Sangamon Sun

More than 1,000 pending discrimination in Illinois will continue to wait their turn in line after the House voted recently not to combine the Illinois Human Rights Commission (HRC) and Illinois Department of Human Rights (DHR), according to a state press release.

Gov. Bruce Rauner filed Executive Order 17-02 to consolidate the two agencies in an effort to hasten the process of clearing cases brought to the HRC. Cases currently take at least four years to be resolved.

"The Illinois Human Rights Commission has a pending caseload of 1,000 Requests for Review with some serious cases lasting as long as 7 years within our system,” HRC Chair Rose Mary Bombela-Tobias said in the press release. “By blocking the Executive Order, the General Assembly has blocked a plan that would have allowed us to effectively utilize our shared resources by eliminating administrative redundancies between the Department and Commission, focusing resources on the backlog while keeping the independence and integrity of the system."  

Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner | www.illinois.gov

Rauner argued that combining the agencies would quicken the investigation and resolution of discrimination cases as well as preserve the independent appellate process. As a result, taxpayers would have saved at least a half million dollars within the first year of the merger, the press release said.

“Blocking the Governor’s consolidation of DHR and HRC will continue to delay the independent investigative and adjudicatory process under the Illinois Human Rights Act and fails to offer any solutions to reduce the unacceptable backlog at the Commission,” IDHR Acting Director Janice Glenn said in the statement. “Maintaining the status quo of backlog and inefficiencies is a disservice to those who are seeking timely justice from unlawful discrimination."