Freshman Dems Reflect on Budget Drama
Sen. Rachel Ventura (D-Joliet)
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As time ticked away at the end of the spring legislative session, blowing past a self imposed May 19th deadline by a week, numerous lawmakers, Democrat and Republicans, lamented privately how little they knew about budget negotiations happening behind closed doors.
A progressive freshman in the Senate says there was “frustration” among some of her colleagues as negotiations dragged on.
In an interview for our The Illinoize Podcast, which will be on our YouTube channel, Sen. Rachel Ventura (D-Joliet), a progressive who advocated for tax credits for working families and tax increases on high-income earners, said progressives were not satisfied with some of the budget options given to them.
“You can’t look at things in a vacuum, right? If you want me just to cut expenses, that’s one way to balance a budget. It is not the only way to balance a budget, though,” Ventura said. “So I think there was some frustration that we were, I don’t want to say spoon fed, but getting information was slow. Part of that, to be fair, is that negotiations on some of these things were still happening.”
While Ventura’s previous service in government was on the Will County Board, Sen. Paul Faraci (D-Champaign), another freshman in the Senate this spring, had previously worked with with the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity and with State Treasurer Mike Frerichs.
Faraci said he was less surprised by the way rank and file members were left out of budget details.
“I think the budget process went exactly as how I would expect it to go,” Faraci said. “When you’re a Senator or a legislator, you’re not going to be engaged in every single bill or every single discussion. I was not surprised at all.”
Ventura said the process and last-minute negotiations even left Democrats in the dark until the final hours before a vote on the $50.6 billion spending plan.
“We didn’t see it at one time, all as one picture, until it was pretty much time to vote on it, because each of those [line items] was a moving part,” she said. “As a freshman senator, I was not in most of those rooms, so some of that stuff I was seeing for the first time and we had to make decisions quickly.”
Meanwhile, while some Latino lawmakers and progressives have been critical of Governor JB Pritzker’s plan to pause enrollment in a Medicaid-style health care program for immigrants in the country illegally, Ventura said Pritzker is making necessary changes to rein in costs.
“Moving it to managed care is going to help decrease those costs,” Ventura said.
”Pausing the program will help us do those things and manage future costs. If we don’t make any changes, those costs continue to go up.”
Ventura says lawmakers should push the federal government to help fund the program, which legislators budgeted $550 million for, even though the Pritzker administration projected costs over $1.1 billion.
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