Gov.-elect Bruce Rauner said Tuesday that every time he and his transition team look at the state budget for the current fiscal year, they discover more bad news. He likened the budget that was signed into law last spring as a booby trap set to spring just as he takes office Jan. 12.
But he also vowed bi-partisan cooperation to work out a solution as he met reporters in the Statehouse during the final week of the General Assembly’s annual fall veto session.
Here are highlights:
Rauner explained his transition process was “well into the process,” saying he hoped to get to know every member of the General Assembly “personally” and to understand each member’s legislative goals so that Democratic and Republican lawmakers can work together to improve the state.
In preparation for tackling the state’s off-kilter budget, Rauner also said meeting with state financial experts had taken up a lot of his time during the transition process. He repeated his warnings that the state’s financial situation is “dire. Very bad. Worse than has been reported. Worse than has been discussed publicly.” Rauner said that the closer he and his team looked at the budget issues, the worse they seemed, and promised more information for voters in the coming weeks.
He blamed Gov. Pat Quinn for the issues. He explained that he saw the budget as balanced on borrowing and deception, citing expenses moved from year to year in an effort to hide the real costs of the government and borrowing money from special funds to pay for routine expenses.
“Unfortunately Gov. Quinn signed a budget that was broken. It was not honest. It was a phony budget. It was not balanced even close.”
Rauner slammed these budgeting practices as a “booby trap” that might mitigate problems in the present but would only cause further issues down the road. He called such short-term borrowing “fundamentally wrong. That’s not the way to run the government. That’s not the way to run any organization.”
He explained that there is about $1.4 billion in the current budget that is unaccounted for and “fundamentally dishonest.”
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