The start of a new legislative session is traditionally a time of grand ambition. With a little vacation (and perhaps an election) behind them, lawmakers promise this will be the year they revamp public school financing, reform health care, rescue mass transit, pass a capital works plan or whatever.
Nobody’s talking about any of that now, though. It’s all about Gov. Rod Blagojevich — getting rid of him, that is. Getting things done in Springfield was hard enough when Blagojevich was merely the governor dubbed Public Official A. Now he’s a governor facing federal corruption charges and impeachment and he’s desperately trying to prove he’s still on top of things.
That’s his fantasy. Here is reality: Illinois finances are a disaster. Comptroller Dan Hynes estimates that the state will come up $3 billion short of what it needs to pay its bills by the end of the fiscal year in June. With income and sales taxes — the two biggest sources of operating revenue — tanking, next year’s outlook is not rosy either.
This time last year, Hynes reported that Illinois had more than $1.7 billion in bills it couldn’t pay, much of it to health and social service providers. At the time, it was the highest total ever at the midpoint of a state fiscal year. Meanwhile, Blagojevich was hyping his self-declared expansion of medical care, drumming up more patients for the health-care providers who weren’t getting paid on time for the patients they already had. That’s just one example of the sort of antics that poisoned his relationship with lawmakers.
With the economy worsening, the state found itself more than $4 billion behind by November. Nursing homes, day-care centers, substance-abuse clinics and programs for disabled people were stretched to their limits, trying to pay their bills while waiting for the state to pay what it owed them. Many of them fear they’ll have to close their doors.
The state borrowed $1.4 billion to get payments flowing, and Hynes says it now takes 49 days to pay a bill instead of 71.
But some group homes are four to six months behind in getting paid. Many of them have tapped millions of dollars in credit to make their payments, and some can’t get any more credit, says Tony Paulauski, executive director of The Arc of Illinois, which advocates for the disabled.
The state faces an emergency. But it’s not going to begin to fix it until it concludes the matter of Rod Blagojevich.
