Illinois has a budget

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SPRINGFIELD — Two weeks into the new fiscal year, Illinois finally has a budget.
Lawmakers worked into the night Wednesday before approving three bills that will keep the state’s financial engine running.

By comfortable margins in both the House and the Senate, legislators approved a $26 billion spending plan that relies on a combination of $3.5 billion in short-term pension borrowing and $2 billion in cuts but manages to preserve most of the state services that were threatened.

Ignoring party lines, local legislators Rep. Frank Mautino, D-Spring Valley; Rep. Don Moffitt, R-Gilson; Rep. David Leitch, R-Peoria; Sen. Gary Dahl, R-Granville; and Sen. Dale Risinger, R-Peoria, uniformly voted in favor of all three bills.

On Thursday, Mautino was pleased with the efforts of his colleagues.

“The bills passed by solid margins in both houses,” he said. “People in leadership positions on both sides worked with the governor’s office.”

Mautino was particularly pleased with Senate Bill 1216, which was the operating budget.

“Paychecks will go out, and vendors will be paid,” he said.

Mautino said the bills give Gov. Pat Quinn a lot of flexibility within the budget, and he will be able to use some of his discretionary funds to increase the level of grants for agencies such as Gateway Services in Princeton, which can now be brought up to more than 80 percent of last year’s levels. The previous budget proposed nearly $10 billion in cuts to the Department of Human Services, which would have slashed funding in a wide variety of areas including people with disabilities, childcare assistance, domestic violence services, addiction treatment, foster care, senior care, Circuit Breaker, college scholarships, vaccines and breast cancer screenings.

Contracts cutting the agencies to 50 percent of last year’s levels have already been sent out, but Mautino said they can now be reissued.

“It’s not up to 100 percent, but it’s more than the 50 percent they were going to get,” Mautino said.

Although the budget calls for no income tax increase at the present time, Mautino said the revenue expectations could be adjusted in January if an income tax increase were approved then.

From the other side of the aisle, Risinger was philosophical.

“It’s certainly not the budget I hoped for,” he said. “But it keeps the government going.”

Risinger said he was pleased the budget didn’t cut as much from social services as the previous budget would have, and that it gave Quinn the opportunity to pick and choose where to spend some of the available revenue.

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