In today’s Chicago Sun-Times, Brad Spirrison takes a look at Senate Bill 786, State legislation that would expand the Treasurer’s ability to invest more dollars in Illinois start-ups.

“We are falling behind other states in terms of the money allocated to venture capital and startups,” said [State Treasurer Alexi] Giannoulias… “We want to make sure legislators and members of the General Assembly understand what venture capital is. This is money we are going to invest anyway, and we are using it in a manner to spur economic growth.”

Originally filed in February 2007, the SB 786 bill that would allocate more dollars to venture investments unanimously passed through the Senate in April of this year. The bill was immediately referred to the House Rules Committee, where it has been sitting ever since.

Read the whole article here.

Should Illinois invest in more startups? Yes.

It’s not going to be easy - as Spirrison and several headlines point out - political turmoil has been preventing even the most reasonable and agreed-upon bills from becoming law. But we have to start somewhere and let the legislature know how important tech is to our State.

The Illinois Technology Partnership supports Senate Bill 786, and applauds Treasurer Giannoulias and the bill’s sponsors for recognizing the importance of cutting-edge technology and innovation in Illinois. (Read more about our position here.)

This entry was posted on Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 5:41 pm and is filed under NewsBlog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.