I went to Springfield last week to attend a board meeting of our state association for youth service organizations. I’m starting my ninth month of retirement from a job in which I was closely linked to state budgets and funding for services for kids. The state was our biggest funder. Nearly every organization that serves abused, neglected, or troubled kids in a concrete and tangible way here in Illinois is in the same boat. I know it’s a perspective that will fade, that someday I will either forget or just stop feeling it. That being the perspective that makes you realize how important politics are to the community of not for profit agencies devoted by mission, rather than profit, to help communities stay whole and healthy. But I haven’t lost that perspective yet.
If you’re an agency exec or a board member responsible for a social service organization it’s easy, especially this year, to challenge those around you with these questions and this argument. “What do you want us to do? We don’t make the budgets. We don’t allocate the money. The legislators do. We do the best we can with what we’re given. We raise some money to put alongside the state funds, we do all we can with federal funds if we have them or can keep them, and we’re as efficient and as thrifty as we possibly can be. Isn’t that enough?”
The answer to that is, “No, it’s not.”
In the shadowy world of Illinois state government two powerful forces have combined to make the upcoming Fiscal Year 2015 budget (July 1, 2014-June 30, 2015) even more fictitious than normal. There’s an election cycle (a primary election in March and a general election in November) and a state income tax increase that goes away December 31, 2014 failing further legislative action. Read “go on record as voting for a tax increase.” It has everyone scurrying for cover.
Or simply not talking about it. At stake is about $4 billion dollars annually, but a mere $2 billion in next year’s budget because we have the benefit of the increase for half a year (July 1-December 31). It’s a lot of money. And it becomes a lot more when you try to figure out how to do without it.
But don’t expect to hear any straight talk about it. Who is now for extending that tax increase? Hard to tell. If they are not for it what will they cut to balance the budget without it? Given the large amount of Illinois’ budget that goes to education, health, and social services, which by necessity has to be subject to cuts in any significant budget cutting plan, what exactly gets whacked? What do the people of Illinois do without? Support for public schools, help for abused and neglected kids? Services for the mentally ill, which are already bare bones? Substance abuse services as heroin and prescription drug overdose deaths climb? What gets axed? Nobody’s talking.
Rumor has it the legislators will simply pass lump sum budgets for major departments and leave the decisions, and thus the blame, for the governor to shoulder. That will string it out to July, with no answers evident, and leave but four months and change until the election, after which we can finally settle this tax increase question once and for all in the lame duck session. That’s highly likely to happen.
What’s the problem you say? It leaves Illinois’ government, and the agencies and services it funds, twisting in the wind. That’s the problem. If you are a community agency trying to respond to problems in your area, trying to formulate your own budget, your own annual plan of how much capacity you will have to maintain programs, improve the help you offer to children and families, respond to emerging problems being faced by people in your community; what do you do? If you’re a volunteer board member of one of Illinois’ important children’s agencies how balance the importance of maintaining fiscal stability while at the same time providing quality services to the families that need your help? If you’re an agency executive what do you advise your board to do? And if you work for one of those agencies, or depend on them as a person receiving services, like a child in a foster home, what do you expect your future to be?
If a specific budget is not created that clearly shows what the spending priorities are for Illinois in the next twelve months we as advocates and concerned citizens should insist that vital programs and the contracts that sustain them continue at this year’s level for six months at a minimum until Illinois’ revenue, in regard to the tax extension, is decided. It is not ethical to dismantle important programs, lay off the staff, give up the offices, dismiss the clients, when they may indeed be continued, all in the name of a political bluff. Already Illinois waits in limbo. Will the pension reform deal hold? Will we achieve savings that can be reinvested? Will the tax increase be extended? In the best case we drift, as providers of services, as agencies working to make Illinois communities stronger. Let me give you an example.
DCFS lost its director to cancer after a turbulent year in which he fought off cuts to basic child welfare services. His successor, a man who had served in a longtime leadership role at DCFS and then headed the Department of Juvenile Justice for two years, was appointed DCFS director and then forced to resign a month later. The list of people equipped to handle that job, coupled with the list of those willing to take what could well be an interim appointment till Illinois has a new governor, gets shorter by the day. Meanwhile what happens at DCFS? Little or nothing. It’s amazing how quickly large organizations can deteriorate with weak or non-existent leadership. Multiply that kind of drift, that “waiting to see what happens” by a factor of who knows how much and you have a pretty good picture of Illinois in 2014.
We should be figuring out how to reduce the number of juveniles and adults now expensively incarcerated by funding services that follow them back to their home communities and serve them where they live both before and after they enter that system. How’s that going?
We should be far down the road of determining what among state funded services will fit into services covered by the Affordable Care Act, what the managed care companies now emerging might find worthy of funding (Even if they are not reimbursed for delivering them? How likely is that? It’s a head scratcher.) Which among those services will Illinois continue to support? Drug Abuse Prevention? Community organizing? Outreach to the elderly? Do child care subsidies go on as always? What about pre-school education? Unless I’m wrong, Illinois has hardly a clue. So far the answer seems to be “Let’s put that off and see how the budget develops.”
Abused and neglected kids, the mentally ill, the developmentally disabled, families living in poverty, individuals jailed for drug dependence which could be treated, troubled young people-they all deserve an organized response, an approach that allows for the planning and implementation of sustainable programs which truly help in a quantifiable way. What do they get? They get wait and see. Let’s see how the election turns out first. We’ll get to you later. Illinois deserves better. We should all help those that need us most find an answer to their obvious question “What about us?”
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