Among the numerous social-service agencies still waiting for payment from the state of Illinois for services they've rendered is Center on Halsted, which has yet to receive about $200,000 for HIV testing services it offered in the previous fiscal year.
The General Assembly and Gov. Bruce Rauner agreed on a stopgap budget June 30 that funded PreK-12 education and transportation items, but other items were mainly funded through the rest of the calendar year.
"Regarding the stopgap, we have not received any payments," said Peter Johnson, the Center's director of public relations. "I suspect we are in line with the other backlog of payments."
The funding came through Illinois Department of Public Health grants. "It accounts for 17 percent of our total HIV-funding. It's not all of it, but we've really seen that our capacity as an organization has decreased and that this has a huge impact," Johnson added, noting that the Center still continued floating the services through FY 2016. "We completed 1539 tests through May, 2016. The Center targets high-risk populationspeople under the age of 30, in particular. Seventy-one percent of those tests were people 16-29."
He stressed that the Center and other service providers will only see a negative impact with a commitment from the state going forward: "We've seen instances of HIV decreasing over the years because of commitments from our public officials to combat this disease. Without those commitments, our numbers will only get worse."
While the Center has been offering the testing, they have not been hiring new people to perform them, Johnson said. "Our capacity as a staff has decreased, on top of $150,000 that was cut already between fiscal years 2015 and 2016. That emphasizes not just the need for us to be reimbursed, but the need for these [services] to be reimbursed at the levels they should be," he said.