State Sen. Daniel Biss (D-Evanston) called on politicians at a town hall meeting Wednesday to put aside partisan ideology and compromise to solve the state’s fiscal crisis before the government defaults on its debt.

The Evanston native focused the annual town hall meeting at the Levy Senior Center, 300 Dodge Ave., on demystifying the budget fight in Springfield and its potential consequences. Biss, taking note of his own bluntness, told the roughly 50-person audience the most likely outcome is that there will not be a finished budget by the end of the fiscal year on June 30, leading the state into a government shutdown.

“If that is what happens, then there will be significant harm done to a lot of people — slowly at first and then quickly,” Biss said in the meeting.

If there is no budget by July, it’s unclear if government employees should continue to serve people with the expectation of getting paid, he said. And if the budget crisis continues into August, the problem will deepen when public schools don’t receive paychecks, leading to difficulties opening for the next school year, he added.

“This is not a game, this is not a joke,” Biss said. “The human damage that would be a consequence of treating it like a game ought to be unacceptable to all of us.”

Despite a budget deficit of $2 billion this year and a projected $6 billion deficit next year, Gov. Bruce Rauner entered office attached to an ideological agenda blind to the state’s fiscal problems, Biss said. And although the deadline is two weeks away and the state is what he called a “basket case that’s about to go bankrupt,” many politicians at the capitol are more focused on mudslinging than the crisis at hand, he said.

“From day one, Gov. Rauner has focused on fixing Illinois’ fiscal crisis, beginning with balancing — without a tax hike — the $1.6 billion budget hole he inherited from lawmakers,” Rauner’s office said in an email to The Daily. “Unfortunately, Speaker Madigan and the legislators he controls are blocking real reform at the expense of the middle class and the most vulnerable.”

Calling on most members of the audience by their first names, Biss took questions that varied from why a college student should choose to stay in Chicago amidst the state’s financial turmoil to how a senior citizen should deal with potentially losing her pension.

Harriet Sheeley, a 65-year-old retiree who lives on the Evanston/Skokie border, asked Biss to focus on finding ways to shift some of the burden of the cuts in Rauner’s turnaround agenda to wealthy corporations.

“When you talk about shared sacrifice, one of the things that I’d like to see … is to expand who you want to sacrifice,” Sheeley said. “It seems like we go back to the same group of middle-class or working people.”

One necessary fix is a change in the state code to a progressive income tax, which would tax the wealthy at higher rates, Biss said. But as it stands, services for vulnerable populations such as the mentally ill and those with HIV/AIDS are being “slashed viciously” and the middle class are being asked to sacrifice by paying higher college tuition, he said.

Pat Moriarty, a 66-year-old Chicago resident, questioned the senator on the strength of the Democratic leadership in Springfield in opposition to the governor’s agenda.

“Who’s going to be framing the debate from our end — and I mean the progressive end?” Moriarty asked Biss.

But a hardened Democratically minded agenda wouldn’t serve to dispel the most imminent danger, which is the fiscal crisis, Biss said. At this moment, Illinois is at the precipice and politicians need to put aside personal and ideological differences to close the budget gap, he said.

“Maybe we all sit down and try to solve a problem,” Biss said. “It will be better to do that than prepare for Armageddon.”

This post was updated to include a statement from Gov. Bruce Rauner’s office. 

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