McHenry Times

State Rep. Dan Ugaste (R-St. Charles) said Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s “complete fail” grade in a recent Brownstone Institute study assessing the effectiveness of his COVID-19 mitigations strikes him as completely well deserved.

“I have thought since May 2020 that the governor is overstepping the original intent of the emergency management act and should be consulting the legislature with all new mitigations,” Ugaste told the McHenry Times. “I filed legislation to make that happen and it has not been given a hearing.”

Ugaste said voters everywhere are now of the mind that the governor had little basis for much of what he has done.

“The majority of my constituents have had issues with a lot of what he has done,” he said. “The majority I've heard from disagree with him and based upon what I’ve heard, most of them are not happy with one person making all the decisions for the state.”

The Brownstone study composed data from every state from March 2020 through April 2021, with Pritzker receiving worse than an F – he was graded as a “complete fail.”

Researchers said, “there’s a special place for governors that locked kids out of classrooms for a year and a half, ordered sick COVID-19 patients back into nursing homes, did not practice their own orders, shut down tens of thousands of businesses and still couldn’t beat the U.S. average in COVID-19 deaths or excess all-cause deaths.”

In Illinois, Ugaste argues things got far worse than they ever had to be.

“We should have held hearings to decide what would work best for the people of the entire state,” he said. “We never had them; we never had hearings to determine the effects of shutting down businesses, the economic and mental harms it caused. It’s not a single issue we're supposed to be looking at in making these kinds of decisions.”

Ugaste said the fact that Pritzker’s wife and daughter have spent much of the pandemic in Florida sends a strong and clear message.

“I think it says that there are rules that apply to some people and not all people and not all rules apply to the Governor and his family,” he said.

Ugaste said one thing has become painfully clear.

“The people in my district are definitely worse off,” he said. “We're dealing with failed leadership across the board. We’re having failures that I never thought I’d see in my lifetime, from not being safe in the street of our communities to rising taxes and all the fiscal mismanagement. And we’ve done absolutely nothing to make this state a more business-friendly place to be.”