Martin McLaughlin
Maria Peterson
State spending priorities were among the issues debated by the candidates running for the 52nd District House seat during a recent Daily Herald endorsement interview.
In the process, the discussion veered into the topic of immigration.
Republican incumbent and former Barrington Hills Village President Martin McLaughlin said spending is out of control. McLaughlin, who was first elected in 2020, said in his term in office he has seen spending climb from $39 billion to $54 billion.
“It puts us as one of the highest taxing states in the country. If now isn’t the time when we can have spending reforms,” he asked, “When will be the time?”
He said the state should prioritize spending on veterans, the disabled and students over “illegal migrants.”
He said spending on the latter was approximately $2 billion last year and approximately $700 million the year before that.
Democratic challenger Maria Peterson, a retired labor attorney, said her family knows what it means to tighten their belts and survive financially. She said they did just that during the financial crisis in 2008, when she and her husband faced mortgage and car payments and were raising a young son. At that time, her husband had finished graduate school and she was attending law school.
“Mr. McLaughlin always says that we are tax and spend Democrats,” she said. “But we all know how to live within our means.”
Referencing McLaughlin’s call for fully funding the Local Government Distributive Fund, she said he fails to “realize how much more money the villages have received beyond the LGDF.”
“They’re asking for more money, and he’s ready to give them more money, but they haven’t been held accountable to how they’re using the money,” she said.
Peterson took issue with McLaughlin’s remarks about migrants.
“Not every immigrant that has arrived here in Illinois is illegal,” she said. “Many of them are here seeking asylum, and they have entered through the asylum process, and it’s our humanitarian responsibility to make sure they have at least the most fundamental health care, that they have their vaccines, that they have preventive health care. Because if they get sick, the rest of the population could get sick too.”
She said immigrants are filling jobs for which there is a shortage of employees and are paying taxes.
The 52nd District includes Algonquin, the Barrington area, Fox River Grove, Inverness, Island Lake, Volo, Wauconda, and Western portions of Libertyville and Mundelein.