By Kevin Lee     Illinois Statehouse News

SPRINGFIELD  –  State lawmakers will tackle a flurry of budget proposals before the scheduled end of the legislative session on Friday.

The Illinois House will consider a tax hike on cigarettes from 98 cents per pack to $1.98 per pack.

The Illinois Senate passed the cigarette tax increase proposal last April by a vote of 30 to 26, and the vote in the House could be just as close.

Kathy Drea with the Illinois Lung Association said the proposal could bring in $300 million, which could be leveraged for more funds from the federal government and free up money for other state operations such as education.

According to the proposal, the money from the tax increase would go towards a fund specifically for state healthcare providers.

But lawmakers on state border districts are concerned that their gas stations and convenience stores will lose business because residents will go to other states to purchase their cigarettes.

State Rep. Pat Verschoore, D-Milan, has businesses in his Quad-Cities district that have already been hit hard by the recession.

“We’re on the border of the state of Iowa and if they raise it $1-a-pack, it would put us at a disadvantage…and my fear is that it will take business from the businesses on the Illinois side,” he said.

State Rep. Jil Tracy, R-Quincy, also lives in a border district and is concerned about the proposal’s effect on businesses in her area.

But she also is opposed to the tax increase because she doesn’t think it will deter people from smoking.

“Human nature is, (smokers) are going to go out of state to get these (cigarettes),” she said. “That’s not the way I like to legislate — require behavior modification, enforcing things on people that they don’t want to do.”

During the Senate vote, most Chicago-area Democrats were in support of the proposal, while Republicans and border-district lawmakers stood in opposition.

Drea said that a poll conducted by the American Lung Association indicated that Illinois voters favored the cigarette tax as a way to close the state’s massive budget shortfall.

“We recently did a statewide poll of registered voters and 74 percent of registered voters in Illinois support the cigarette tax. And they were polled on many different revenue enhancements for Illinois and cigarette tax was the number one most popular solution to the current budget crisis,” she said.

Among the other choices presented in the poll were increasing the personal income tax, increasing vehicle registration fees, reducing funding for road & highway construction and reducing funding for public education.

But state Rep. Jack Franks, D-Woodstock, said a tax increase on cigarettes was not an appealing proposal given the state’s budget troubles.

“The problem is we just keep throwing more money at our problems instead of looking at how we can re-do our budget,” he said.

Lawmakers could not pinpoint a specific day or time when they would vote on the cigarette tax, contained in Senate Bill 44.