Illinois lawmakers – citing the state’s pension costs, budget shortfalls, and empty unemployment trust – are asking for more than $40 billion in no-strings-attached aid from the federal government.

In a letter to the state’s Congressional delegation, Senate President Don Harmon said Illinois state government is projecting significant budget shortfalls in the current, coming and preceding fiscal years.

The onetime head of Fitch Ratings’ Public Finance Group is blasting the firm’s decision yesterday to immediately downgrade Illinois debt, calling it “premature,” instead of giving officials a chance to resolve financial woes amid a fast-moving COVID-19 pandemic.

Mike Belsky said the pandemic still has too many uncertainties to make a judgement on its fiscal impact here. Belsky is now executive director of the Center for Municipal Finance at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy.

With Illinois’ COVID-19 deaths still rising sharply, Gov. JB Pritzker announced Friday the closures of public and private schools across the state for the remainder of this school year to help slow the statewide creep of the coronavirus.

“My decisions are hard ones, but they follow the science, and the science says our students can’t go back to their normal routine,” Pritzker said at his daily COVID-19 briefing. “Therefore I am suspending in-person learning for the remainder of the 2019-2020 school year.”

Dr. Martin Lucenti once practiced in the emergency room at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, and he has treated soldiers at combat hospitals in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now, he’s the medical director of Vizient, one of dozens of contractors the city of Chicago is turning to for help in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic. Vizient just landed a city contract for up to $2.5 million to help operate the field hospital at McCormick Place, which began accepting patients Tuesday.

If history is any indication, Illinois lawmakers could take money that would have been sent to cities and towns across the state and use it to shore up their budget that is forecasted to be billions of dollars short. That, experts say, could lead to property tax hikes.

Illinois acts as a tax collector of sorts for towns and cities. The state collects income, sales, excise and other revenue and then remits it back to the municipalities via the Local Government Distributive Fund. The fund was instituted via the 1970 Constitutional Convention. In exchange, local income taxes were repealed.

Illinois fared “very well” in the first-come, first-served, chaotic race for the federal Payroll Protection Program, Small Business Administration officials said today. Statewide, 69,893 small businesses were approved for loans averaging about $229,000 each. That compares to the nationwide average of $206,000.

SBA said 60 new Illinois lenders joined the program that doled out a total of $16 billion in loans. Approved businesses should have money in hand within 10 days of their loan approval, officials said.

The SBA said yesterday it stopped accepting applications and enrolling new lenders after funding ran out for a $349 billion federal relief program meant to help small businesses survive the coronavirus outbreak.

Cook County is bearing the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic in ways that other units of government aren’t.

The county, which has prided itself on being the “best house on a bad block” financially, is seeing the economically sensitive taxes it relies on for 65 percent of its revenue taking a massive dip. The jail it runs is a national hot spot of the virus, with more than 600 detainees and staffers testing positive. And its health system—already facing financial headwinds—has tabled revenue-generating elective surgeries to focus on treating COVID patients, some of whom are uninsured. On top of all that, Cook County Health is addressing the emergency without a permanent CEO, CFO or head of public health.

Two Madison County aides who were fired Thursday night after facing corruption allegations say they plan to challenge the county board’s decision.

Doug Hulme, former county administrator and adviser to Republican Chairman Kurt Prenzler, said Friday a two-year state attorney general’s investigation into allegations of wrongdoing already cleared his name.