Here’s what’s in Illinois’ $50.6B six-year infrastructure plan

Illinois on Wednesday unveiled its latest six-year, $50.6 billion infrastructure plan for the state’s roads, bridges, railways, airports and more.

The plan spans all 102 counties and includes $32.5 billion over six years for roads and bridges, including $25.7 billion for the state system and $6.8 billion for the local system.

It covers 8.4 million square feet of bridges and 7,107 miles of state roads, according to the Illinois Department of Transportation. The local funding will cover 1,654 lane miles and more than 1.3 million square feet of bridge deck.

The state unveils a new multi-year plan each year. Gov. JB Pritzker said this year’s is the largest ever.

“You can’t drive or bike or ride or walk anywhere in this state without seeing and feeling the impact of the modernization that is underway in Illinois,” Gov. JB Pritzker said at a Wednesday news conference in Chicago announcing the plan. “From Chicago to Rockford, from Decatur to Springfield, to Carbondale, to Metropolis. No region of the state has been left out of this program.”

Click here to read the full multi-year plan.

About half of the road and bridge funding — or $15.8 billion — is expected to come from the federal government, with $1.6 billion coming from bond proceeds, $1.3 billion from local reimbursements and $13.8 billion in state funds.

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How Illinois funds transportation

State funding is largely made possible by legislation dubbed “Rebuild Illinois” that passed on bipartisan lines in Gov. JB Pritzker’s first year in office in 2019. Road and bridge funding comes mostly from the state’s Road Fund, which is separate from the General Revenue Fund, which largely sustains the state’s day-to-day operations.

“I’ll remind you that we passed that bill years before the federal government finally got around to passing a major infrastructure bill,” Pritzker said.

The Road Fund’s main feeder is the state’s Motor Fuel Tax, which lawmakers in 2019 scheduled to increase with inflation each year, creating the funding mechanism that allows for the road and bridge investments.

The state’s Motor Fuel Tax is 48.3 cents per gallon of gasoline and 55.8 cents for diesel. The funding bill also raised the price of vehicle registrations starting in 2020, which for most passenger vehicles is $151 a year.

Since 2019, Rebuild Illinois has dedicated $20.8 billion, including 21,309 miles of road improvements, 815 bridge projects and 1,181 safety improvements.

Multimodal plan

The “multimodal” portion of the plan — covering public transit, rail, aviation and marine infrastructure — is slated to receive $18.1 billion over six years, including state, federal, local and private funds, according to IDOT.

Of that, $13.8 billion is for 90 transit projects, $2.9 billion for 29 rail projects, $1.2 billion for 244 aviation projects and $197 million for 28 marine projects, according to IDOT.

Notable projects include $388 million for connecting Chicago and the Quad Cities via passenger rail, with an intermediate stop in Geneseo; between $2 million and $5 million each for airports in the Metro East, Lansing, Rockford, Whiteside County and Peoria; and $175 million to the Chicago Transit Authority for a training and control center facility.

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.

Jerry Nowicki

Jerry began his career in news in 2013 and has covered state government since 2019. He was the editor of the LeRoy Farmer City Press in McLean and DeWitt counties from 2013 until it closed in 2017. During that span, the Press was named the state’s best small weekly newspaper by the Illinois Press Association. He was born and raised in south suburban Evergreen Park and graduated from Illinois State University with a degree in journalism.