South West Illinois News

State Sen. Paul Schimpf (R-Waterloo) has urged Gov. J.B. Pritzker to give county health officials the power to open businesses or order them to close based on local circumstances, not a statewide COVID-19 infection level.

Schimpf and seven other senators wrote a letter to the governor, saying that he should have unveiled a plan to get the state moving again, long ago.

Local control will allow officials to act based on the way COVID-19 played out in their counties and reopen businesses where there haven’t been high numbers of cases or crowded hospitals, instead of judging by cases in Chicago and other larger cities.

“To use a military analogy, I think the end of the operation — the end of the invasion — is as important as the beginning,” Schimpf said. “You look back at the example of Iraq, where we had the plan to get in but we didn't have the plan to get out. That is something that I think we need to be looking at right now.”

On April 16, Pritzker announced Illinois had joined forces with Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Kentucky and Wisconsin to determine how they would restart the economy with a fact-based and data-driven approach.

“I am just as eager as all of those state senators, the president of the United States and everybody else to get everybody back to work,” Pritzker said during Wednesday’s televised news conference. “But we’ve got to do it in a fashion that really works for everybody, so that we keep customers safe, that we keep workers safe.”

Schimpf isn’t the only one who thinks that it’s time to formulate a plan to get people back to work.

Heather Goines-Evans, a vice president at Priority Staffing Group told the Southern Illinoisan that a regionalized approach makes sense. She told the publication that non-essential businesses might be asked to develop action plans that show steps they could take to reopen and to help the businesses that are operating on thin margins.