State legislators fail to secure temporary budget to fund certain essential services
Daily file photo by Paige Leskin
On the first day of the new fiscal year, a temporary budget failed to pass through the Illinois House. Gov. Bruce Rauner vetoed the bulk of the legislature’s original budget bills because they left a $4 billion deficit.
July 1, 2015
A one-month emergency budget hit a wall Wednesday in the Illinois House after Democrats and Republicans failed to reach a consensus on the budget before the end of the fiscal year.
The temporary budget that cleared the Senate earlier in the day would have continued funding for state-run operations such as natural disaster response, the prison system, monitoring sex offenders and care for abused and neglected children.
Before the vote on the spending plan, Gov. Bruce Rauner’s budget director called it “unconstitutional” in a memo to the governor because it left a budget gap, according to the Associated Press. Rauner himself criticized the General Assembly’s earlier spending plan Thursday for its $4 billion budget deficit, vetoing 19 out of 21 of the bills and signing one, which funded elementary and secondary education.
“The governor stood by us in protecting K-12 funding,” state Sen. Donne Trotter said in a news release. “Now, we need to defend essential services and quality care for our state’s most vulnerable residents.”
Human services organizations will receive individual letters from the state informing them as to whether they can expect to receive funding while the state budget is in question, state Rep. Greg Harris (D-Chicago) said in a town hall meeting in Chicago last week.
Other parts of the budget remain up in the air, including payments to local governments such as Evanston. The governor’s budget proposed to cut funding to local governments in half, while the budget passed by the General Assembly — and almost entirely vetoed by Rauner — kept those payments flat, state Sen. Heather Steans (D-Chicago) said at the same town hall meeting. Rauner’s proposal would have cut $3.75 million from Evanston’s budget and almost $9 million from its combined school districts.
Evanston aldermen approved a resolution in March asking Rauner and the legislature not to cut state funding.
“Right now we have a lot of municipalities and a lot of school districts who are also in fiscal crisis and just making those cuts without doing other things could make a lot more problems,” Steans said at the meeting.
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @juliarebeccaj
