Tired of shouldering the blame for the state's continued budget mess, Gov. Pat Quinn on Wednesday invited lawmakers to join him in cleaning up financial problems he contended were decades in the making.
The Democratic chief executive enumerated the long-standing challenges: too much money is spent on public worker pensions and health care for the poor, and too many loopholes have been carved into the state's tax code for businesses.
Instead of spelling out specific solutions, however, Quinn suggested that the state wait for task forces to complete their work.
"Too many governors and members of the General Assembly have clung to budget fantasies rather than confronting hard realities," Quinn said during his annual budget speech at the Capitol. "Today, our rendezvous with reality has arrived."
The approach of attempting to put the heat on lawmakers ignored a political reality — this is the one time a decade when all 177 lawmakers are up for election and running in new districts. And while the governor called for bipartisanship, Republicans noted they're running on a map drawn by Democrats to eliminate as much of the opposition as possible.
Quinn garnered mostly praise from fellow Democrats. House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, stuck to the theme of bipartisanship. But given the difficulty of cutting pensions, benefits and jobs of politically active state workers during an election year, Madigan wasn't predicting a quick resolution.
"I'm prepared to spend the summer in Springfield," Madigan said on public television's "Illinois Lawmakers." "Springfield's a nice town in July and August."
To some extent, the governor was darned either way. If Quinn threw out a bunch of specific demands to lawmakers, he likely would have been pilloried. If he didn't throw out specifics, he risked being labeled as a leader who didn't want to lead.
Quinn chose a middle path, detailing the closings of prisons, mental health centers and social service offices but deferring on the twin pressures of pension and Medicaid reform. The governor said that without major changes, the Medicaid program could collapse, and the pension systems will require so much money that funding for education, health care and public safety would suffer.
Many at the Capitol liked Quinn's blunt assessment of the state's money woes, but his proposals are far from a done deal. While Quinn estimates the state will have $33.9 billion to spend next year, House and Senate lawmakers are set to land on their own figure within the next week. Quinn wants to set aside more money for early childhood education, college scholarships for students and veterans programs, but lawmakers will have their own priorities.
Quinn called on small groups of lawmakers to work with his office to find solutions to Medicaid and pensions, and suggested lawmakers do the same on closing business tax loopholes. It was an approach embraced by many Democrats.
"Now it is up to us in the next coming months, as the Legislature, to do our job, and that is to put in those details," said Sen. Donne Trotter, D-Chicago, a budget expert. "This time around … he didn't add all that hyperbole and make false promises and talk about what must be done or how it's going to be done. So I like his collaborative approach."
Republicans said failing to provide concrete suggestions showed a lack of leadership.
"We've got a hodgepodge here of really kind of unbaked ideas," said Republican Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka, who said Quinn's budget proposal would do little to help her whittle away a backlog of bills topping $8 billion. "You have to start making specific plans. You have to start saying, 'How are we going to do this?'"
The fight to overhaul the state's budget won't be easy. For every dollar spent and cut, there is a constituency that will go to war to protect the dollars they won or recoup the money they lost.
Even Quinn's proposal to increase early learning programs got a qualified embrace from the Ounce of Prevention Fund, where President Diana Mendley Rauner criticized the governor for reducing money for a home visiting program that helps low-income parents give babies a healthy start.
The Children's PlaceAssociation, located in Humboldt Park, also saw a drop in aid to an early childhood school for HIV/AIDs-infected toddlers. Cathy Krieger, the association president, said care for some children will be "jeopardized."
Likewise, theAmerican Federation of State, County and Municipal Employeeswill oppose every job put in jeopardy. While the Quinn administration estimates the total reduction in head count would be about 750, AFSCME said the number of layoffs could be about 2,500.
Quinn wants to close more than 60 facilities across the state, from far southern Illinois' super-maximum prison at Tamms, to the women's maximum-security prison at Dwight in central Illinois and on to the Singer Mental Health Center in Rockford.
Still, Republican Sen. Bill Brady of Bloomington, who ran against Quinn in 2010 and is a member of the legislative group examining pensions, said he's concerned that the governor's proposed facility closings would harm pension negotiations that already have begun."It's going to take employee participation to solve these problems in the area of pensions, and to throw this out at this point in time, I'm just concerned about how those representing employees are going to react," Brady said.
Quinn said it will cost $5.2 billion to make the annual pension payment this year, a roughly $1 billion jump from last year and a figure that represents about 15 percent of the state's roughly $34 billion general fund.
The question is how to do that within the confines of the state constitution, which says public employee pension benefits cannot be reduced once they are given. Madigan outlined a potential trade-off.
"The question is, for a person on a public job today, can we say to them, 'Everything you've earned up until today you keep, no change?' But ... can we say to that person: 'Starting tomorrow, it's going to be a different deal. It won't be as rich. The benefit level will not be as high, but we will save the stability and the fiscal integrity of your pension system,'" Madigan said.
Quinn called for projected Medicaid expenses to be cut by $2.7 billion in the budget year that starts July 1. Aides have said options could include cutting reimbursement rates for doctors, hospitals and pharmacies, and putting in place more standards of care.
The threat of rate cuts drew immediate opposition from the health care lobby, including the Illinois Hospital Association. Maryjane A. Wurth, the association's president, said the Medicaid proposal would lead to thousands of job cuts and reduced services for patients. Further, she said, the cuts could force some hospitals to close.
One of those may be Norwegian American Hospital in Humboldt Park. About 70 percent of the 200-bed hospital's patients are on Medicaid.
"If we were forced to absorb a cut of that magnitude, I think we certainly will have to close our doors," said Jose Sanchez, Norwegian's president and chief executive. "There is no way we could continue."
Dr. Ram Raju, head of the Cook County Health & Hospitals System, warned that he is "very concerned about the Medicaid cuts" because the group's care represents the "safety net to the people of Cook County."
With Quinn calling for change on two major issues this spring, lawmakers are digging in.
"This is all going to be painful, and we knew that coming in," said Sen. Toi Hutchinson, D-Olympia Fields. "This is going to be an incredibly long, difficult, painful year."
Tribune reporter Peter Frost contributed.