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Illinois Issues
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Ends and Means: Illinois' Budget is the Most Out-of-Whack in Recent History

Charles N. Wheeler III
WUIS/Illinois Issues

As the legislative session gets under way each January amid a blizzard of bill introductions, Statehouse watchers have modest expectations: All lawmakers really have to do is pass a budget.

The task has proven difficult in recent years, in large part because of former Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s “my way or the highway” approach to governing and the state’s chronic structural deficit. So with a new captain at the helm this spring, folks were cautiously optimistic that lawmakers would return to the good old days of bipartisan cooperation to address serious state issues and hammer out a budget compromise on time.

What they got instead was the most out-of-whack spending plan in recent state history, a near total abdication of the legislature’s role in the budget-making process and the prospect of even greater headaches next spring.

Contrary to popular belief, the Illinois Constitution does not require that the budget actually be balanced. Instead, the charter says that appropriations “shall not exceed funds estimated by the General Assembly to be available” for the budget year. In past years, the legislature usually tried to maintain the fiction that spending wouldn’t outstrip revenues.

In fact, though, Illinois has been awash in red ink since FY 2001, the last time the state had enough in the bank at the close of the fiscal year to pay outstanding bills, and is likely to see the largest deficit in state history when the books finally are closed on FY 2009.

Legislators abandoned any such pretense for the current budget year and simply chose not to include funding for about $3.2 billion already owed to service providers, which has since climbed to $3.9 billion. They also opted to borrow $3.5 billion to bankroll new spending, mostly for health care and human services, and siphoned $356 million from accounts earmarked for other purposes.

Such fiscal sleight-of-hand was common during the Blagojevich administration, which built upon the smoke-and-mirrors techniques employed by his predecessors, so perhaps one should not be surprised leaders followed a similar course for FY 2010.

However, as a result of relying on such one-time revenues, along with federal stimulus funds to pay ongoing costs, the state will face an even bigger budget shortfall next spring, perhaps as much as $10 billion to keep spending at current levels.

Red ink aside, the truly jaw-dropping aspect of the current spending plan is the unfettered control lawmakers gave Quinn over tens of billions of dollars. As long as anyone can remember, the legislature has dictated line by line, down to the $100-level, spending authority for state government operations: how much an agency can spend for travel, how much for a particular mental health program, how much to feed inmates at each of the state’s prisons.

This time, however, lawmakers sent Quinn lump-sum spending authority for most state agencies, providing a specified amount in general funds for salaries and an additional sum for whatever else the governor wanted the agency to do. The corrections budget, for example, provides $791 million for personnel costs and $356 million for all other expenses, leaving it to Quinn to determine staffing and funding levels at each of the state’s 28 prisons. In similar fashion, Human Services was allocated $716 million for personnel and $1.9 billion for everything else, encompassing a wide array of welfare, mental health and rehabilitation service programs.

In addition to broad spending authority for each agency, the legislature also gave Quinn more than $2.2 billion to spend on human services and an additional $1.2 billion to spend as he saw fit. Moreover, lawmakers granted the governor a free hand to fashion whatever emergency rules and regulations might be needed to carry out his spending decisions.

“We’ve made him king of Illinois,” says Sen. Donne Trotter, a Chicago Democrat and longtime budget negotiator.

All this from a General Assembly that less than six months earlier ousted Blagojevich for broad abuse of his gubernatorial powers, including specific counts charging the former governor with ignoring the legislature’s line-item spending allocations and with crafting regulations as he saw fit with little regard for legislative prerogatives.

Why such a stunning surrender of the legislature’s control of the purse strings? Chalk it up to a combination of political expediency and everyday cowardice.

Quinn initially called for an income tax increase to help close the budget gap, and to their credit, Senate President John Cullerton and his fellow Democrats voted to revamp the state’s revenue structure to help put Illinois on a sound footing.

But House Democrats balked at voting for higher taxes without Republican support, and while some rank-and-file GOP legislators might have been inclined, party leaders were unwilling to yield what they saw as a potent issue for next year’s campaigns.

Unwilling to provide the revenues needed to pay for popular programs, lawmakers were equally loathe to slash their funding. So they gave the governor a virtual free hand in carving a budget pie that was billions of dollars smaller than the appetites of those wanting a piece. The rationale was simple: Forcing Quinn to make painful cuts would insulate individual legislators from unhappy constituents.

The governor dutifully slashed about $1 billion, savings he hoped to achieve in part by laying off some 2,600 state workers — many of them prison guards — and by ordering those kept on to take 12 unpaid days off, a furlough mandate opposed by the state’s public employee unions. Even with the cuts, Quinn warned, the state’s spending commitments are likely to outstrip revenues by as much as $1.4 billion by next June 30, making a tax increase essential.

Lawmakers will have another opportunity to right the foundering ship of state in the fall session scheduled for next month. One would hope that’s not too late for the vulnerable citizens who are paying the price for lawmakers’ unwillingness to do their job.

 

Red ink aside, the truly jaw-dropping aspect of the current spending plan is the unfettered control lawmakers gave Quinn over tens of billions of dollars.

The rationale was simple: Forcing Quinn to make painful cuts would insulate individual legislators from unhappy constituents.

 

Charles N. Wheeler III is director of the Public Affairs Reporting program at the University of Illinois at Springfield. 

Illinois Issues, September 2009

The former director of the Public Affairs Reporting (PAR) graduate program is Professor Charles N. Wheeler III, a veteran newsman who came to the University of Illinois at Springfield following a 24-year career at the Chicago Sun-Times.
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