The Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts (AOIC) and the Civic Federation originally released a report on behalf of the Illinois Supreme Court Pretrial Practices Implementation Task Force on September 13, 2021 that measured the amount of cash bond payments collected and disbursed by circuit court clerks throughout Illinois between 2016 and 2020. The report was revised in August 2022 with updated data. In addition to the revised report, the AOIC also received new data for the 2021…
The General Assembly approved and Governor Pritzker signed an approximately $48.7 billion capital budget on June 17, 2021.[1] Unlike the State’s annual General Funds budget, which is intended to cover only the cost of operations for the current fiscal year, capital appropriations are reauthorized over multiple years as planning, engineering and construction of capital investments commence. Since 2005 the capital budget has been proposed in a separate document from the State’s operating…
On August 24, 2021, Governor Pritzker signed legislation that will create a Higher Education Evidence-Based Funding Commission to evaluate higher education funding in Illinois. The Commission will make recommendations to the General Assembly and the Illinois Board of Higher Education (IBHE) on how to establish an adequate and stable equity-based funding model. This blog post includes information about previous higher education funding in Illinois and the new commission’s mission. Higher…
The State of Illinois received some good fiscal news this summer: two rating agencies upgraded the State’s credit ratings and a third revised its outlook to positive. The credit upgrades were the first in in two decades, reversing years of negative news. The State of Illinois currently has approximately $41.9 billion in outstanding general obligation and Build Illinois revenue debt outstanding.[1] On June 29, 2021, the State of Illinois received the first credit upgrade of this year from…
The fiscal year 2022 budget for the State of Illinois and the process that created it showed the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, but also the beginnings of a recovery within the State economy. Unlike the FY2021 budget, the spending plan for FY2022 does not rely on federal borrowing and instead includes provisions to pay off the previous year’s remaining Municipal Liquidity Facility (MLF) borrowing early. It was also buoyed by better-than-expected revenue projections and significant…
The Illinois General Assembly recently passed major revisions to its initial 2019 adult-use cannabis law. The revisions target an important provision of the original law that was meant to ensure access by disadvantaged communities to the growing and lucrative cannabis industry. House Bill 1443 awaits the Governor’s approval, and he has indicated he will sign it. In previous blog posts about cannabis legislation in Illinois, the Civic Federation has focused on the taxation and regulatory…
UPDATE - February 23 2022: This blog has been updated with corrections to the information about other states where court data is subject to disclosure through FOIA laws or court rules, under the section “How Illinois FOIA Law Compares to Other States.” Because the judiciary in Illinois is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), data disclosure and responses to requests for information are discretionary, despite the fact that individual case files are a matter of public…
Click here to read the full report. Click here to read the press release for this analysis. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The Civic Federation considers the Governor’s FY2022 budget recommendation to be a reasonable one-year short term response to pandemic-stressed financial and economic situation. It has many positive elements, such as holding most areas of agency spending flat at a time of uncertain revenues and it makes the full statutorily required pension payment. In addition, it appropriately…
As laid out in many Civic Federation blogs over the last several years, the State’s two pension buyout plans, which were enacted as part of the FY2019 budget legislation, were supposed to generate hundreds of millions of dollars of budgetary savings. But issues with implementation and with the savings projection itself meant that only a very small portion of those savings have actually been recognized. The Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability reported in November that none of…
The Civic Federation’s recently released Inventory of Local Governments in Illinois report identified a total of 8,923 units of local government in Illinois. This includes 2,826 general purpose governments and 6,097 special purpose governments. In addition to providing a comprehensive list of local governments in Illinois, the report provides an overview of the different types of local governments in Illinois and their reliance on property taxes and other sources of revenue to fund operations…
