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Last year, Rep. Dave Severin voted in favor of “Rebuild Illinois” — the first significant construction plan that the General Assembly has approved in a decade. He also joined a majority of his colleagues in supporting legislation to foot the bill: primarily by hiking gas and cigarette taxes, increasing license plate fees and expanding gambling.

Because tax increases can haunt politicians come election season — and it’s earned him a GOP primary opponent challenger this election cycle in Tim Arview of West Frankfort — Severin said he’s been asked the question: "Why would you do that?"

Severin, R-Benton, recalled a radio interview he did with WJPF's Tom Miller shortly after he was reelected to a second term in 2018. “He said, ‘Dave, how are you going to stay relevant being in the super-minority?’” referring to the fact that Democrats, assuming they stick together, had secured enough seats in the House to pass bills and override governor’s vetoes without help from Republicans.

“I tell people, I said, ‘I think about this every morning when I get up and shave: How are you going to be relevant today?’” Severin told The Southern in an interview Monday. “And voting for that capital bill made my district continue to be relevant. The money that is going to come in in the next five years — that is in the lock box for the gas tax — the revenue for roads and bridges in Southern Illinois is almost $1 billion. ... We hadn’t had a gas tax increase in 20-some years. We hadn’t had a capital bill in over 10 years.” And Southern Illinois’ roads and bridges, he added, “are in terrible disrepair.”

Arview, an insurance salesman, said it was Severin’s vote in favor of raising revenue to support the capital budget that cemented his decision to challenge him in the Republican primary.

“The big one is the gas tax, when he voted to double the gas tax,” Arview told The Southern in an interview on Thursday. “That was the first one that I really saw that I went, what? Why would he do that? What would prompt him to do that?”

Before stepping into the race this past summer, Arview said the idea of running for office had been on his mind for a number of years. “It was about 2015, somewhere around there, I felt like that God wanted me to run for office and it just kind of took me by surprise, because I’d never really thought about doing anything like that, and I didn’t really even know what. Just run for office. Well, what office? I don’t know anything about this,” he said. “And so I kinda hemmed and hawed about it and didn’t really do anything with it, but it just kept up and kept up.”

In 2016, Severin ousted longtime Rep. John Bradley, D-Marion, who held a top position in the Illinois House Democratic leadership structure under Speaker Michael Madigan. Arview said he was personally glad to see Severin win.

“I thought, ‘Well, OK, there, we got a good Christian person in, now I don’t need to. I’m off the hook.” But Arview said the feeling that he should run just didn’t leave. “I felt it every election,” he said. “In 2018, I started really looking into it. I looked at Dave’s record, how he’d voted, and I started to see he wasn’t what we needed, he wasn’t what we thought we were getting. That’s when I decided I’m going to oppose him in the next election.”

Arview said that he took issue with Severin voting in favor of raising gas taxes, income taxes and property taxes. He wasn’t immediately able to provide bills to back up his claims, but followed up with an email outlining five pieces of legislation with which he disagreed with Severin. At the same time, he backed off his claim that Severin had voted to raise property taxes. “I must apologize; I was mistaken about a property tax bill,” he said. (Local governing bodies levy property taxes, though the General Assembly can set parameters around property taxes). He also did not provide any legislation backing up his claim that Severin voted for an income tax increase.

But Arview did take issue with Severin voting in favor of a state spending plan in 2017 in the midst of a historic budget standoff between then-Gov. Bruce Rauner and Democratic legislative leaders. That epic political battle left many providers unpaid across Southern Illinois, and threatened to lower Illinois’ bond rating to junk status. While he gave a yes vote to the budget’s spending plan, Severin voted against the controversial revenue plan, which increased individual income tax from 3.75% to 4.95%, and the corporate income tax from 5.25% to 7%.

Severin acknowledged his conflicting budget votes. He said he wanted to see a balanced budget “which that budget wasn’t.” “But I did vote for the spending because I wanted people to know that I was interested in getting something done in this state,” he said. “My thought in my mind was by doing that people would ask me: Why did you do that? I wanted people to know that look, I’m for a balanced budget, but I’m also realizing we’ve got to get the state moving, we’ve got to get the state going, we have to pay bills and so that’s why I did that.”

Arview also said he disagreed with Severin’s vote to expand gambling. He said he worries that the taxes that Severin has supported will drive existing businesses out of the state, and prevent others from choosing Southern Illinois.

Severin noted that the gambling expansion bill he supported as a package deal with the capital budget earmarked a new casino license for a massive project underway at Walker’s Bluff in Carterville. “1,000 jobs is what it will basically create for the building of Walker’s Bluff,” he said. “It’s not just a casino, but it’s a world-class spa, indoor water park, convention center/hotel. It’s a full package.” Severin also noted that he is co-sponsoring legislation to roll back some license plate fee hikes and a small raise to legislators that he said were tucked into a large revenue bill he supported overall, but not in its entirety.

For his part, Arview had difficulty defining how he would contribute to balancing the state’s budget, and instead spoke in broad generalities, comparing the state’s budget to his family budget. As a hard rule, Arview said he would not vote for any tax increases. He said he supports spending money on repairing roads and bridges and other infrastructure needs but said “that money could have come from other places.” The lawmakers, he said, “are mismanaging.”

“We need to divert unnecessary spending to necessary spending,” he said.

Asked for specific areas he would cut in order to hold the line on taxes or reduce them, Arview mentioned the word “things” 10 times in a vague, 98-word answer.

“What we need to do is we need to sit down and prioritize those things and figure out which are the most important things, and those are the things we pay first. And then we pay the less important things, and then we pay the less important things. And if we have anything left over, then we get to do extra things. I’m not sure we necessarily have those extra things, but we do have things that are less important than other things, and those are the things we need to look at cutting. At least temporarily.”

Asked again for him to specify some of the “things” he would support cutting, Arview said: “You’re absolutely right. It’s easy to say we want to cut these things. But to actually sit down and figure out what are the things? That’s not something that I would personally, just as an individual, feel comfortable even saying, ‘Well, I think we need to cut this.’ We need to sit down and look at it.” Pressed further, Arview said he would look at raising the eligibility for Medicaid, and possibly consider an across-the-board cut across all state government programs to spread out the pain. Arview also said he would “focus on driving business into the area” and incentivize companies to hire people who receive public aid so that they no longer need it. “And then those problems are solved, or alleviated,” he said. Severin has also said he supports lower taxes and business development, and spends a lot of his days back home in the district visiting area employers.

Among other areas of contention between the opponents, Arview said he was disappointed that Severin was not in session the day that the House passed a bill requiring public schools in Illinois to include the contributions of LGBTQ people in American history lessons. Severin’s vote would not have changed the outcome of the legislation, which was later signed into law by Gov. J.B. Pritzker. Severin said he had a pre-planned excused absence that day, and didn’t realize the bill would be called while he was away. Severin said that if he had been there, he would have voted no.

The two also have different takes on Illinois’ pension woes, caused by years of lawmakers and governors agreeing to skimp on their funding obligations. Severin said that he uses his position to advocate for the state making its required payments in annual budgets. But he said that he would not make further adjustments to benefits. He opposes a proposal to place a constitutional amendment on the ballot to tie annual cost-of-living adjustments, or COLA — currently a fixed, compounded 3% annually — to inflation.

Arview, on the other hand, said he would support efforts to tie the COLA to inflation. He also suggested the state pass legislation creating a new benefits structure for incoming employees. Arview was not familiar with legislation the General Assembly passed to do that a decade ago, creating a second tier effective for new employees hired after 2010. Given that information, Arview said he would create a third tier and cut their benefits by 2% compared to the second tier employees. 2% is a safe amount, he said, “because you’re not going to effectively hurt their quality of life by doing that, because we’re just talking a few percentage points,” he said. “And if we can do that, then we can make a big effect on what we can spend the money on otherwise, where we can help people.”

“I don’t want to sound like a socialist because that’s not the intention here,” he said. “But, we have people who need it who can’t work and don’t have it, and then we have people who spent their entire lives in this job, this government job, this state job, and now their retirement is set.”

Severin, who is seeking a third term to represent the 117th District, said that if he wins this race, he only intends to run one more time. “My goal is to serve four terms — eight years,” he said. “I feel like that’s plenty.”

Illinois' 117th Representative District covers areas of Williamson, Franklin and Hamilton counties. The primary election is March 17.

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