His Inaugural Address featured fairy tales such as the budget he supposedly balanced (he's yet to do so) and his election "mandate" (most voters marked someone else for governor).
Since the late 1980s, "I'm going to Disney World!" has been the happy proclamation of Super Bowl winners, becoming one of the most recognizable advertising slogans in marketing history.
Champion athletes have nothing on Gov. Rod Blagojevich, though. As he started his second term last month, the Democratic governor was already in the Magic Kingdom. His Inaugural Address featured fairy tales such as the budget he supposedly balanced (he's yet to do so) and his election "mandate" (most voters marked someone else for governor).
To his credit, the governor pledged to provide access to affordable, quality health care for all Illinoisans — a noble dream — but he offered no specifics on how to pay for universal health care, just as funding details remain uncertain for two of his first-term initiatives, health insurance for all children and universal preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds.
At the same time, Blagojevich avoided harsh realities like ethics reform and widespread inequities in funding public schools. The omissions may have been understandable, with federal prosecutors probing his administration's hiring and contracting practices and his school finance "solution" — selling the state lottery — likely destined to be dead on arrival in the legislature.
But the issues merit serious attention when the legislature returns this month, as the rest of the state's Democratic leadership seemed to appreciate, choosing to go the reality route while the governor cavorted in Fantasyland.
For example, every statewide elected official, save Blagojevich, spoke of the need to end the state's sorry history of political corruption. And in his first official act, new state Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias issued an executive order barring his campaign fund from taking contributions from banks, treasurer's office employees and contractors doing business with the office. The order also prohibits employees from accepting gifts from lobbyists and imposes a two-year ban on former employees lobbying the office.
"There will be no pay-to-play politics in the treasurer's office," declared Giannoulias, the only newcomer among the statewide officers.
The treasurer's ethics order is patterned after one issued earlier by state Comptroller Dan Hynes, and the two fiscal officers endorsed legislation that would make it illegal for all officeholders to accept campaign contributions from large contractors.
Hynes also urged state leaders to do "not just what's convenient in the short term, but what is right in the long term," on the state's budget woes, a familiar theme for the third-term comptroller, who last fall predicted that the state's foreseeable revenue growth for the next few years would be consumed by on-going commitments for pension funding, repaying past borrowing and meeting mushrooming health care costs.
"For too long, government spent money without the slightest concern for the future," he noted in his inaugural remarks. "The consequences? Those could be put off until the next year, the next administration or the next decade."
Now the consequences are here, said Hynes, visible in crumbling roads, poor schools and inadequate health care.
Underscoring the point, just a few days before the inauguration, the comptroller reported the state faced a backlog of more than $1.3 billion in unpaid bills at the end of December, the midpoint for fiscal year 2007, a pattern he said was likely to persist through the next fiscal year, "absent any significant changes."
But change may be in the offing. Both Democratic legislative leaders, House Speaker Michael Madigan and Senate President Emil Jones Jr., sounded similar fiscal concerns after being re-elected to their posts for the 95th General Assembly.
Citing a report by a group of Chicago business executives that the state "is headed toward financial implosion" with more than $100 billion in unfunded debt, Madigan declared himself willing to make unpopular choices.
"I am prepared to engage in doing things which today may not be viewed so favorably, but down the road, there will be an acknowledgement it was the right thing to do," said Madigan, who noted pointedly that he has voted both for income tax increases and for major budget cuts in past years.
But Jones argued the state's fiscal woes stem from inadequate revenue, not wasteful spending. Education and health care are the two largest budget items, he said, and neither should be cut. In fact, the Democratic leader wants the state to step in with additional dollars for local schools to remedy what he termed an "outrageous, inequitable" financing system that relies too heavily on property taxes, allowing schools in wealthy areas to spend four or five times as much per student as schools with smaller tax bases.
"A child's education ... should not depend on where the child attends school or where that child is domiciled," declared Jones, a longtime champion of school funding reform.
Still, the major obstacle to overhauling the state's revenue structure remains Blagojevich, who repeated his pledge to oppose income or sales tax increases in his Inaugural Address. But the governor may find it difficult to deliver on universal health care — a multibillion-dollar commitment — without yielding on the no-tax pledge.
Even without a costly new program, the state will be hard-pressed to meet its obligations next fiscal year, which starts July 1. The required contribution to state retirement systems will jump by more than $600 million and debt service — loan repayments — will grow by more than $80 million. And on July 1, Blagojevich will lose his relatively unfettered ability to siphon money from accounts earmarked for specific programs to bolster general state spending, a windfall averaging more than $200 million annually.
One would hope such hard fiscal facts, abetted by legislative resolve, would bring the governor back from the Magic Kingdom.
Charles N. Wheeler III is director of the Public Affairs Reporting program at the University of Illinois at Springfield.
Illinois Issues, February 2007
