A standing-room-only crowd filled the hearing chambers at the Bilandic Building, 160 N. LaSalle St., as the Illinois Senate Appropriations Human Services Committee met to discuss Gov. Bruce Rauner's proposed budget cuts.
Acting Human Services Secretary Gregory Bassi testified about the importance of the cuts, and faced grilling from some committee members, while service providers and their clients urged the committee to keep funding in place. The cuts, as proposed by Rauner, would slash just over $4 billion from the state budget. About $500 million would be cut from the human-services budget, affecting areas such as housing, childcare and mental health services, among others.
Bassi acknowledged that "difficult decisions were made" surrounding the budget, but argued that those decisions were necessary, given the precarious state of Illinois' finances. But some senators felt that the state had already trimmed all the fat it could.
State Sen. Donne Trotter, D-Chicago, implied that Rauner's administration was making a straw man argument in focusing its public discourse around the budget. He reminded Bassi that most programs were facing finance problems already, and these new cuts would only exacerbate difficulties clients had in accessing them.
"Let's not get distracted by the budget. We have to deal with reality. What are [Rauner's] plans for making lives better?" Trotter asked.
Committee Chair Heather Steans, D-Chicago, noted that more than 60,000 people would be affected by cuts to supportive housing. "That's a mid-size townare these people going to evaporate? The mission doesn't change … Where are they going to end up? They're going to end up on the streets, in jails, and in emergency rooms."
But state Sen. Matt Murphy, R-Palatine, reminded the gathering that the state's problems were largely the result of mismanagement by previous administrations.
Before the hearing, Mark Ishuag, CEO of Thresholds, called the cuts "devastating to community healthnot just to Thresholds, but all of our partners."
He added that most of the cuts would likely not even save money in both the short and long runs: "[Persons in need] will get services when they need themthey'll get services from police, emergency rooms, hospitals and nursing homes. All of those are more expensive than the programs they want to cut."
It's a lesson the state learned the hard way in both 2009 and 2011, when the state lopped off $100 million from human services spending, Ishaug noted.