A State Budget Deal Done on Time?

On the first day of May, the Illinois General Assembly’s deadline for developing a new state budget by the end of the month doesn’t seem that far away.

“There’s clearly a lot on the line,” said Jak Tichenor, who hosts Illinois Public Media’s Illinois Lawmakers series. Tichenor told RFD Radio Network, “We’re still in a situation where we have over $6 billion in overdue bills to our creditors, and we’ve burned through over a $1 billion in fees and interest for a lot of those back bills when we owed over $14 billion.”

He said Illinois Republican Senate Leader Bill Brady from Bloomington and House Republican Leader Jim Durkin from Western Springs are pushing for a revenue estimate in putting a new state budget together.

The bipartisan Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability would provide the estimate.

“They look at the tax receipts, and they estimate how much the state’s going to have in the bank for each quarter,” he said.

The latest revenue estimate is $36.7 billion, which would be used for the FY 2019 budget year, which begins July 1.