Will County Gazette

Sen. Sue Rezin (R-Morris) is drawing attention to legislation designed to bring more supervision to state-run nursing homes in the wake of the COVID-19 deaths of 36 residents of the LaSalle Veterans Home. Two of the bills were introduced last year but have lingered in the Senate.

"As we near the end of the legislative session, I'm renewing my call to pass a series of legislative bills I introduced last year in response to the deadly COVID-19 outbreak at the LaSalle Veterans Home and Governor Pritzker's failure to implement critical recommendations from the Illinois auditor general's performance audit of the legionnaire's disease outbreak at the Quincy Veterans Home," said Rezin at a press conference Thursday in Springfield.

"How many reports must land on Gov. Pritzker's desk before he takes the safety of our veterans seriously?" Rezin said. "It took the Pritzker administration 11 days to arrive on-site in LaSalle, and it could still take the same number of days today."

The three bills that Rezin is pushing are Senate Bill 1445, which would provide the inspector general subpoena powers in state investigations; Senate Bill 3170, which would require that a veterans home administrator provide written notification to IDPH and IDVA within 24 hours of learning of a second case of an infectious disease; and SB1471, which would require facilities licensed and operated by the state to conduct outbreak-related preparedness drills.

The bills have been referred to the assignments committee where two of the bills havve lingered for a year. 

The audit performed in 2019 after an outbreak of legionnaire's disease at the Quincy Veterans Home called for a timely response for on-site assistance by the Illinois Department of Public Health, and it required the immediate implementation of all the CDC recommendations since an outbreak was confirmed. After the performance audit, the Tetra Tech report was published, which basically pointed out the same issues. But, according to Rezin, the Pritzker administration "ignored both reports which led to fatal consequences at the LaSalle Veterans' Home in November 2020 when 36 veterans died, making it the deadliest outbreak at a state-run facility in Illinois history."