Write Hard and Clear

I still get the Tribune delivered to my door and save clippings from it for blog posts I intend to write.  The shack is filling up with pieces of paper about Bruce Rauner and the Illinois legislature.  I have started this piece many times and deleted it.  It’s painful.  But just today I read an applicable quote in another article I saved, on Stacy Keatch totally blowing his lines in a one man play about Hemingway.  The play, “Pamplona”, which I have tickets to later this month, was halted half way through on opening night last night and cancelled today.  Word has it Stacy is getting medical treatment. Here’s what Hemingway once said:

“Write hard and clear about what hurts.”

Thanks for the reminder Ernie.

The day after state budgets were passed, not so long ago it seems, was always a day when private social service agency directors burned up the phone lines determining what happened at the close of session to the state grants and contracts they signed to help people in their communities.  The political wrangling continued all the way till midnight, sometimes they  stopped the clocks in the chamber.  Even if you stayed up till it was over you couldn’t tell where the money went from back home.  George Ryan was famous for passing out the budget book so late in the game that lawmakers, especially the Democrats, didn’t know what they were voting on.   

Newspapers never carried the details we were looking for.  Before the internet, it took someone reading the final budget book in Springfield, often printed in the waning hours of the session or after, to tell us.

I’d be on the phone to the state association or my local politicians Springfield office armed with a yellow pad listing all my funding sources, the amount contracted for the previous year, and a calculator to figure the percentage increases or decreases.  Sometimes, it was a victory if the line item survived at all.   More than once I would inquire about a line item and the quiet response was “Zero.”  I’d swallow hard. 

Programs, initiatives, efforts to serve new populations of kids and families who needed help, sometimes died that way.  Sometimes they were revived in the veto session. But we knew.  We knew where state funding was going, where we could go in turn, what we could accomplish without their support that needed to be done with private money.  Government decides things, sets priorities, by how it spends money.  The budget deadline came and went last night at midnight.  What are Illinois’ priorities today?

Yes, May 31 is a phony date.  The fiscal year doesn’t end till June 30 and a budget could be passed at that time but it would require more than a simple majority, which means Republican votes, and further it requires the Governor sign, not veto, the bills enabling the budget.  Neither of those possibilities seem likely.  So despite the posturing, few see real work towards a budget that could be passed prior to July 1.  What is seen is manipulation of blame in order to gain a political advantage prior to the 2018 election, which takes place in November of that year.  Few rules are hard and fast these days, but the saying which holds most true in Illinois politics is “nothing of substance gets passed in an election year.”

That means failing to pass a budget now likely dooms Illinois to having no budget till January of 2019 at the earliest.  That’s a long time folks.  Another 570 days.  Add that to the 700 we’ve gone so far and you have a state lurching along with no budget in place for four years, Rauner’s entire term as governor.  I remember people predicting this.

“We may not have a budget for four years.”

I thought they were crazy.  You can’t run one of the fifty states in America, let alone the fifth largest state, without defining the future with a spending plan.   You wouldn’t run anything like that, not a church, a small agency, a big agency, a school district, a township, a village, a county, a city.  It’s unheard of.  How do you plan in the absence of a budget?  How do you set priorities?  How do you meet challenges, changing needs, emerging problems, contingencies, without a budget as a guide? 

I don’t think you do.  That’s where my pain begins.  I’m not even a fan of planning and policy.  But for Christ’s sake how do you know where you are without a budget, in a world where generating revenue and spending that revenue in ways that help people who reside within your borders is your only purpose?  Public policy and spending are like bread and butter.  We have a failure in both.

Would you come to work in Illinois from another state?  Today there is an opening for a new Director of DCFS, the agency charged with helping children and families affected by child abuse and neglect.  Who is going to take that job in this climate?

Not having a budget, not facing up to our need for increased revenue via taxes, is screwing our state colleges and universities.  They never know when their next check is coming from the Comptroller.  I graduated from one of those schools, and today I wouldn’t send my college age son or daughter to one of them because their futures are unknown.  Would you fill a job at one of those universities?  Is that a place you would choose to advance your teaching career?

Some believe there is a conspiracy, between Democrats and Republicans alike, to simply let the weak schools fail.  The weak one of course are the financially vulnerable, Chicago State, Eastern, Western, Northeastern, Southern.  Did we vote to weaken or close universities in rural areas of the state where students can study while working and being part of their family and community?  Did we pass a referendum that if your campus is situated in a distressed part of the city of Chicago you lose?  This is policy by default.  Is this what we want for Illinois?  That’s what we’re getting.

There have actually been positive policy initiatives during the Rauner’s turn in office, particularly in juvenile justice and adult prison Reform.  Both legislation and executive action point to a desire to reduce incarceration.  Most agree that reducing confinement requires increased services be delivered in the community.  However ReDeploy Illinois, a partnership between states and counties to reduce commitments to the Department of Juvenile Justice, that contracts with private youth serving agencies for those services, and is the key to making that policy work, is dying on the vine.  Winnebago County, which has little organized local funding for such services such as a county mental health board, was an early casualty.  Only three programs among the many that operated three years ago are now in operation, LaSalle County being one, which is blessed with such a mental health board which injects local money into the effort.  that is but one example. 

You can’t implement public policy initiatives that require services to a community without financial investment.  If you ran a private agency with such a contract (yes they still write contracts, that agencies sign, knowing there is no promise of payment) or were on the volunteer board of that agency, would you continue to hire staff for such a program?  Not knowing when or if you will be paid?  Is that what you imagined when you voted for this governor?

Senate democrats approved bills increasing the income tax and advancing a budget that the house did not vote on, would not call the bill, claiming it would only be vetoed and yes votes used against democratic representatives in the upcoming election.  Democrats in the house demand republican votes.  Imagine, both parties voting on something to help Illinois. 

Everybody, democrats and republicans, including the governor, knows a tax increase is needed and must happen in the end if Illinois is to right itself financially.  Everything hinges on what is gained by the governor and conceded by democrats to reach the point where that tax increase is approved.  And nothing happens. 

As an example, the governor demanded that the Thompson Center, a state building in Chicago with problems, be sold.  The democrats passed such a bill.  Rauner says it’s not the right bill.  He has problems with zoning considerations contained in it.  It’s likely to be vetoed.  Find a compromise.  Anywhere.  I can’t.

Rauner demands a property tax freeze in exchange for an increase in the income tax.  On my tax bill, the lion’s share of what I pay funds my local schools, which I value highly.  If you were a public school board member, whose only ability to improve the schools his or her kids and neighbor kids attend is to generate money from property tax increases, would you support giving up that power when the state formula for school funding is inequitable and unresolved?  I hope not.  Public education depends on resources.  Did we sign on to screw schoolchildren and their families?  Did we elect this Governor hoping he destroyed Chicago Public School funding?

Is nothing done incrementally anymore in Illinois?  Are compromises not reached in hopes of further progress later?   Is everything about campaign money and elections?  When you cast your vote in 2014 is this the kind of hurt you expected to suffer, watching the state you live in, perhaps were born in, self destruct?  Our bond rating has been reduced again.  We have the lowest bond rating of any American state.  The only lower rating left to achieve is junk.  The budget hole just gets deeper. 

It hurts.  I get angry and sad at the same time.  I don’t know what to do.  I don’t have anyone on the state level to vote for in the near future, and I don’t believe the people we’ve elected are listening.  Perhaps they listen, but they certainly are not acting independent of their party bosses.  It’s not about blame for how we got here.  The past is over.  It’s about going forward.  How much pain is too much?  When does something happen?  How will we know when it’s too late?