CHICAGO – Instead of fulfilling his constitutional duty to propose a balanced budget, Governor Rauner is concocting ridiculous conspiracy theories and wasting more taxpayer dollars.
It gets harder to take him seriously when what he presents in his tweets and court filings has so little basis in reality.
CMS
Payroll records show that under Rauner’s handpicked “wingman” comptroller, the Dept. of Central Management Services consistently used the Garage Fund and the Maintenance fund to pay for 578 employees who work on maintenance and in state garages.
Now Governor Rauner suddenly wants to hoard those funds which he has tellingly renamed “government shutdown prevention funds” and instead raid the state’s General Revenue Fund, which would take critical funds away from nursing homes, hospice care and care for the disabled.
Instead of using the funds that are $93 million in the black, Gov. Rauner wants to raid the fund he put $12.5 billion in the hole by failing to propose a balanced budget for the last three years.
Rauner's administration has more than enough money to pay employees from the department's self-protected funds. The only reason to draw attention to this issue now is to manufacture a phony headline about state employees in "danger" of missing a paycheck. This is just one of many phony stories Rauner's administration has shopped in recent weeks, like the Dept. of Aging hoax. Expect more: All just as phony.
No employees will miss any paychecks if the administration uses the money that the General Assembly authorized them to use and the Governor signed. The administration can continue using those funds for payroll as they always have. Or they can choose to create a phony crisis for P.R. value and continue playing politics with people's lives.
Dept. of Aging
While the comptroller and her staff work tirelessly to triage the state’s obligations and do all they can to prevent closures and shutdowns, the governor is more interested in using state employees as political pawns to score political points.
In her first three months in office, The Comptroller made the elderly a greater priority than the previous administration by processing more than $110 million to providers in Department on Aging programs. The Governor is peddling the black-is-white falsehood that the Comptroller has "cut" payments to Aging while he proposes cutting the Community Care program and kicking 40,000 elderly people out of the program and forcing them into nursing homes. That's the real Bruce Rauner - not the Twitter version.
All outside observers agree the main reason for the state’s financial crisis is the Governor’s failure for the third year in a row to propose a balanced budget for the General Assembly to consider.
Even Standard & Poor's wrote, “Illinois’ fiscal crisis is, in our view, a man-made byproduct of policy ultimatums placed upon the state’s budget process.” In other words, Gov. Rauner owns this fiscal disaster.
Our office and Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s office will present to the court today the history of CMS payments coming from the Garage and Maintenance funds and Gov. Rauner's attempt to rewrite history.
###
You can view the PDF version of this release here