* Here we go again…

* It starts like this…

Hi everybody. As you all know, Attorney General Madigan went into court last month, trying to force a government shutdown. At the same time, Speaker Madigan had a government shutdown bill ready in the legislature. And Comptroller Mendoza refused to fight for state employees. Fortunately for us, they all lost. A judge ruled state employees must continue getting paid and support for the Madigan Shutdown Bill collapsed in the House.

Actually, AG Madigan was simply attempting to clarify that state bills shouldn’t be paid without valid appropriations. Speaker Madigan proposed a bill to fund state worker salaries through the end of the fiscal year. And Comptroller Mendoza didn’t do as the governor ordered and hire her own lawyer in that AG Madigan fight.

* Back to the governor…

Sadly, it appears the fight isn’t over. Since the court ruling, Comptroller Mendoza has been looking for other ways to create a crisis and force a shutdown of state services.

She’s cut hardship payments to the Department of Aging by millions of dollars, putting services for the elderly in danger of collapse. She’s delayed payments to critical vendors at the Department of Health and Family Services and the Department of Corrections. And now she’s threatening not to process payroll for nearly 600 state employees.

This latest attempt to force a crisis is a clear violation of a court order to pay state employees. It’s part of a pattern we’ve seen. Trying to create a crisis that would force another incomplete, stopgap budget or a massive tax hike with no changes to our broken system.

The payroll for nearly 600 state employees was submitted to the comptroller last week. It’s a valid payroll, no different than the payrolls she’s processed since she became comptroller. And by court order she is legally obligated to process it once again. But she is continuing to resist.

To state employees, please know that we will use all of our legal options to make sure Comptroller Mendoza processes the payroll we’ve submitted on your behalf, on time and in full.

And to the social services providers and vendors she’s putting at risk, we will forcefully advocate on your behalf as well.

Thank you for your support to keep government operating as we work for changes to fix our broken system.

The background on the payroll dispute is here, in case you need to refresh your memory from last week. I’ve asked the comptroller’s office for comment on this aspect and the rest of the allegations.

*** UPDATE 1 ***  Background…

Today the Rauner Administration filed a motion in St. Clair County, asking the court to direct Comptroller Mendoza to continue paying state employees in compliance with the court order that has done so since July 2015. That order provides that state employees must be paid for the work they perform and orders Mendoza to process lawful payment vouchers submitted for that purpose. The Rauner Administration submitted a lawful voucher late last week for 578 employees of the Illinois Central Management Services. The Comptroller to date has refused to process it. That is a clear violation of the court order. Our filing today shows the Administration’s commitment to ensuring that all state workers continue to receive regular, uninterrupted paychecks.

The motion is here.

*** UPDATE 2 *** Comptroller’s office…

Instead of fulfilling his constitutional duty to propose a balanced budget, Governor Rauner is concocting ridiculous conspiracy theories and wasting more taxpayer dollars.

It gets harder to take him seriously when what he presents in his tweets and court filings has so little basis in reality.

CMS

Payroll records show that under Rauner’s handpicked “wingman” comptroller, the Dept. of Central Management Services consistently used the Garage Fund and the Maintenance fund to pay for 578 employees who work on maintenance and in state garages.

Now Governor Rauner suddenly wants to hoard those funds which he has tellingly renamed “government shutdown prevention funds” and instead raid the state’s General Revenue Fund, which would take critical funds away from nursing homes, hospice care and care for the disabled.

Instead of using the funds that are $93 million in the black, Gov. Rauner wants to raid the fund he put $12.5 billion in the hole by failing to propose a balanced budget for the last three years.

Rauner’s administration has more than enough money to pay employees from the department’s self-protected funds. The only reason to draw attention to this issue now is to manufacture a phony headline about state employees in “danger” of missing a paycheck. This is just one of many phony stories Rauner’s administration has shopped in recent weeks, like the Dept. of Aging hoax. Expect more: All just as phony.

No employees will miss any paychecks if the administration uses the money that the General Assembly authorized them to use and the Governor signed. The administration can continue using those funds for payroll as they always have. Or they can choose to create a phony crisis for P.R. value and continue playing politics with people’s lives.

Dept. of Aging

While the comptroller and her staff work tirelessly to triage the state’s obligations and do all they can to prevent closures and shutdowns, the governor is more interested in using state employees as political pawns to score political points.

In her first three months in office, The Comptroller made the elderly a greater priority than the previous administration by processing more than $110 million to providers in Department on Aging programs. The Governor is peddling the black-is-white falsehood that the Comptroller has “cut” payments to Aging while he proposes cutting the Community Care program and kicking 40,000 elderly people out of the program and forcing them into nursing homes. That’s the real Bruce Rauner - not the Twitter version.

All outside observers agree the main reason for the state’s financial crisis is the Governor’s failure for the third year in a row to propose a balanced budget for the General Assembly to consider.

Even Standard & Poor’s wrote, “Illinois’ fiscal crisis is, in our view, a man-made byproduct of policy ultimatums placed upon the state’s budget process.” In other words, Gov. Rauner owns this fiscal disaster.

Our office and Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s office will present to the court today the history of CMS payments coming from the Garage and Maintenance funds and Gov. Rauner’s attempt to rewrite history.

*** UPDATE 3 *** Ouch…

She even quotes Chance the Rapper at the end.