On November 9, 2021, the Governor’s Office of Management and Budget (GOMB) released the Illinois Economic and Fiscal Policy Report. The report includes a comparison of the FY2022 enacted budget with the current outlook for FY2022 and a five-year budgetary forecast. The FY2022 Enacted Budget On June 17, 2021, Governor JB Pritzker signed the State’s fiscal year 2022 budget, contained in P.A. 102-…
On Thursday, December 9, the Civic Federation will honor Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS) Secretary Grace B. Hou with the 30th Annual Motorola Solutions Foundation Excellence in Public Service Award. The award, presented and administered by the Federation, annually honors a non-elected government official who has had an extraordinary impact on the quality of state and local government…
Illinois enacted a $48.7 billion multi-year FY2022 capital budget in June 2021. Unlike the State’s annual General Funds budget, which is intended to cover only the cost of operations for the current fiscal year, capital appropriations are reauthorized over multiple years as planning, engineering and construction of capital investments commence. The current capital budget was initially approved in…
The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (Lincoln Institute) released last week an evaluation of common property tax relief programs used across the United States. The report also makes recommendations for the best practices in promoting a property tax system that is fair and also retains the ability to provide sustainable revenue. The Civic Federation has long supported some of the reforms…
In a report released last week, the Civic Federation and the Illinois Supreme Court presented a first-of-its-kind statewide analysis of the total amount of bond payments collected in criminal cases and how those dollars are distributed at the conclusion of a criminal case. Beginning January 1, 2023, judges may no longer order someone accused of a crime to pay a monetary amount in order to secure…
The Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts (AOIC) and the Civic Federation originally released a report on behalf of the Illinois Supreme Court Pretrial Practices Implementation Task Force on September 13, 2021 that measured the amount of cash bond payments collected and disbursed by circuit court clerks throughout Illinois between 2016 and 2020. The report was revised in August 2022 with…
The General Assembly approved and Governor Pritzker signed an approximately $48.7 billion capital budget on June 17, 2021.[1] Unlike the State’s annual General Funds budget, which is intended to cover only the cost of operations for the current fiscal year, capital appropriations are reauthorized over multiple years as planning, engineering and construction of capital investments…
On August 24, 2021, Governor Pritzker signed legislation that will create a Higher Education Evidence-Based Funding Commission to evaluate higher education funding in Illinois. The Commission will make recommendations to the General Assembly and the Illinois Board of Higher Education (IBHE) on how to establish an adequate and stable equity-based funding model. This blog post includes information…
The State of Illinois received some good fiscal news this summer: two rating agencies upgraded the State’s credit ratings and a third revised its outlook to positive. The credit upgrades were the first in in two decades, reversing years of negative news. The State of Illinois currently has approximately $41.9 billion in outstanding general obligation and Build Illinois revenue debt outstanding.[…
The fiscal year 2022 budget for the State of Illinois and the process that created it showed the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, but also the beginnings of a recovery within the State economy. Unlike the FY2021 budget, the spending plan for FY2022 does not rely on federal borrowing and instead includes provisions to pay off the previous year’s remaining Municipal Liquidity Facility (MLF…
