McHenry Times

State Sen. Donald DeWitte (R-St. Charles) joined several of his Senate Republican colleagues at a Capitol press conference on June 1 to present an end-of-session update in which he tackled the fiscal year 2022 budget.

DeWitte claimed that the budget was not crafted in a bipartisan fashion and would need to be studied further.

“We're still analyzing this spending as it relates to capital to see if any Republican, regional or local initiatives have been included,” DeWitte said. “My best understanding right now is, its capital funds in this budget are earmarked only to projects in Democratic districts. Does it get any more partisan than that? Is that the reason redistricting might be so important? I guess four million taxpaying Illinoisans that us Republicans represent don't matter in the eyes of the capital project budgeteers from the Democratic process.”

He claimed that Democrats denied them the opportunity to work on the budget.

“Once again Senate Republicans were completely locked out of budget discussions on how resources, federal ARPA funds, and others would have been divvied up,” DeWitte alleged. “Sure, we sat in on the approximately 15 appropriations meetings that were held throughout the caucus session where departments presented their budget priorities and I personally served as minority spokesperson on four of those budget subcommittees. Let me say each of the departments that appeared in each of those subcommittees could not have been more well-prepared professional and courteous.”

DeWitte continued to detail the scenarios that took place.

“When it came time to take the testimony and funding numbers to actually start crafting the fiscal year 2022 budget, no one from the Senate Republican caucus, not even the designated budgeteers — myself, Sen. [Chapin] Rose — was invited to any of the planning that was done when either final testimony or dollars was written into that actual spending plan,” DeWitte said. “Bad process gives us bad results and that has been the norm in past budget years, but when the actual budget is created behind locked doors in purely partisan processes, I have no doubt in the coming weeks as we continue to dig through this pile, we will find a few real gems hidden in those three thousand pages.”

“There were a few good points coming out of budget,” he said. He was pleased that the Road Fund money was not diverted, sales tax revenue for RTA and downstate transit was kept whole at 100%, and Local Government Distributive Funds (LGDF) remain whole at 100%.