The Arc of Illinois

June 29, 2010

Leaders in The Arc:

Secretary Saddler cleared her schedule today to join the Governor in more meetings about the state budget. So my meeting with her and other advocates was cancelled. The Governor is supposed to release the new state budget for the fiscal year which begins Thursday, July 1^st!

Throughout the state human services are suffering because of cuts to direct services and in many cases, the elimination of most of the grant programs assisting children and adults with developmental disabilities.

Community providers are in a major no win situation not knowing whether to close programs or reduce services and layoff loyal staff. What are they to do without full information about their funding? They are in a rock and a hard place because our legislators refused to do their jobs!

This mess we are now faced with is a result of legislators of both parties running away from their legislative responsibilities! They ran away from the jobs they were elected to do and left the Governor to take the blame for their inaction!

Today, I talked to many advocates about next steps, more to come on this later. In the meantime I want to encourage you to facilitate meetings with legislators, self-advocates and families who are about to lose their direct services.

They may have run out of the Capitol but they are at home now!

Editorial from the Pantagraph in Bloomington follows.

Tony Paulauski

The Arc of Illinois

815-4664-1832

Pantagraph.com

No one seems to care about fiscal year's end

By The Pantagraph Editorial Board | Posted: Tuesday, June 29, 2010 8:15 am

The general election is 126 days away. The end of the fiscal year is tomorrow. Guess which date is getting more attention.

The budget for the next fiscal year is not balanced unless you call it balanced to send Gov. Pat Quinn a budget that gives the governor broad spending authority and essentially just says, Fix it.

Quinn is expected to explain how he will fix it Wednesday.

The Senate hasnt acted on a plan to borrow $4 billion to pay the states employee pension obligation.

As of Friday, the states backlog of unpaid bills topped $4.6 billion and that is an improvement over the $5 billion or so it had been for the last couple of weeks because the state finishing paying off $2.25 billion in short-term borrowing earlier this month.

But, dont be surprised if theres another round of short-term borrowing this summer as the state struggles to get the revenue it needs and to bring spending in line with actual revenue.

The comptrollers office expects the stack of unpaid bills to be more than $5 billion when the fiscal year ends Wednesday. But it will take awhile to know the total, as agencies process bills and send them to the comptrollers office for payment.

And we thought it was bad last year when the state ended June with $2.78 billion in unpaid bills. That figure was held down by $1 billion in short-term borrowing in May 2009, but it was still a record.

The first $3.8 billion in Fiscal Year 2010 revenue went to pay bills from Fiscal Year 2009, digging a big hole right from the start, said Carol Knowles, a spokeswoman for Comptroller Dan Hynes.

Obviously, the state didnt learn from last year and has dug an even deeper hole and none of our elected officials has done so much as gett a proverbial brighter flashlight so we can see where were going.

Thats right we said none so dont blame Republicans or Democrats; theyre both to blame.

Actually, we know where were going even without that flashlight and its not a pretty picture.

We are sinking to the bottom among fellow states when it comes to job creation, unfunded pension obligations, falling bond ratings and a host of other measures that will make it even more difficult to recover.

It shouldnt be too much to ask our state constitutional officers and lawmakers including the rank-and-file, not just the leaders to start earning their pay and worry more about the states financial situation than the next election.