House Bill 2394 is not a victory.
The legislation, unanimously passed during last week’s veto session, does represent a smart step. But a long journey remains.
According to a Capitol News Illinois summary, HB 2394 attempts to deal with backlogs at the Department of Financial and Professional Regulation, a problem that got worse from 2019 through 2022 when applications increased by 15%.
The context of the current discussion is providers of mental and physical health care, where some professionals have been waiting up to eight months for license renewals, but IDFPR regulates more than 130 careers. Canine handler, fingerprint vendor, locksmith, sex offender evaluator … those and dozens of other workers must be in compliance with state guidelines to avoid penalties and sanctions.
Each month the department publishes a discipline report. In September it assessed $50,000 in fines for people acting as roofing contractors without a license. Small-government types would argue the whole thing is a racket. Property owners can decided for themselves if a roofer knows what they’re doing, the state licensing process is just a cash grab rolled in with busy work.
The counterpoint is the government as protector approach. They’d argue rules and regulations drafted with professionals offer value to the average Illinoisan who doesn’t have the time or credentials to evaluate land surveyors or speech and language pathologists.
Further, the penalty structure often goes beyond the simple “do you have a license?” punishments. If a mortician somehow breaches professional ethics – perhaps by mislabeling or misplacing remains, the kind of mistake that can’t be undone – there’s already a functioning framework for punishment, which hopefully carries preventive benefits as well.
Just as with challenges to the Firearm Owner Identification program, the state could potentially find itself on the losing end of a legal battle if it can’t demonstrate an ability to execute its own self-given administrative powers. Government lawyers might be able to prove a legitimate public interest in the letter of a given policy, but a persistent failure to allocate sufficient resources for enforcement calls into question the underlying intent.
Take the human jobs out of it altogether: if a state mandates elevator inspections to make sure they operate safely, but then can’t get them all scheduled and completed in time, then it’s not meeting its promise to ensure reliable technology.
The new law will force an upgrade to IDFPR’s 1990s online systems and hopefully reduce paper backlogs. That should’ve been accomplished already, but a “master contract” vendor already working for the state can’t meet the agency’s needs.
This bill marks slight progress. But its existence sheds new light on a perpetual problem: government biting more than it can chew while insisting that strategy is better for everybody.
• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Media. Follow him on Twitter @sth749. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.
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