For
while some people want to downplay the impact of state government’s financial
problems and lack of a state budget by saying that 90 percent of government
operates by court decree, it would seem the remaining 10 percent is enough to
make our state look stupid.
WHAT
BOTHERS ME is the latest financial incident impacting the state – the fact that
a company is repossessing five trucks it leased to the state Department of
Corrections.
The
company, known as the Larson Group, negotiated a contract by which the state pays
them $68,000 per year to provide trucks used by Illinois Corrections Industries
to ship the goods that prison inmates make to locations where they are then
sold to the public.
But
the lack of a state budget (which is an Illinois Constitution requirement)
means that the bills for the time period from July through now have yet to be
paid.
The
Larson Group made the decision to take back the trucks, even though the Chicago
Tribune reported that the terms of their lease with the state called for the
trucks to remain in state use through the end of the next fiscal year.
HAVING
AN OUTSTANDING debt of just over $17,000 was the point at which Larson Group
decided the state was no longer worthy of being trusted. The trucks, currently parked at a facility in downstate Lincoln, are supposed to be returned on Thursday.
The
fact that the bill will eventually get paid once our state officials get off
their stubborn derrieres and negotiate a balanced budget (which becomes more
difficult the longer they wait to do so) wasn’t enough to keep the company’s
faith in doing business with state government.
Now
the Tribune reported that Corrections Department officials have other vehicles
they can put into use to make the shipments for corrections industries. There
won’t be immediate delay in the goods made by prison inmates for next to no
wage actually making it to the public.
Although
the image of the state being the target of repossession is an embarrassment –
just as much as the reports in recent weeks about how the utility bills for the
Capitol building and other state government facilities in Springfield aren’t
getting paid.
FORTUNATELY
FOR STATE operations, no one has cut off the electricity or the water supply.
But we’re developing a real deadbeat reputation – one that ought to be
particularly embarrassing for those who claim the financial standoff is somehow
justified because it will result in taking down the labor unions that are
somehow the cause of our real problems.
Who’s
to say we don’t start getting a flood of similar repossessions?
Because
we really don’t seem to be getting any closer to resolving the financial
problem – which this time isn’t so much financial as much as politically
partisan.
Nor
do I believe the rhetoric that somehow January is going to be a magical point
in time at which a budget deal will be reached.
PERSONALLY,
I CAME to the realization in mid-August that the “sides” in this political
fight were stubborn enough to create the possibility that Fiscal 2016 could be
the year we never get a budget. As it turns out, even if a budget deal is
reached, the spending already done for the past four months has been at a
higher rate than the state can afford.
State
officials are concerned they don’t want to pass anything resembling a tax
increase. They may have to pass a larger one now than they would have had to
back in May to make up for the money that may have been wasted.
Which
makes me think the best thing that could have happened to Illinois would have
been if the judge in St. Clair County (the St. Louis suburbs in Illinois) had
ruled months ago that the lack of a budget REALLY DID MEAN state employees
couldn’t have been paid; rather than going out of his way to rule against the
Cook County judge who would have cut off the payroll.
Because
the pressure those workers would have put on Gov. Bruce Rauner and the General
Assembly with their anger would have ensured we’d have had a budget by Aug. 1
at the latest.
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