The financial condition of Illinois’ pension funds improved slightly due to strong investment returns, but they remained critically underfunded at the end of fiscal year 2017. The five State-funded retirement systems had total unfunded…
When the Illinois General Assembly overrode Governor Rauner’s veto of the FY2018 budget package in July, it estimated that the enacted budget would have an operating surplus of about…
Illinois has by far the greatest number of local governments in the nation at 6,963, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2012 Census of Governments. The vast number of local governments in Illinois is often cited as a driving factor for…
Illinois Public Act 100-0401, signed into law on August 25, 2017, will increase the value of the Senior Citizens and General…
For nearly two months, the fate of Illinois’ budget for the current fiscal year was in doubt because of Governor Bruce Rauner’s veto of a…
After several iterations and much disagreement, the State of Illinois now has a new statewide school funding formula. The Illinois General Assembly approved the new formula as Senate Bill 1947, House Floor Amendment 5 on August 29, with…
Seven weeks after the General Assembly enacted Illinois’ first budget in three years by overriding the Governor’s veto, the backlog of bills owed by the State still stood at…
After two years with no complete budget except for public school funding, Illinois now faces the prospect of beginning the 2017-18 school year with a budget for everything except schools. On August 1 Governor Rauner issued an…
Higher education was one of the areas hit hardest by the State of Illinois’ two-year budget impasse. This blog post examines how higher education fares under the…
The State of Illinois ended its two-year budget impasse on July 6, 2017, enacting a $36.1 billion spending plan with about $5 billion in tax increases. To break the logjam, the General Assembly narrowly overrode Governor Bruce Rauner’s…
