Overspending the problem? Not so fast.

A smart, fact-based opinion piece from Eric Zorn at the Tribune showing that Rauner's diagnosis of Illinois' ills ("the Democrats have spent our state into the toilet for 30 years") is crap.

Illinois state taxes and state spending are in the middle of the pack. Local taxes may be high, thanks in some part to our ridiculous overabundance of separate governmental units, that's not the fault of Democrats—or Republicans—in Springfield.

What our state politicians have done, on a bipartisan basis, is utterly fail to put enough money toward pensions for state workers. Years of reckless irresponsibility there have left state government without enough money to both fund pensions and fund social services and education.

Insert comment about perspective here.

Enrollment worries, indefinite impasse, etc.

The Southern ran an AP story on fears for enrollments at Illinois public universities next fall. Nothing terribly new or specific here, just confirmation of what we've been fearing/expecting.

Rich Miller of Capitol Fax made the following comment after linking to the same story:

Meanwhile, the governor has said he’s not too worried because universities have “other funding sources that are very, very significant.”  This is some seriously wrong-headed thinking.

Miller's weekly column paints a bleak outcast for budget progress, noting that both sides seem to be waiting for November, while there's little chance the election results will change the balance of power enough to break the impasse.

The Southern also reports that the Governor seems to be sticking to his guns, still calling for changes in workers' compensation and bargaining rights as the price for any increase in taxes to help craft a budget compromise. Madigan for his part seemed to be buoyed by the big union rally last week, and is no more compromise-minded than Rauner is.

The changing consensus views of where the state is or isn't headed remind me of nothing so much as teenage mood-swings. Some hope for progress a few weeks ago, now back to the two sides sulking in their corners. While social services and state universities rot.

8000 union activists march in Springfield

The SJR estimates that some 8000 folks marched in Springfield today to protest Governor Rauner's anti-union policies.

A highlight of the day was normally taciturn House Speaker Mike Madigan leading the crowd in some call & response questions. After the break, Madigan's speech as transcribed by Capitol Fax. I support the union cause; I also worry that this show of strength will encourage Madigan to resist any appearance of compromise with Rauner, and leave us all in limbo until November at the earliest. 

State inaction and local effects

Lot's of "news" coming out of Springfield, but very little action, and the mood seems to be turning less optimistic.

On Monday Governor Rauner, as expected, vetoed a bill that would have mandated arbitration in the event negotiations between AFSCME and the State (i.e., Rauner) break down. He provides his reasons in a letter to state employees--one sent via the media. Rauner would rather impose terms himself, as he's arguing that negotiations have in fact reached an impasse, something AFSCME denies. If the ILRB (Illinois Labor Review Board) rules in Rauner's favor, he'll be able to impose terms on AFSCME, which will give SIU employees a choice between reduced health benefits or a doubling of insurance premiums.

A meeting on Tuesday between Rauner and the four legislative leaders appeared to produce some movement, with House Speaker Madigan agreeing to at least appoint folks to serve on a committee discussing Rauner's reform agenda. Rauner has consistently said that he will support a budget compromise with new revenues (which all seem to agree is the only way to balance the budget) only if some such reforms are passed. But subsequent statements by Madigan show little wiggle room. Madigan for his part got the House to pass funding for MAP grants, but Republicans reject the measure because it does not identify a funding source.

Proof that rallies matter

Capitol Fax has coverage of an attempt by the Rauner administration to prevent unions from publicizing the May 18 at Springfield by posting fliers on union bulletin boards at state work sites. An officious memo was sent out claiming this was a violation of the Ethics Act. I'm not lawyer enough to parse that act authoritatively, but the claim looks pretty bogus. "Political activity" is pretty narrowly defined by the act to apply to elections, and what are union bulletin boards for, anyway?

More interesting, perhaps, is the obvious sensitivity among some in the Rauner camp about this rally. When you stretch the law to censor publicity about something, that shows you're worried. SIUC  veterans will remember the outcry when the SIU administration censored the SIUC Facebook page during the strike. I suppose the quick action by SIUC to paint over the graffiti on Faner recently is somewhat similar case, though removing graffiti isn't  censorship.

Some wag quickly adopted a rally flier to reflect the latest developments . . .

Health insurance premiums could double

If your eyes glaze over when reading news of the AFSCME negotiations with Governor Rauner, consider this bit from the info on our Benefit Choice Information regarding our health care.

CMS has indicated that employee and dependent premiums could potentially double. 

 AFCSME negotiations are currently on hold, as Rauner claims they are at an impasse, which would allow him to impose his terms--including that doubling in premiums. AFSCME says Rauner has not been negotiating in good faith. These are precisely the charges we saw at this campus, though Rauner is seeking a ruling from the labor board before imposing terms. Democrats in the Assembly have been pushing a measure to require binding arbitration to settle such disputes; the On Labor website has a good summary of what such a bill would mean.

Capitol Fax has a he-said she-said version of negotiations. AFSCME is planning a rally on May 18 in Springfield to protest against Rauner.

Movement in Springfield?

An article in Politico (brought to my attention, as most such things are, by Capitol Fax) suggests that various rank & file groups of legislators are making progress in coming up with longer-term fixes to the Illinois budget crisis. These plans apparently include real concessions from both sides, movement on worker's compensation on the one hand and on tax increases on the other.

A Chicago Tribune article from today gives a take more or less in synch with the Politico article, albeit focusing on the governor's role--or rather lack of one--in ongoing negotiations.

The "stop-gap bill" for Higher Education came about like this--not through some deal struck by Madigan and Rauner, who appear incapable of making a deal, but through members of the GA presenting Madigan and Rauner with a deal they couldn't refuse (though Madigan briefly delayed it). The stakes are larger here--a real budget for this year and the next--but  the Springfield consensus seems to be that there's a decent chance of this happening by the end of May. Starting June 1, a 3/5 majority is required to pass anything.

CSU layoffs; Rauner's optimistic spin; swastikas at U of I.

The Tribune and Sun-Times are reporting that Chicago State has laid off 1/3 of its staff, about 300 people; no faculty have been laid off, but almost 50% of the rest of the staff are now gone. Faculty are expected to finish CSU's semester off, and are thus technically on contract through May 15, but it is unclear how many will be back in the fall. CSU in effect laid off everyone, and issued 'recalls' to those who still have jobs. They will be reviewing academic programs this summer (with no faculty around) in order to decide what will stay and what will go given the budgetary situation.

CSU got a higher percentage of its state allocation through the recent stopgap funding bill than any other school (about 60%), but it was still too little, too late. The school will attempt to limp through the summer in hopes of surviving for the fall.

In news from a day or two earlier in the week the Tribune reports that Rauner has put on his happy face and suggested a grand bargain on the budget was possible by the end of May, and the SJR reports that he may dip into his own private fortune to pay for a special session and that he wanted more money for higher education budget in FY 16 (i.e., the current fiscal year, the one for which we've gotten only 30% of our state funding). The Tribune story on Rauner's optimism  includes the following bit of analysis.

By broadcasting he's open to a deal, Rauner is seeking to avoid blame as an obstructionist should an agreement remain elusive. It’s not the first time Rauner has declared he’s “cautiously optimistic” about a pending deal. He said as much nearly a year ago, though those talks quickly fell apart. His optimism has since wavered depending on whether he’s in attack mode.

In other news, swastikas drawn on campus buildings at the U of I are leading administrators there to call for tolerance; in the same announcement, the U of I administration noted that an employee had been fired for leaving a noose on a table in a work area. 

We live in interesting times.

Springfield update

A story in the Springfield State Journal-Register says the Rauner-Madigan rivalry is worsening and "leaving little hope that the state will have a spending plan any time soon".

Others however suggest what Rich Miller at Capitol Fax calls "green shoots". Despite the public sniping, there have been private meetings, both of the principals and their staffs. 

If private conversations don't produce anything productive, perhaps threats will. Miller notes the impact from a threat by Democratic Senate President John Cullerton, who has said he will hold back K-12 funding until the rest of state government gets a budget.

Finally, there's now a democratic proposal on the table for redistricting, a long-time desideratum of good government folks. That's also an item on Rauner's Turnaround Agenda. If passed, it could conceivably allow Rauner to declare victory and engage in real negotiations about the budget.

This all in addition to other pressures: the Comptroller's decision to put legislative salaries on the slow track, and the likely legal challenge from the Attorney General to question whether the state has the authority, absent a budget, to pay any employees. Not to mention angry and fearful constituents.

So after 10 months of chaos, the pressure starts to build. Those 10 months have already done great damage, and funding on the level the Governor has proposed--a 20% cut--would not turn things around: it would just slow our decline. We need a decent budget now. Every extra day means more students who go out of state or give up on college, and every dollar cut from the eventual budget undermines our potential to rebuild.

State roundup

Capitol Fax concludes that it's now all but certain that Attorney General Lisa Madigan will indeed file a lawsuit arguing that the State of Illinois cannot legally pay state workers. (Previous coverage of that move can be found here.) The politics of this are mind-boggling. Democrats want a real shut-down to force the governor's hand, and to get the crisis resolved to benefit the 10% of state government that is already slowly shutting down. The governor responds with pious words about paying dedicated state employees--at least those not laid off yet, and attacking the Democrats for prolonging the crisis in order to push through a tax hike.  Assuming Madigan's legal reasoning is sound and supported by the courts, her move would result in a nearly complete shutdown of state government, which would presumably in result in some sort of resolution. But she hasn't filed her lawsuit yet, and it would obviously take time to get through the courts.

After the break: what Madigan is saying in the photo below, and an update on a bill that is intended to provide funding for universities and social services.

Madigan speaking to the GA on 4/12, via the State Journal-Register.

State news update

IHBE leaders warn that community colleges certainly can't front MAP grants, universities probably can't. The DE has coverage of our students' worries on this front here. Even if public universities, including SIU, somehow manage to continue funding MAP grants, the loss of MAP grants at community colleges would mean a massive loss in college access, including for many students who would otherwise eventually transfer to SIU.

GOP floats new bill to fund social services--not universities. The Republicans argue this bill would pay for such spending, unlike previous democratic efforts to fund social services and higher education. One way their bill pays for social services (and not for public universities) is to require public universities to pick up pension payments for anyone making over $180,000. I.e., it pays for social services, in part, by taking money from universities. Social services need funding, and I'm not terribly sympathetic to the financial plight of folks making more than $180,000, but universities cannot simply renege on promised pension benefits to them. The rest comes from the mysterious "special funds". They are apparently a real problem (one beyond my ken), but "sweeping" them has consequences, at least in one case where taking gasoline taxes meant to pay for leaking gasoline tanks. Ultimately the state needs a real budget: the belief that we can solve state budget problems via special funds is the state-level equivalent of saying we can solve university funding problems by cutting administrative bloat.

Rauner calls for putting partisan differences aside, attacks other side.  Our governor penned a letter to the State Journal-Register (Springfield) that started off with happy talk about putting people first and then quickly became a pitch for his own short-term proposals to fund universities and social services. My analysis of those proposals is here. The same day he called for negotiations he gave a speech at a GOP Lincoln Day dinner that the local paper characterized as a call for "Staying the Course".

The slow-motion train wreck

Here's how bad things look: the following counts as a possible end game. There is more  speculation about a judicial "solution" to the crisis. The solution--something I blogged about before but with less informative links--is that the courts rule that Illinois has no legal authority to pay employees. Or perhaps it is required, by federal law, to pay essential employees the federal minimum wage. But Illinois' payroll system is so obsolete that it can't figure out who's essential, or how to pay them only the federal minimum. In any event, if the courts rule this way, the whole thing comes to a screeching halt. And at that point we have to have a budget, as the state would be lucky even to keep the jails locked in that case. But of course the courts work slowly, so any such ruling is months away.

There's also somewhat more rosy speculation about how Republicans in the House could solve things without that trainwreck, again from Capitol Fax. It would only take a few votes to sustain a veto override. But don't hold your breath.

One of the most frustrating things about the crisis is that many aspects of state government are going along more or less as usual (K-12, for example). It's this that has allowed things to go on this far. I don't begrudge the funding that is allowing my son to go to school. But other parts of state government are going under. Those include some vital social services, like those attempting to address the epidemic of drug use, and also our public universities.

Rauner's higher education argument

My sympathies in the funding crisis are clearly not with Governor Rauner, but I like to be fact-based. And to understand the enemy (even if one concludes that's the right way to understand him), you need to understand his position.

A difficulty with understanding Rauner's position is that it seems to be constantly changing. Flexibility could of course be a good thing, and a sign of pragmatism, but at least in this case it leaves it difficult to figure out just what the hell Rauner is trying to do (at least difficult for me: real political insiders may understand this better).

I think that Rauner basically has a two-part strategy. The long-term game is to use the crisis to implement 'structural reform' in Illinois. To survive the pressure from the crisis, Rauner has various short-term responses. In this post I'll attempt to address his short-term proposals. Spoiler: they aren't impressive.

State government to return to "action"

The legislature will soon be back in session. Two informative stories can be found in the Bloomington Pantagraph (reprinted in the Southern, as it's part of the same chain of newspapers) and the  Springfield State Journal-Register. Finally, this story from the "Illinois News Network" cites a couple of pundits saying a budget resolution is unlikely anytime soon.

The first story is the most comprehensive. It notes that the apparently imminent closure of Chicago State University is amping up the pressure on the governor and the legislature, and provides an update on the latest bargaining positions of the two sides. The Democratic position seems to be: sign the appropriation bills we've sent you (including funding for MAP grants and public universities), and we'll go from there. The Dems know there's not enough money to fully fund those bills, but this would at least get some funding out. Rauner's position seems to be that since there's not enough money to fully fund those bills, they are worthless. Instead he thinks the Democrats should first agree to the watered-down items remaining on his Turnaround Agenda, and we'll go from there. Going on from there for both sides seems to mean addressing revenue as well as budget cuts, though no doubt Rauner will want more of the latter and Democrats prefer more of the former.

The juiciest thing the second article is the back story on an otherwise mysterious memo from the governor saying he was going to continue to pay state employees despite a recent court decision. For the very court decision that denied AFSCME employees back pay could be taken to provide a legal argument that no state employees should be getting paid now in the absence of a budget. There was scuttlebutt that Attorney General Lisa Madigan (daughter of Mike Madigan, and potential gubernatorial candidate) was going to sue to prevent employees getting paid; despite the lack of any statement from Lisa Madigan on this topic, Rauner decided to score some political points against her be decrying her supposed plan.

The third story is mainly informed speculation, but also contains some more background on the memo and the issue of state employee pay, suggesting that might trigger a still larger crisis that could result in a budget.

Advice for the Governor

A photo from a colleague at NEIU, shared via EIU-UPI; faculty on both campuses are preparing for large rally in Chicago on April 1.

Rauner comes to town

Governor's Rauner's visit to Murphysboro this week was covered in stories from the Southern Illinoisan, the Carbondale Times, and WSIU. The most relevant bit for higher ed from the story in the Southern is this:

In his Q&A session with students, Rauner said the state could use special-purpose funds to pay for higher education now -- if only Democrats in the General Assembly would agree to some savings measures. Democrats and Rauner’s critics have decried the governor’s unwillingness to compromise.

Rauner's budget calls for a 20% cut in state funding (after no funding next year); that's what he means by "funds to pay higher education". The "savings measures" currently advocated by the GOP include "procurement reform", basically a set of changes to streamline the process universities use to purchase things. That may be a good idea--but it is hardly going to save a tremendous deal of money. The "special purpose funds" are funds set aside for, uh, a special purpose. Say, you pay for a hunting license and expect that money to go to the Department of Natural Resources. Instead Rauner suggests we use it to pay for English Composition--and expect state lands in Illinois to take care of themselves. No wonder that an expert cited in the Chicago Tribune (not exactly a progressive source) characterized sweeps as "misleading, at best, and downright deceptive". Re-routing those funds is hardly a case for good government. And sweeping such accounts isn't a steady source of income for anything.

Some malcontents were not happy to see our Governor.

Squeeze the beast

A brief story from Capitol Fax on the governor's "solution" to the higher education crisis. Rich Miller's link back there via the lovely phrase squeeze the beast gives further help on what passes for a positive agenda for public universities among the state GOP leadership. It's basically the same garbage I tried to refute in this post about the Illinois Policy Institute report excerpted in the DE the other day.

One little point here for my friend Tony Williams, who may be the only one reading this in any event: calls to cut administrative costs may be justified in their own terms but also play into the hands of the GOP. If we cut every unnecessary deanlet, trimmed every bloated administrative salary, and eliminated every unnecessary layer of bureaucracy, the savings would be a pittance compared to the savage cuts the governor is proposing—much less the 100% cut he's imposed this year. So I'm starting to think that our administration's defensiveness on this issue may not only be self-interested (though it certainly is that) but perhaps also smart politics on behalf of public education.

GOP Think Tank to the Rescue

A rather odd story in the DE on Monday summarized a February report by the Illinois Policy Institute, a pro-Rauner, conservative think tank. (The think tank summarizes their own report here.)

The central claim of the report, titled "Pensions vs. Higher Education", is true but irrelevant: last year (when it was still funding universities), Illinois put a disproportionate amount of its higher education funding into pensions. This same fact means that Illinois looks like it's increased university funding over recent years: but this is simply due to the fact that the state started to catch up on long overdue pension payments to the SURS system. Universities themselves didn't see a penny of that money.

So Illinois' past failure to fund pensions doesn't tell us a damn thing about inefficiencies in the university system. Contrary to the claim by the report, the central problems faced by our universities are Springfield's fault: past underfunding of pensions, and this year's gridlock, which is bankrupting state universities.

While the basic claim of the report is bogus, it goes on to argue that administrative costs are too high at Illinois universities. It also argues that SURS pensions are too high. More on that after the break.

Our Trump

Brian Mackey of Illinois Public Radio has a meaty story analyzing Bruce Rauner as a typical CEO turned politician and as a cautionary tale for a Trump presidency. (Hat-tip to Capitol Fax, which flagged the story today.)

Among the more interesting things in the story is Mackey's use of the findings of a book called Stealth Democracy. The book argues that most Americans don't really want democracy, with all its arguments and messy compromise. Rather, they exaggerate the amount of agreement about what government should do, and therefore attribute disagreement to self-interested politicians. Hence the special attraction of non-politicians to ride in and implement common sense reforms, overriding the special interests.

Rauner seems to share this idea of stealth democracy himself, failing to recognize that the Democrats opposing his turnaround agenda are representing more than special interests. He sold himself as a deal maker and team builder, but in office has acted more like a vulture capitalist hired on as a CEO and engaged in 'corporate turnaround'.

Illinois higher ed on NPR, and via a think tank

The NPR program Marketplace aired a story on Illinois' abandonment of public universities  on Friday, 3/18. The story does a nice job of providing the background to the crisis, and highlighting its impact on minority students (particularly but not only at Chicago State). Not much news for those of us living through it, but perhaps a good survey if you want to bring others up to speed. The story notes that's CSU's President, Thomas Calhoun, has been critical of Rauner, and that Rauner wasn't willing to be interviewed for the story despite multiple requests. (Madigan at least provided a spokesperson to talk to the show.)

The Center for American Progress, a liberal thank tank, on Thursday (3/17) released a story on the long-term decline of state support in Illinois for higher education. The story has more detail and statistics than most, including: MAP grants covered the full cost of tuition and fees as recently as 2002, but now cover only 1/3; lllinois now has the fourth-highest public tuition in the country. The "CAP" is calling for a federal intervention to reinvigorate public higher education across the country. Their proposal would increase federal aid and require states to match increases in federal spending; they would also add elements of performance based funding, but they seem to tie such measures more to low-income students than most such proposals (which end up rewarding universities with students more likely to graduate in the first place).

Federal intervention sounds welcome in Illinois, at least given the proposals from both Sanders and Clinton. On the other hand, federal intervention could mean . . .