Dec. 11—State Rep. Blaine Wilhour, R-Beecher City, will run for a third term in the Illinois House, this time in the newly drawn 110th District.
Wilhour, currently one of the owners of his family’s construction company, feels his presence in the General Assembly is important in large part because of his working-class background, having grown up on his family’s farm and climbing the ranks in the family business.
“There are very few people in the General Assembly that have any direct association with the economic circumstances in the state of Illinois,” Wilhour said. “I got into this thing in 2018 because as a small business owner, I saw that we were leaving a lot of things on the table from an economic standpoint, especially as it pertains to opportunity.”
The home of his particular business won’t be in his new district, however. Much of Effingham County has been placed in other districts, with Rep. Brad Halbrook, R-Shelbyville, seeking to take over much of Wilhour’s territory in the new 107th District (Wilhour represents the current 107th). Rep. Adam Niemerg, R-Dieterich, represents the rest of Effingham County, although his district — now the 102nd — takes on more of east-central Illinois along with it.
Wilhour now represents a small portion of southern Effingham County, home to Mason and Edgewood and Fayette County — where his home is located, just outside the Beecher City limits in an unincorporated part of the county — along with all or parts of Montgomery, Bond, Marion, Clinton, Clay and Richland counties.
Wilhour is disappointed in how the House committee responsible for redrawing the maps kicked his home-base out of his district, noting that he’s involved in these areas in many ways — from his business to his church to the schools that his children attend.
“It’s definitely disappointing to lose places like Effingham and Altamont,” Wilhour said. “I started and own a business in Effingham County, I go to church here, my kids go to school here. It’s disappointing that they did that, but that’s they way it works when the other side of the aisle has all the power.”
But Wilhour will continue fighting for spending reforms, including instituting zero-based budgeting policies in Illinois to control how state agencies spend their money. He also said that the state should focus on trying to implement what he feels are better regulatory policies in order to allow for manufacturing jobs to return to places like Effingham County.
“When I was growing up in the early ’90s, a good majority of the parents of my classmates worked in a lot of the manufacturing centers over here,” Wilhour said. “All of those jobs are gone now, and not all of them have gone to China or Mexico. A lot of them have gone to states that have better regulatory policies. Our workers comp system in the state of Illinois is way out of line with our neighbors like Indiana and Michigan and some of these other places. All of those places have grown manufacturing jobs.”
He also plans to remain focused on highlighting the issues with the recently-passed Green Energy Jobs Act, which he says could make people pay more to power their homes and make the energy in their homes less reliable. In this realm, he felt that politicians paid too much attention to positive press than the reality of the situation on the ground in places like central and southern Illinois.
“We craft too much policy based on what we want to do with our press releases, not about what is actually going to be good for the state of Illinois,” Wilhour said. “This thing was unrealistic from the beginning — to think that Illinois could put itself at a serious competitive disadvantage, that it would even be a blip on the radar is completely ridiculous when it comes to global climate change. It’s a virtue-signaling bill. That’s all it is.”
Wilhour also wants the state to get serious about tackling corruption, as he felt that recent changes to the state’s ethics laws didn’t go far enough to solve the problem, and about keeping communities safe, as he feels that soon-to-be-enacted changes to public safety, such as the elimination of cash bail, wouldn’t do anything to ensure people’s safety.
“Most of the policies they are passing are more ‘punish the police’ than ‘solve the problems’,” Wilhour said. “Most of the problems in our communities are a product of the stagnant economy (and) the stagnation of opportunity that has been inflicted on us by poor public policy. If we really want to fix these places, then we need to have policies that are geared towards bringing opportunity back to these places.”
Wilhour is also focused on attempting to end what he calls a “war on families”, blaming Gov. JB Pritzker, the Illinois Department of Public Health and the Illinois State Board of Education among others for creating a situation in which children have been negatively impacted by their polices both pre-COVID and during the pandemic.
“We need to make parents the authority in the lives of their kids, not the government,” Wilhour said. “The way that it has been done in the state of Illinois has been a top-down thing. Look at all of the restrictions that’s been put down by the Department of Public Health, the State Board of Education (and) the teacher’s unions that have negative and in a lot of cases, catastrophic impacts for a lot of kids. There’s kids in the state of Illinois that still, today, aren’t having anything close to a normal livelihood.”
Republicans hope that 2022 will bring serious change to statewide politics, in the form of them winning legislative seats and retaking the Governorship. Even with the general optimism for the GOP, Wilhour is concerned that the losses in seats and in political power over the course of the last several years will continue to leave them at a disadvantage even if they make big gains next year.
“The Republican Party in the state of Illinois needs to get a lot better,” Wilhour said. “We can’t be this upside down on the numbers and then cry about the results. We need to get a lot better at standing for real issues that people care about. Then, we wouldn’t have to worry about these things so much.
“The Democrats play for keeps, they play hardball. They do that on a state level and a national level.”