* OK, let’s start a fresh “doomsday budget” thread, shall we? That other one was getting too long. This is the full explanation from the governor’s office. Have at it…
“Slash and Burn” Budget Consequences
Balancing the fiscal year 2010 budget by using only a “slash and burn” approach will take a significant toll on the people of Illinois. In this grim budget scenario, Illinois meets requirements to tap American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding and provides limited state money necessary to attract other federal matching funds.
What follows are some of the dire consequences should this scorched-earth, cuts-only, approach be used to close the deficit:
Education – $1.5 billion cut – Over 14,300 teachers laid off
• Cut school aid by $568 million, causing more than 9,300 teachers to lose their jobs.
• Eliminate preschool for 100,000 children, causing more than 5,000 teachers to lose their jobs.
Higher Education – $554 million cut – Over 400,000 students affected
• Eliminate all state scholarships, including MAP grants, making college less affordable for 400,000 students.
Healthcare – $1.2 billion cut – Over 650,000 people lose healthcare
• Eliminate healthcare for 300,000 children and 175,000 parents, and Rx assistance for 172,000 seniors.
• Eliminate all healthcare subsidies for 78,000 retired teachers, university and state employees.
Seniors – $368 million cut – Over 271,000 seniors affected
• Cut Community Care program in half - 26,000 seniors would not receive services to help remain in their homes.
• Eliminate Elder Abuse and Neglect program - 11,000 cases would not be investigated.
• Eliminate Circuit Breaker program, cutting property tax relief for 271,000 seniors.
Veterans – $27 million cut – Over 150,000 veterans affected and 1,000 kicked out of veterans’ homes
• Close all four Illinois veterans’ homes, leaving over 1,000 veterans without critical care.
• Eliminate Traumatic Brain Injury & Post Traumatic Stress Disorder counseling and assistance program.
Public Safety – $294 million cut – Nearly 1,000 State Troopers laid off and 6,000 inmates released early
• Lay off nearly 1,000 State Troopers -50 percent of the force - and eliminate the 2010 class of 100 cadets.
• Release over 6,000 inmates early and close the Sheridan and Southwestern Drug Treatment facilities.
• Close four Department of Juvenile Justice facilities and release over 500 juveniles early.
Human Services – $769 million cut – Over 100,000 people affected
• Eliminate home services for 5,000 people with disabilities.
• Eliminate addiction treatment and prevention for 45,000 people.
• Close one out of every five Illinois Department of Human Services offices.
• Eliminate child care for 1,000 kids and increase co-pays for remaining children.
Economic Development – $549 million cut – Every mass transit district affected
• Eliminate all state funding for public transit and AMTRAK.
Agriculture and Natural Resources – $98 million cut – 60 parks and every museum closed
• Shut down half of the state parks and lay off one-third of frontline park staff, and close state museums.
• Eliminate state funding for Springfield and Du Quoin state fairs, 4-H and county fairs.
Local Government – $1 billion cut
• Eliminate state funding for local governments, reducing their ability to fund core services like law enforcement, fire service and garbage collection and offices like public defenders, county treasurers and state’s attorneys.
Additional– $1.1 billion cut
• Require additional deep reductions in agency services, eliminate support for numerous specialized programs and eliminate dozens of state boards, offices, commissions and agencies.
————————
• The two-year deficit from fiscal years 2009 and 2010 is $11.6 billion.
• Of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds that Illinois is receiving, $4.1 billion can be applied towards closing the $11.6 billion deficit.
• In this “Slash and Burn” budget scenario, the remaining deficit is closed with $7.5 billion in cuts that hurt the citizens of Illinois and further damage the economy.
* Gov. Pat Quinn, speaking today about legislators who refuse to support budgetary revenue increases….
“I would say to legislators who think we have to cut,” Quinn said, “Maybe they can take some of those prisoners home to their own houses when they get out of jail.” An audience of more than 500 people at the City Club of Chicago luncheon laughed at that line.
The governor’s doomsday proposal would let 6,000 prisoners out of jail early.
* 12:11 pm - Subscribers already have details and I’ll update this post after the governor’s noontime speech (expecting a release around oneish). From Melissa Hahn’s Twitter page…
Gov’s “doomsday” budget may be released today… thousands of teacher layoffs, massive cuts to public trans, health care, and state fair.
* 12:55 pm - From a press release…
”The Governor’s doomsday budget should serve as a wake up call to members of the General Assembly. Failure to take action to raise revenue before the session adjourns would mean catastrophic cuts to education, health care, home care, child care and countless other vital public services that millions of Illinois families depend on. Legislators who oppose cuts to these vital services need to get off the fence and on record today that they will support a fair tax plan that raises enough revenue to prevent this doomsday plan from becoming reality.”
- Keith Kelleher, SEIU Healthcare Illinois & Indiana President
* 1:00 pm - While the governor is speaking today about doomsday budgets (including eliminating all money for the Illinois State Fair, the Illinois State Fair is set to announce its grandstand lineup on Wednesday. From a press release…
ILLINOIS STATE FAIR TO ANNOUNCE 2009 GRANDSTAND LINE-UP MAY 20
DATE: Wednesday, May 20, 11 a.m.
LOCATION: Artisan’s Building on the Illinois State Fairgrounds
DESCRIPTION: Illinois Agriculture Director Tom Jennings and Illinois State Fair Manager Amy Bliefnick will announce the 2009 Illinois State Fair theme and Grandstand entertainment line-up.
Apparently, the agencies aren’t yet synched up with the guv’s message of the day. Bad move.
* 1:13 pm - Senate Democratic “budgeteer” Donne Trotter talked to the press a few minutes ago about the governor’s “doomsday” proposal…
He also touched on how passing a tax hike is more difficult in the House than the Senate…
*** 1:22 pm *** We have a few details of the doomsday plan from ABC7…
laying off 14,300 teachers
closing veterans homes
closing half Illinois’ parks
eliminating Illinois State Fair funding
The governor’s proposed cuts would slash about 37-percent of the state budget. [Emphasis added]
That almost looks like it was cribbed from the “Extra” I put out an hour or so ago. But, whatever.
* 1:25 pm - From AFSCME…
“These cuts would devastate education, health care, public safety, human services and transportation. Tens of thousands of public-service workers would be laid off.
“In a terrible recession, with millions unemployed and demand for public services skyrocketing, President Obama understands that government needs to invest in America, protect public services and put people back to work.
“Legislators in Springfield need to show the same leadership. They must raise revenue to prevent devastating cuts, save public services and pay the state’s bills.”
*** 1:34 pm *** From the AP, with emphasis added since this is a long post…
[Quinn] says without that money [from a tax hike], 14,300 teachers and half of state police troopers could be laid off. He says 650,000 people would lose health care and 400,000 college students could lose state grants and scholarships.
*** 1:45 pm *** From Crain’s. Again, with emphasis added…
* 14,300 public school teachers would be laid off, a $1.5-billion cut.
* 400,000 college students would lose scholarship aid in a $554-million reduction.
* 650,000 people would lose health care benefits in cuts totaling $1.2 billion. * 271,000 seniors would not be taken care of in the wake of $368 million worth of reductions, cutting things like the state Department on Aging’s Circuit Breaker program, and services to help seniors remain in their homes and fight elderly abuse. * 6,000 prisoners would be let out of jail early. * $769 million in human services cuts would mean 5,000 disabled people would lose home care services and 45,000 people would no longer get addiction treatment and prevention.
* Mass transit cuts of $549 million would eliminate all public funding for public transit and Amtrak.
* Local aid to state government would be cut $1 billion.
* Another $1 billion in cuts have yet to be determined. […]
The cuts he detailed in his speech total about $7 billion.
That would pretty much take care of the FY10 deficit, but doesn’t really address the current fiscal year’s shortfall. In other words, the state will still be trying to catch up on bills for at least another year, but probably longer.Error. With new federal Medicaid and education cash, this does close the hole. Sorry about that.
…Adding… By zeroing out local governments, slashing school aid and mass transit subsidies, you can guarantee local tax hikes.
This doomsday proposal is, of course, an exercise and not the actual thing. But it does give you an idea of the hole we’re in.
When someone is arrested for a serious crime, police automatically take a set of fingerprints and no one thinks twice about it.
In close to 20 states — but not Illinois — the cops go a step further: They take a DNA sample from everyone who has been arrested for a serious crime but not yet tried. The FBI recently started to do the same.
That’s a reflection of just how valuable DNA has become as a way to catch the guilty — and exonerate the innocent. Experience shows that such databases stop criminals and solve cases.
Five years ago, Illinois tried to follow suit. The House approved a similar law only to watch it die in the Senate. Critics said such testing was an invasion of privacy for people who may have done nothing wrong.
Provides that every person arrested for committing a felony shall have a sample of his or her saliva or tissue taken for DNA fingerprinting analysis, at the time of booking, for the purpose of determining identity and for certain other specified purposes.
* The Question: Should the police be allowed to take a DNA sample after arresting someone for a felony? Explain fully, please.
* While this story has an interesting premise - the sworn testimony of a witness in Al Sanchez’s trial that House Speaker Michael Madigan put so many employees into the city’s Bureau of Electricity that it was called “Madigan Electric” - the evidence presented is somewhat slim…
In all, 16 employees of the bureau have contributed a total of $45,200 since 1997 to the speaker’s 13th Ward Democratic Organization and to Citizens for Lisa Madigan, according to campaign records.
That works out to $235.42 per year per employee. Not much.
But this statement is more than a bit weird…
“Madigan doesn’t have anything to do with hiring in Chicago,'’ says his spokesman, Steve Brown.
What? Nothing at all? The Speaker, a ward committeeman for decades, has nothing to do with city hiring?
Gov. Quinn’s office took the unusual step late Friday of retracting a letter of support for a West Side hospital expansion after drawing bipartisan criticism for personally promoting the project.
Quinn’s office sent a letter bearing his signature to the scandal-plagued Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board, touting Hartgrove Hospital’s bid to build an 88-bed mental health facility at 520 N. Ridgeway.
His letter, dated March 5, praised the hospital’s “commitment to once again provide services in this community.” But it sparked serious questions about why he would personally intervene on a matter before a board that was ground zero in the corruption scandals that knocked former Gov. Rod Blagojevich from office.
Late Friday, Quinn’s office said the letter was written without his backing and said it shouldn’t have been sent to the board. A new letter correcting the original one would be sent immediately to the hospital construction board.
There’s nothing in the piece about who wrote the letter and put the governor’s name on it or whether that person has been punished. Curious, that.
* And the Daily Herald takes a fairly honest, if brief, look at some of the pros and cons of various ethics reforms today…
PRO: District lines drawn by a computer would lead to more candidates competing in more competitive elections. Instead of always re-electing incumbents, voters would get to choose from many candidates in races for Congress and the state legislature. Term limits for leaders would get new people in control of the chamber much more often and make the leaders less powerful than they are today.
CON: More candidates running in more-competitive races will require candidates to spend more money in election races. Leader term limits could backfire. Madigan is the only leader who stood up to Blagojevich and stopped him from gaining control of nearly $30 billion in project spending. A new, less-experienced leader might not be so willing to say “no” to a governor.
It’s been clear from the beginning that Gov. Pat Quinn muffed his budget rollout.
Instead of stressing the billion dollars or so in cuts he made and the additional cuts he might be open to, Quinn has repeatedly stressed the need for a 50 percent increase in the income tax rate and has flatly rejected additional budget reductions.
Polling conducted for the Senate Democrats reportedly shows voters want the exact opposite approach. First, make the cuts, then increase taxes if and only if they are absolutely necessary.
So, Quinn hasn’t made it any easier to wrap up the General Assembly’s business by May 31 and balance a budget that has a hole somewhere in the neighborhood of $12 billion.
Senate President John Cullerton said last week he believed two of the three major issues facing the General Assembly were going quite well. You’d never know it by hanging out at the Statehouse, but he was more upbeat than I’ve seen him in weeks.
An ethics reform bill is beginning to take shape as Cullerton negotiates with the governor and the governor’s reform commission.
The public works “capital” bill is also moving forward, Cullerton said. The leaders have agreed to a basic outline of revenue sources, including increasing the sales tax on most alcohol; a sales tax expansion to include candy, iced tea and beauty products; privatizing lottery management and allowing Internet lottery ticket sales; raising various vehicle registration and licensing fees; legalizing video poker and using road fund money that is currently spent elsewhere.
The big problem, Cullerton said, is the budget. And he’s certainly right about that. I could tell you lots of stories, but I’ll just pass along one.
I spent some time last week with a liberal African-American state Senator from Chicago who has historically fought attempts to cut the budget, but has never been directly involved with the budget-making process. The legislator, who is virtually assured of reelection, stunned everyone in the room by announcing that the General Assembly ought to just pass a budget and go home without a tax increase, no matter what the deficit or damage might be. The legislator couldn’t be convinced otherwise, even by a highly respected Democratic budget expert who was also in the room.
When a liberal who represents a district chock full of people who depend on state government services starts talking like that, you wonder how they’ll ever solve this budget crisis.
The mushrooms, as rank and file legislators are often called, aren’t restless. They’re an apoplectic mess.
Legislators elect their leaders to protect them from the harsh realities of political life. Leaders raise most of the money, they run the campaigns, they help members write legislation to benefit their districts or make them more popular with the folks back home. And they protect members from tough votes.
Nobody has taken a truly tough vote in the General Assembly since maybe 1983, when taxes were raised during a terrible recession. They’ve been spoiled rotten, coddled and shielded at every turn by leaders who have ignored the state’s problems until everything finally exploded at once with a fury unmatched since the state government went bankrupt in the 19th century. Nothing has prepared legislators as a group for the horrific votes they face this month.
Cullerton says he sees the way forward. He believes he can cut a deal with the reform commission that will keep the good government types and the editorial boards off his members’ backs through the 2010 election, and iron out the details of a massive public works program to create jobs and mollify the unions. Easier said than done, I know, yet he thinks that’s all within reach right now.
But then, as Cullerton says, there’s that budget problem.
Quinn has made things even more difficult by caving in too quickly to unions representing teachers and state employees. He had demanded that the workers pay an extra 2 percent of their salary into their pension funds. The unions pushed back hard, so Quinn announced he was dropping the idea after being roundly booed and heckled during a raucous teachers union rally.
An experienced negotiator would’ve made the teachers and state workers sweat it out until the end of the legislative session, and then handed them the concession. Now, they want more out of Quinn and he has little to give.
* Related…
* It’s always the greedy vs. the needy: When people talk about cutting government budgets, they don’t think about businesses like hers or the people she serves. They think if budgets are cut the fat will be trimmed. The patronage workers will be fired. The slackers will be shown the door. And wouldn’t that be great? But the world doesn’t work like that, and we all know it.
As federal regulators hold fast to their claim that a chemical in baby bottles is safe, e-mails obtained by the Journal Sentinel show that they relied on chemical industry lobbyists to examine bisphenol A’s risks, track legislation to ban it and even monitor press coverage.
In one instance, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s deputy director sought information from the BPA industry’s chief lobbyist to discredit a Japanese study that found it caused miscarriages in workers who were exposed to it. This was before government scientists even had a chance to review the study.
Almost a quarter of children in Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood have asthma. That’s about twice the national average. A hospital in the neighborhood is taking a novel approach to the problem. It’s pressuring some landlords to clean up conditions that can trigger asthma.
“A lot of times you can simply run the tree limbs through a chipper and dispose of the debris quickly,” Land said. “There were 100-year-old oak trees that were uprooted, with root balls that would fill up a dump truck. I say that if we can get all of the debris cleaned up by December, it will be a pretty good Christmas present.”
The CTA will transfer almost $129 million in cash originally earmarked for station fixups and new buses to help fill $155 million budget hole this year.
The mural was a painting of three Chicago Police Department blue light camera’s that you see on light posts in high crime areas. The Chicago Police logo is on the cameras but then the artist also painted Jesus on one post, a deer head on another, and a skull on the third camera. What the mural is supposed to mean is anyone’s guess. Angeles agrees that it’s a rather inscrutable work of art but he liked it and he says he feels bad for the artist.
Teachers at three Chicago charter schools are on a course to become the first unionized charter teachers in the city. They still have legal hurdles to overcome. But if they get to negotiate a contract, it’s likely to look dramatically different than traditional teacher union contracts.
The department and UIC are promising that those who participate in the survey won’t be identified, although they will have to input a code to allow the department to measure responses by years of service and unit.
Though the FOP helped draft the survey, Dougherty said the union hasn’t endorsed the survey for its members because it wasn’t allowed to take part in the collection of the surveys.
As long as she lives, Patricia Fasula can never work for the City of Chicago.
That was her punishment for filing bogus documents to convince city officials that she — and not her husband — owned and operated Patricia Trucking, one of several “women-owned businesses” in the city’s scandal-plagued Hired Truck Program.
But Fasula is still a $58,816-a-year accountant for Cook County Circuit Court Clerk Dorothy Brown, where she was working when she and her husband set up their trucking company out of their Bridgeport home.
Similarly, Fasula’s husband, John Fasula — who had told the Chicago Sun-Times he helped run the trucking company — still works for the CTA, where he makes $89,705 a year as manager of grounds maintenance. He was working for the CTA when the Hired Truck scandal erupted five years ago, and officials of the transit agency seized his computer then to see if he was running the trucking company from his CTA office.
“That’s all over the country where you could sell [affordable] housing. We changed that,” he said. “Every [affordable housing] development, all developments did it in the country. That is not acceptable.”
Daley said the federal government should impose similar restrictions nationally.
The County Board recently voted 12-3 to kill the tax hike. Board President Todd Stroger vetoed that action. And on Tuesday the board is scheduled to decide whether to override his veto.
–That veto override is the Tuesday vote that matters most. Stroger’s allies on the board don’t want you to believe that. They want you to think they’re swell compromisers: As part of their ceaseless effort to confuse this discussion and confound the public will, they’re offering a slow-mo alternative that would phase out the tax gradually. Don’t fall for this. The moment the 2010 election is over and the heat from victimized taxpayers subsides, they’ll surely try to undo any phase-out. In the meantime, they won’t have to do the necessary streamlining of county government. Why? Because your tax dollars will still be washing through their door by the hundreds of millions.
Asked why he hadn’t set up a payment plan earlier, Stroger replied, “Sometimes things slip through your fingers.”
Although the lien filed by the IRS read “Area: Business/self-employed,” Stroger told Kelley his family has no other outside income or job other than his job with the county and his wife’s job at the Illinois secretary of state’s office.
Stroger said he would not release tax forms and said other officials who do, like Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, are doing more than they’re required.
“I think they’re making a mistake. It’s really none of your business,” said Stroger.
