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player ready...A group of religious and community leaders from Evanston and beyond say the state’s budget impasse coupled with funding cuts has had a devastating impact on human service agencies and the individuals who rely on them. But they argue they have a solution that would restore lost funding and solve the state’s fiscal woes.
Community Renewal Society (CRS), a progressive faith-based organization comprised of various religious institutions and their members, hosted a town hall meeting at the First Congregational Church of Evanston last Saturday to urge members to call on state legislators to support a bill that would place a referendum on the November ballot. The referendum would ask voters to approve a constitutional amendment to replace the state’s flat income tax with a graduated system that would require those who make more money to pay higher tax rates.
Individuals in Illinois currently pay a state income tax rate of 3.75 percent, which dropped from 5 percent in January last year after a temporary increase expired.
“We’re looking at 10 months now and going on a second year without a budget,” said Rev. Ron Howell of Metropolitan Community Church. “Last year’s budget deficit was over $6 billion. We’re looking at no end to the impasse in Springfield and that’s why organizations like CRS and folks like you are important to really tell our legislators to get behind some type of solution that will dig us out of a hole that has really been building up for many years.”
CRS representatives argued that a graduated income tax set at the right rates would produce enough revenue to adequately fund the state’s education, health care, human and public safety services.
Sue Loellbach, director of development for Evanston-based Connections for the Homeless, a nonprofit that helps individuals and families who are homeless or in danger of becoming so, said she learned last July that her organization would lose nearly 10 percent of its operating budgets due to cuts in state funding.
She said she believes Gov. Bruce Rauner’s administration introduced the cuts as “an experiment to see how many social service agencies can survive with less money.”
Although the nonprofit is still operating, “we are a lesser organization than what we were before the cuts,” Loellbach said. For example, she said, the organization has had to end its homelessness prevention program which served people at risk of losing their housing.
“With a small grant of $2,000 or $3,000, we helped them pay whatever their arrearages were and provided them with case management,” she said. “All the prevention money is gone and we have not received any since February 2015, which means there are probably 500 or 600 families who have become homeless because of this.”
She said she’s particularly concerned about the long-term impact, because the longer someone is homeless, the more difficult it becomes for them to get into a stable housing situation. She said a single homeless person costs taxpayers about $50,000 in police and emergency medical services per year.
As a result of the budget impasse and the funding cuts to social service agencies, Rev. Ann Rosewall of the First Congregational Church of Evanston said more of her time is now taken up by individuals in dire need of mental health care.
She said religious leaders are “not trained in counseling and mental health and psychiatric diagnostic processes and things like that.”
“We do a basic assessment and refer out, and now there’s no place to refer to,” Rosewall said. “We have professionals in the pastorate who are inadequately providing services to people who need so much more.”
The implementation of a graduated tax rate would provide the revenue necessary to restore funding to programs like Connections for the Homeless, solve the state’s structural deficit and “spur the economy by putting money in the pockets of low and middle class Illinoisans,” said Dennis Wilson of the Unitarian Church of Evanston.
He said the current flat tax system is unfair because poorer individuals are required to pay a larger portion of their income in taxes than do the state’s wealthiest residents.
“In democracies, your tax policy needs to burden the rich and relieve the poor, and Illinois’ tax policy does exactly the opposite,” Wilson said.
He said affirmative votes from three-fifths of legislators in both the House and Senate are needed to approve the bill authorizing the referendum in November. The deadline to get the constitutional amendment question on the ballot is May 7, Wilson said.
Lee V. Gaines is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.