Bivins said the day of reckoning is here for years of overspending and ignoring a constitutional mandate to keep a balanced budget.
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For Emily Miller, it’s clearly frustrating.
IL has gone seven months without a state budget. But it will be the state budget – or the lack of one – that will continue to color everything the governor does in the coming year. Lyons said changes to unionization practices will have a big impact on upcoming negotiations for union contracts in 2017. He also says he wants to hold schools “truly accountable for results”. Rauner and his wife also have donated significant money to help Chicago Public Schools.
House Democratic Leader Barbara Flynn Currie of Chicago said Rauner was over-simplifying the issue.
CORLEY: The Chicago Sun-Times reports the governor will highlight a bipartisan pension plan along with education and criminal justice reforms.
In his address, Rauner asked for “mutual respect” from both sides of the aisle to pass the state’s gridlocked budget. “These and other reforms will lead to fewer victims of crimes, a better pathway back for ex-offenders, and safer communities for all”.
Illinois’ prison population has grown from 6,000 in 1974 to about 49,000 presently.
“Undeterred and unashamed, AFSCME is demanding $3 billion in overall compensation”, the governor said. “I understand that there’s changes that need to be made, but hopefully adults can come to the table, compromise, make those changes, so the state can move forward”, said Humphries.
Cullerton, a Democrat who is working with Rauner on a plan to ease the state’s pension debt, sums up the status of the state right now this way: “Social service programs are suffering”. It would give employees a choice between keeping cost-of-living increases in retirement and counting future raises when figuring retirement benefits.
“They know our taxpayers are angry”. It has the dubious distinction of having the worst-funded pensions and lowest credit rating of any state.
“For House, four terms of four years”, Babcock said. Rauner continued by saying his administration is focused more on prevention practices and paying providers for “value” rather than volume, but did not provide details. “IL can’t wait any longer”.
Righter said he believes Rauner was talking about new money for education, which the senator believes could come from cuts to Medicaid and other public assistance programs, “where the spending has grown immensely over the last decade”. He later reversed course.
Meanwhile, low-income students who rely on the IL grants to pay tuition won’t be getting that help this spring. As he prepares for his second State of the State speech this week, he is talking tougher than ever about his adversaries, particularly the “union bosses” he has already called “corrupt”, and is raising the specter of growing chaos, including public employee strikes, layoffs and shutdowns in state services.
Rauner says the key is to pass pro-business legislation that he’s been pushing for more than a year.
Business leaders have sided with Rauner in his campaign for making workers’ compensation less expensive for companies and weakening collective bargaining and prevailing wage requirements. That’s all because of the stance the governor has taken over the state’s budget.
Though Rauner returned to previous themes like weakening unions, the governor went out of his way to strike a more conciliatory tone with Democrats, who control the legislature. Rauner has spent months berating Democrats for failing to get on board.
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He says he’ll work with Democrats to accomplish some of them this year. During a press conference in which he brandished a sleeping bag and soup to demonstrate a willingness to camp at the capitol until a budget is passed, Dunkin said everyone wants a solution but “one man” – Madigan. Protesters waved signs and yelled “Rauner says cut back!”
