From Illinois Public Media, this is special coverage of the governor's state of the state and budget address. We are broadcasting live from the Illinois State Capitol Building, where any minute now Illinois Governor JB Pritzker is expected to deliver his eighth such speech. He'll be giving it to a joint session of the Illinois General Assembly in Springfield. We are watching now for the governor to enter the House of Representatives. The special session is convening. Lawmakers are being told to take their seats. We have House Speaker Chris Welch standing at the podium, as well as the Illinois Senate President Don Harmon. And at this time, we are waiting for the governor to make his entrance into the chamber.
Joining us before and after the speech to talk through what we are expecting to hear are two experts on Illinois government, politics, and state finances. Brian Gaines is a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Paula Worthington is senior policy adviser at the Civic Federation and lecturer at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. Thank you both for being with us. Paula, for listeners who are just joining us, can you just briefly outline the fiscal state of Illinois? We saw a $2.2 billion deficit number being thrown around in state government budget circles not long ago. Talk broadly about the situation of Illinois heading into this speech.
Sure. Thank you. Thank you, Brian. So that estimate of $2.2 billion is a bit old. It was a few months back, and it reflected the governor's office best estimates of the impact of the slowing economy and particularly federal income tax changes driven by HR1, which would have implications for the state's own income tax collections.
HR1, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
That's correct. Exactly right. And in that report from the fall, the Office of Management and Budget laid out all the, considering all the factors there. It really wasn't a spending story. It was a revenue story. And so for the current year, fine, but for next year it was going to be about the revenues. And that, I'm looking to hear what the governor has to say. Part of the good news is that the recent core revenues for the state have really been performing pretty well as we're entering the second half of our current fiscal year, and that puts us in a good place as we think about entering fiscal year 2027.
We are still waiting for the governor to enter the Illinois House chamber. Currently they are acknowledging the distinguished guests: Attorney General Kwame Raoul, Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias, Comptroller Susana Mendoza, and Treasurer Mike Frerichs, as well as members of the Illinois Supreme Court. Still waiting on the governor to make his entrance into the chamber. Brian Gaines at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The speech is, you know, everybody pays attention to the State of the Union, or at least many people do. I think it's a little harder to break through the consciousness of people about state government. Can you talk about the job that governors need to try to do in these speeches, in one of these rare opportunities to, you know, try and connect directly with Illinois voters?
Yeah, I think that they're for the most part not connecting directly with the voters. They know that the attention is relatively low, that for a budget speech there are a lot of people who have a personal interest and are watching closely and parsing the words very carefully, but the average person won't be listening. They might hear something second or third hand. So the goal partly is making a series of technical points for experts, and then insofar as they're thinking of public opinion, I think that's where the sort of soaring rhetoric and general positioning about, I think we'll hear a lot about responsibility and claims that the budget's balanced, which maybe is at least a fib. But that sort of thing, even that is more about indirect communication. There's a tone they want to set that will make its way down to the public, but they know very well that even presidential State of the Union addresses have trouble crowding out all of the more interesting entertainment options people have, and that the general public is not watching closely. That's one of the reasons it's the middle of the day.
And what sort of things are you expecting to hear from the governor this time around, based on some of the preview coverage? We've seen him, you know, he's expected to point the finger of blame, I guess, at the Trump administration in Washington.
The Trump administration is an excellent foil. I think we'll hear a lot. And we could discuss at length that some of it's true, some of it's not really true about the state's fiscal problems, but they'll be the number one villain. And I think he will be positioning himself as someone who is digging the state out of a hole. And again, we could have a lot of long discussion of whether that's accurate or not. The pension liability is still disastrous. We're still in the worst place, as of this summer at least, the state with the worst situation. But I think he would want to portray this as fixing problems that he inherited, and he's doing so and demonstrating good governance and all of that, with a mind to someone who's probably thinking hard about running for president and not just staying in his job as governor.
Paula Worthington, we heard, we are going, I expect we will hear the governor say this is his eighth balanced budget that he's introduced. And we heard Brian Gaines there just use the word fib. I wonder what you think of that assessment, more so of what the governor says, claiming that he's introduced balanced budgets throughout his tenure.
Sure. As has been hinted at before this address segment and then even just now, the state's fiscal condition is not just reflected in the operating budget or the general funds budget, but there's a much bigger budget that the whole state is engaged with, and that includes all kinds of other components. And when you look at things like that, when you look at the growth in spending and revenues over the last few years, I think what you can see is even when you do it in real terms, you definitely see the COVID-era impact on spending and revenues. What you don't see is yet any material improvements in our unfunded pension liabilities. We've sort of plateaued in that regard at this time, and we can talk more about that. And I think we probably should, given that the governor may emphasize his own proposal to reform pensions. I think we should as well, but we may have to hold off on that because the governor is approaching.
He's now entered the House chamber. He's shaking hands with members of the General Assembly. His wife, MK Pritzker, is with him, and now he's making his way towards the podium. We expect his speech will be beginning soon. Let's take a little listen to what we can hear in the House chamber.
Or maybe they have their microphones cut there, as they sometimes do when someone is not actively speaking. He's going around shaking the hands of, looks like some of his cabinet members, members of the Supreme Court. And now he finally appears to be approaching the podium. Hopefully we will have his microphone turned on in a moment here. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker for his state of the state address.
Speaker of the House and the Senate President shaking their hands and stepping up to the microphone.
