Sad IL Saga

The saga of weak, ineffective Illinois state government continues.

You gotta read the editorial below.

Come on Springfield..... the state needs leadership and action.  Not kindergarten partisanship.

Out for now.......

Matt

By the Editorial Board

Rockford Register Star

The resources needed by agencies in the Rockford region to provide valuable services to the community amounts to pocket change for a state that spends billions of dollars every year. The money those agencies are owed can mean — literally — the difference between life and death.

Domestic violence victims with nowhere to go. Directionless teens wandering the streets looking for trouble. Elderly residents going hungry or starving. Single-parent families with no access to child care putting their children in potentially dangerous situations. Drug addicts with no way to get help.

It’s not hyperbole — it’s a near certainty that some Illinois residents will die unless the state lives up to its promise to address public problems.

Illinois has not adopted a budget because of the political fight between Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner and the Democrat-controlled legislature led by Speaker of the House Mike Madigan and Senate President John Cullerton.

Yet even without a budget, the state is paying 90 percent of its obligations, largely because of court orders, consent decrees and continuing appropriations. People with clout are being paid. Nonprofit agencies that serve the elderly, troubled teens, the poor, the mentally ill and others in the 10 percent have no clout. Unless residents of Illinois rally around and advocate for these agencies, the situation will not change.

Although we’ve reached a crisis point this year, the state has been neglectful for years. The Editorial Board recently hosted a handful of agency representatives who detailed how much money they were owed for providing services on behalf of the state. They’ve had to cut staff, curtail services, tap into reserves or seek lines of credit to provide services for people who need help and can no longer help themselves.

Laying off smart, educated and caring individuals will not attract people and businesses to Illinois. Adding people to the unemployment rolls because the state won’t live up to its promises is morally repugnant and economically counterproductive.

It’s a story we’ve heard far too many times in the past decade. These agencies don’t ask for much. They ask for predictability and reliability from the state so that they can plan their own budgets. They’ve been willing to absorb cuts, but they need to know how much and when they’ll get what they are owed.

What business can run if it has no idea if there’s money coming in? The state of Illinois expects human service agencies to rely on the bad practices that have helped the state reach the brink of insolvency: delaying payments, borrowing, bonding debt.

To make matters worse, the state is threatening human services agencies, telling them they must continue to operate without funding or else be barred from ever getting a contract should there ever be a budget. In what universe does that kind of blackmail make sense? Only in Illinois.

There’s plenty of blame to go around, but frankly, we don’t give a hoot about assessing blame. We want solutions. Our elderly deserve to eat. Our teens deserve to have a place to go, and domestic violence victims deserve to live in safety.

There may not be a budget at all this year, so lawmakers should scrap what they’re working on and consider adopting a two-year budget and perhaps make a two-year budget the norm going forward.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 19 states enact biennial budgets. It used to be the norm, but states decided annual budgeting was more efficient. Maybe for other states, but not for Illinois.

Two-year budgets were considered incredible time-wasters by the states that decided to change to annual budgeting. In Illinois, we’ve got legislative time-wasting down to an art form. How much worse could it get?

If Illinois is going to be a great state again, its leaders cannot feign interest in the plight of human service agencies. They need to show compassion. They need to act. Providing financial support to these worthy organizations is a moral imperative.