* My weekly syndicated newspaper column…

Serabi Medina’s family is currently raising money online to pay for her funeral. You’ve probably read or heard about how the 9-year-old girl was deliberately shot in the head and killed, allegedly by a neighbor in Chicago’s Portage Park neighborhood earlier this month.

But the fundraising shouldn’t be necessary.

Last year, House Bill 2985 created the Murdered Children Funeral and Burial Assistance Act. The measure unanimously passed both legislative chambers and was signed into law on May 10, 2022. The law was named after Mychal Moultry, a 4-year-old boy murdered in 2021. “My son will be remembered,” Mychal’s mom told a reporter last year.

The law allows the Illinois Department of Human Services to pay up to $10,000 for a murdered child’s funeral and burial starting July 1 of this year, but that spending was “subject to appropriation.”

That legalese means the services can only be paid if the program is specifically added to the state’s budget law with a dollar amount attached to it. And, as so often happens with legislation like this, the money was not properly inserted into the final bill, which means families like Serabi’s might not see a dime — although there is hope that a solution will be found.

]The problem with the system is that the buck doesn’t seem to really stop anywhere. The original Senate sponsor retired. Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed the bill at a Peoria event, but his budget office and the Department of Human Services didn’t include it in the spending plan Pritzker proposed in February. The legislative staff members also apparently don’t track bills to make sure programs are funded.

It looks like the program slipped through the cracks because, according to the governor’s office, the bill’s House original sponsor apparently made an honest mistake and mistook an appropriation for another burial program to be a funding source for the child burial legislation.

Rep. Camille Lilly is the original House sponsor of the murdered child funeral bill and also chairs the House Health & Human Services Appropriations Committee. She claimed first through a spokesperson and then in a phone conversation with my associate Isabel Miller that the law had been funded last year and, when no money was spent, $5 million was re-appropriated this year.

Trouble is, the law didn’t fully take effect until July 1, 2023, so it wouldn’t have been funded during the 2022 budget process.

More importantly, according to the governor’s office, the $5 million appropriations line Lilly pointed to is for an existing burial program for adults within three different Public Aid Code articles identified in the bill’s language, but not for the children’s program, which is in a different article of the code.

The Department of Human Services is “committed to implementing this law and is planning to utilize some of this appropriation to cover the children’s program,” explained Jordan Abudayyeh at the governor’s office. But the department will have to draft and implement rules to accomplish this because there’s no clear appropriation for the child program.

The rules, Abudayyeh said, will be “retroactive so funeral/burial expenses up to $10,000 may be covered related to tragedies that occurred between July 2022 and July 2024.”

Hopefully, this will all be fixed. But, as I mentioned above, this is all too common in Springfield. Legislators and advocates regularly pass bills that require government spending and then don’t adequately engage during the budget-making process (which is not what appears to have happened here).

The Department of Human Services was required by last year’s law to have new administrative rules in place by last month, but since the funding wasn’t in the budget, DHS put it on the back-burner. That shouldn’t have happened.

Staff members in both the legislative and executive branches are already stretched thin. The House’s appropriations staff is trying to form a union and their director recently announced his pending resignation. There’s lots of flux everywhere. Even so, somebody smarter than me needs to come up with a solution to this.

Separately, Lilly also pointed out to Isabel that the state still has trouble convincing funeral homes to conduct the services and then wait for reimbursement because of the state’s long history of extremely slow payments. State reimbursements flow a whole lot faster now, but it’s hard to live down a bad reputation.

In the meantime, if you would like to help Serabi Medina’s family pay for her funeral and burial, go here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/serabi-medina

…Adding… Another example of “subject to appropriation” from an email I received today…

Rich,

I thoroughly enjoy reading your blog and have done so for years. I am reaching with a legislative question since you are typically “in the know!”

I know that the legislature passed a bill in May ensuring free breakfast and lunch for all students (“Healthy School Meals for All Program”). I checked the status of that bill indicating that Pritzker had signed it:

Bill Number: HB2471
Description: Creates the Health School Meals for All Program to provide free school breakfast and lunches to students in all participating schools. This program is subject to appropriation.
Action: Signed
Effective: Immediately

I was naturally excited to read this and sent a question to my district superintendent and received the following disappointing response: “The bill signed by the Governor was done so with a condition that it was only required if funds were appropriated in the budget. My understanding is that implementation of the bill will cost approximately $200 million which is not currently appropriated in the state budget. If the bill were to be included in the FY25 appropriation, then I believe [redacted] would qualify for participation.”

I don’t understand the purpose of this bill having an immediate effective date with no money allocated. It seems as though school lunches will not be free for all for FY 24. Color me confused…

Thanks,
James