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Dear Friends,
The May 31st end of regular session came and went for a second year without a balanced budget. This is simply wrong and devastating for the state. College students will not receive scholarships, and high school seniors will be counseled to attend colleges outside Illinois. Survivors of sexual assault will not have access to services. Seniors will not receive home-delivered meals. Small businesses and social services agencies will continue to not get paid, and more of them will close their doors. The list goes on.
We need a comprehensive budget that includes spending reductions and new revenue to provide financial certainty and stability to the state and our residents. The Governor continues to demand elements of his turnaround agenda be passed before increasing revenue, which he acknowledges is needed for a permanent solution. There are working groups addressing some of these items, and I believe they are making good progress. I support compromising on some items, like workers' compensation, to achieve a bipartisan agreement and move the state forward. You can see me discuss the budget impasse with a panel of legislators on Chicago Tonight.
Rather than having the opportunity to vote on a comprehensive solution, however, the House passed a partial budget that did not provide needed revenue, and the Governor vowed to veto it. This budget received only 17 votes in the Senate; I was among those who voted no. The Senate, in turn, passed a K-12 education-only budget that would ensure no school district would receive less funding than the current year and would invest an additional $700 million in high-poverty, low-wealth school districts throughout the state (I voted yes). The House did not pass this budget.
There is now a group of appropriations chairs from each of the four legislative caucuses meeting with the Governor's budget team to negotiate a stopgap budget. The aim of this effort is to provide a full year budget for K-12 education and a six-month budget for remaining functions to ensure government and its vendors/social service providers can continue to function. As an appropriations chair, I am part of this team and continue to push for a comprehensive plan to end the destruction the budget impasse is causing around the state. A complete solution is unquestionably the right thing to do, and we should not wait until after the November election. We need to end this absurdity now.
Please call me at (773) 769-1717 or contact me via email with any questions or suggestions.
Sincerely,
Senator Heather Steans
7th District – Illinois
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