
We’re excited to be here with Illinois State Representative Will Guzzardi, representing Chicago in the Illinois State Legislature and a leader in technological innovation in the legislature. Representative, thanks for joining us, I would love to have you describe a bit about your priorities during your service.
Rep. Guzzardi
Thank you for having me. I am in my fourth term and I represent the northwest side of the city of Chicago. I am one of the co-chairs of the Illinois House Progressive Caucus. The issues that I’ve worked on during my time have aligned with the leading issues facing our state and the issues that progressive movement has been fighting for. I was the sponsor of the legislation that raised the minimum wage of $15 an hour. I’ve been working in workers rights, labor rights, and anti-discrimination legislation. I’ve also worked on criminal justice reform, healthcare affordability, and a wide variety of other issues. Most recently, housing has been a sort of a key issue for me and for many of my colleagues as we work through the pandemic and many folks have struggled to make their housing payments on time, and people are in very insecure situations in that area.
So a lot on my plate, certainly, but technology and improving processes is something I’ve always been passionate about as well.
Hudson Hollister
Thanks so much. Thanks for your service. Tell us a bit about the issues where you’ve championed improving processes and improving services for the state’s of people through technology.
Rep. Guzzardi
A lot of that has been internal agency work. The Department of Information Technology was created since I came into the legislature. We have come a long way in centralizing and modernizing our data and technology processes in the state. And it’s been a lot of working with agency directors, and especially in the last couple of years now that we’ve had a governor who is more willing to work with the legislature, I would say than our previous governor, we’ve had a really improved working relationship with a lot of those agency heads. We’ve been involved behind the scenes, from the executive agency perspective, in trying to advance some more modernized processes. There’s still obviously a long, long way to go.
One of the things that was cast into stark relief during the COVID pandemic was the Illinois Department of Employment Securities (IDES). They handled this overwhelming volume of unemployment cases and we saw how the processes of that department really failed a lot of Illinoisans, by no fault of the department, but as a result of disinvestment and neglect in the apparatus of state government over the course of decades. We’ve seen that when these agencies face stress tests, like IDES faced during the pandemic, their technology infrastructure just isn’t really capable of supporting it.
It really has underscored the need for us to make investments on the front end in improving the bureaucratic apparatus of the state government so that the technological capabilities are there when the challenges really hit.
Hudson Hollister
Representative, our audience will be excited about your championship of business transparency through technology. Tell us a little bit about that legislation and its process prospects for passage.
Rep. Guzzardi
It was really great working with you and your organization on this issue over the last couple of years. This is a great example of what I was just talking about, the backwaters of the state bureaucratic apparatus that have been neglected.
The Illinois Secretary of State’s office keeps the records of the corporate database but it’s stashed away in a very inaccessible corner of the internet. If you want the whole database you have to pay the Secretary of State for it. It’s a felony if you try to scrape the data from the website. This is all stuff that I had no idea about until you brought this issue to us and we started working on it together.
When you compare it to our neighboring states and the states around the country where this data is open data — searchable, transparent, and accessible — there’s just no reason for us not to be able to do that as well.
We worked with the Secretary of State’s office and my colleagues in the legislature, and we have a bill to require this data to be open data. The bill passed the House unanimously, it passed the Senate committee unanimously, so it’ll be up for a vote in the full Senate in the next several days. I’m very optimistic that it’ll get to the governor’s desk and get signed. That’s gonna be a big, big step forward for transparency and data accessibility.
Hudson Hollister
Thanks for your leadership on that. Can you tell us a little bit about how the pandemic has changed legislative processes and how people have adapted?
Rep. Guzzardi
Well, last year we didn’t really legislate. The legislative session goes from January to May in Illinois, and the pandemic started in March. We just kind of shut it all down.
So this year, we have returned to some semblance of normalcy. I’m here in my Springfield office. We’re meeting on the House floor. But it’s been very challenging for outside groups to have input in the legislative process, which is good and bad. We rely on the expertise of subject matter experts in the various areas that we work on all the time. For those subject matter experts to communicate with members, “Hey, this bill is advancing and that’s really important for issue X,” or, “If you really care about issue Y, you should keep an eye on this bill, because it could really mess things up.”
That’s the kind of input that we rely on and when those folks aren’t physically present and able to just find you in the hallway and say something to you about those bills, that feedback can get kind of lost in the shuffle. It has complicated the process for sure, it’s been a big change.
Similarly, for us members trying to get our bills passed, those kind of casual passing conversations with people walking through the buildings, going over to them sitting on the House floor, and being able to talk to a member — rather than scheduling a Zoom meeting with their office — that ability to have the sort of in passing, in person conversations has helped a lot now we’re back down here. It’s really helped improve the process. But it’s something that we really lost for a while there, and I think was to the detriment of the process overall.
Hudson Hollister
Tell our audience about the transition to remote committee meetings and markups.
Rep. Guzzardi
We began the process of remote committee hearings over this summer and really started in earnest this year. Even now, as we’re still down here in person, we’re having our committee hearings remotely. We all sit in our respective offices and get on Zoom together because the committee hearing rooms are not set up for social distancing or for remote participation from people back home. We can’t have witnesses coming down to Springfield to testify, and we also can’t have them remotely in these rooms.
We’re doing these committees remotely, still. Again, it cuts both ways. On the one hand, from the perspective of advocates who are seeking to give testimony in committee, it’s been really helpful, because you know, to drive down to Springfield, for those folks who live a long way away. That’s enabled people to participate in the legislative process, who might not otherwise have been able to take the day off of work on a Wednesday and drive down here and, you know, sit around until your bill gets called and then testify for a few minutes and then drive back up. It’s not possible for a lot of people. We’ve heard different voices in the committee process than we typically do, which is great.
In terms of working on legislation, some of the informal communication has been lost and that’s been a real challenge. Being able to walk around the committee rooms five minutes before the hearing starts and say, “Hey, listen, just so you know, I have this bill. Do you think there is anything I should worry about?” Those sort of sidebars and little conversations, that can be so helpful, have just gone away. Then you present your bill in front of committee and members are hearing it for the first time, and they don’t really know what it’s about, it’s kind of hard to follow on the zoom, and then all of a sudden, there’s questions that are maybe irrelevant, or tangential or whatever, and things can get out of control.
Hudson Hollister
That seems very difficult.
Rep. Guzzardi
Yeah, it has been a real challenge. But we’re navigating that and I think all of us being back here in the same place physically has helped. Just being able to find people in their offices has been valuable.
Hudson Hollister
How does the process of proposing and voting on amendments to bills in committee work without the ability to be in person?
Rep. Guzzardi
The process works the same mechanically as it always has. Amendments gets assigned to the committees, so if you have a bill in the State Government Committee and you file an amendment to that bill, it gets assigned to the State Government Committee as well. So procedurally it’s all the same, but on a practical level it has changed.
Rep. Guzzardi
I don’t know how to really describe it, other than to say that the sort of informal understanding around the changes that bills might need are just harder to reach. You can’t we can’t really have that kind of informal dialogue with your colleagues. The result is that I think many bills have gotten tripped up in committee, because of the way that they’re being presented.
Hudson Hollister
Did committees ever review and even vote on amendments that were conceived on the fly or amendments that were amended themselves or modified using that in person interaction?
Rep. Guzzardi
The way our procedures work in the House, you can’t amend the bill as it’s sitting there. But for all intents and purposes, the committee will write an amendment while they’re having a committee hearing.
Hudson Hollister
Informal understanding could arise, perhaps?
Rep. Guzzardi
Yeah. You’ll be presenting a bill in committee, there’ll be questions from legislators, and someone will say, “Did you ever consider this piece of it? Maybe you can bring back an amendment to the committee that addresses this?” Then the members will say, “Yeah, listen, if you address that with an amendment, we would all be for it.”
And that is much, much harder remotely. I think that we all miss that level of interaction
Hudson Hollister
Final question. Do you foresee any opportunity for some of these legislative modernizations like automatic redlining or automatic codification in the future?
Rep. Guzzardi
I think there are opportunities for some of these changes. I think that what we’ve seen in the last year is that more modern technological processes are possible in the legislative process than we used to believe, and I think that’s been true of the pandemic in so many ways. Like, working remotely — we can do a lot more than we used to think we could, but at the same time, the in person stuff really does have tremendous value. So, the question is how we blend the sort of technological improvements with maintaining the valuable stuff of the old way of doing things.
I think that we’re gonna see legislators be open to change as a result of how much change we’ve had to endure during the pandemic. There is a real opportunity for some of these changes in the future.
Hudson Hollister
Very good. We look forward to working with you together on them. Representative Guzzardi, thank you so much for joining us.
Rep. Guzzardi
Thank you. My pleasure.
