Quinn signs Ill. budget, says little about where he’ll make additional cuts

Quinn signs budget, says little about further cuts

CHICAGO — Gov. Pat Quinn said Thursday that’s he’s cutting government spending by $1.4 billion, with more cuts still possible, but offered few details about which services will be targeted.

Quinn signed a new state budget into law, including provisions that give him broad authority to deal with the deficit as he sees fit.

The Chicago Democrat said his goal is to protect government operations that help the economy or support education, health care and public safety.

Still, the new budget’s 5.3 percent cut in spending takes its toll on those areas.

Schools take a $241 million hit, the governor’s office said. Universities lose $100 million. Spending on human services will fall by $312 million.

Exactly how those reductions will be made, or where further cuts will fall, wasn’t clear.

Spending cuts alone don’t come close to erasing the state’s $13 billion deficit, the largest in Illinois history. The budget also gives Quinn authority to take money out of special funds, borrow against future revenue and simply let bills go unpaid until the next fiscal year.

At one point, Quinn seemed to suggest he considers the budget balanced.

“There’s no hole left,” he said at a Chicago news conference.

Sen. Matt Murphy, a budget experts for Senate Republicans, was quick to criticize. He said Quinn’s outline contained “a lot more fiction, I think, than fact.”

Illinois is expected to see a roughly $7 billion gap between likely income and expenses in the coming year. Add in unpaid bills from the previous year and Illinois has a total deficit of about $13 billion.

That shortfall equals half the budget’s general funds, where state officials have broad authority to raise or lower spending.

Quinn proposed raising income taxes to help reduce that gap, but legislators ignored the idea. He pushed to borrow money by selling bonds, but that failed too. Lawmakers did give Quinn permission to take $1 billion from special funds supported by fees, with a promise to repay the money later.

Rather than spell out which programs will get money and which won’t, legislators opted to approve large lump sums and give Quinn the power to decide how it’s spent.

“They didn’t want to put their fingerprints on any reductions or cuts whatsoever,” Quinn said.

Quinn also can let even more of the state’s bills — for services such as day-care for poor families and aid for the disabled — pile up unpaid until next year.