Higher Education

Governor Bruce Rauner introduced his proposed fiscal year 2019 budget on February 14. But despite promising to help close the shortfall from adequate resources identified by the new Evidence-Based Model for school funding, the governor's budget actually cuts available resources for K-12 classrooms by an inflation-adjusted $547 million. This cut frustrates the core purpose of the Evidence-Based Model, which he signed into law just last year: To increase the resources available to Illinois public schools to the levels that evidence shows they need in order to succeed.

Illinois' fiscal year 2018 budget introduced major changes to the state's public pension systems in an attempt to grapple with Illinois' roughly $130 billion in unfunded liabilities. One of the most important aspects of these changes was a new package of benefits. This new package, called "Tier 3," introduced a hybrid defined benefit-defined contribution plan in addition to the defined benefit plans of Tier 1 and Tier 2.

This month, the State Universities Retirement System (SURS) released the first long-term actuarial analysis of the effects of Tier 3 and other changes contained in the FY2018 budget.

CTBA has identified three major takeaways from SURS' analysis:

• The "normal cost" of Tier 3's defined benefit plan-that is, the cost of funding the benefits earned by current employees in a given year-will be higher than many observers expected. As a result, public employers-in this case, public universities and colleges-will be required to make larger payments on behalf of their Tier 3 employees.
• The larger normal cost also means that Tier 3 employees will pay the maximum 6.2 percent of their income towards the defined benefit portion of their retirement benefits. When added to the 4 percent of income they will pay towards the defined contribution portion of their retirement benefits, that means Tier 3 employees will pay 10.2 percent of their income in pension contributions-significantly more than the 8 percent current SURS workers pay.
• Contrary to some reports, which concluded that because Tier 3 will not be implemented in FY2018 it will not be able to produce any savings in this fiscal year, SURS still projects $61 million FY2018 savings from Tier 3. Over the long run, however, the pension changes made in the FY2018 budget do not meaningfully reduce the state's projected pension payments.

You can read the full report here or by downloading the PDF below.

In both magnitude and meaning, state elected officials have no greater obligation than passing a General Fund budget into law. Consider magnitude first. Last fiscal year the General Fund budget provided for the expenditure of $35 billion. No question, that constitutes a sizeable expenditure of taxpayer money. It is also meaningful. While nearly $11 billion was targeted for Hard Costs like debt service and other legally mandated payments, over $24 billion was invested in current services across communities statewide. In fact, over 90 percent of FY2015 General Fund expenditures on services covered education (35 percent), healthcare (30 percent), human services (21 percent), and public safety (7 percent). To be clear, it is those services which provide for the basic health and well-being of the citizenry, and go to the very heart of why we elect a Governor and General Assembly in the first place.

By failing to pass a General Fund budget for FY2016, elected officials are basically punting the following difficult, but fundamental, responsibilities to: 

• Make decisions about how to allocate scarce resources among the aforesaid four service priorities; 
• Identify which of, and by how much, those services will be cut, despite their high priority, if the state’s current woeful fiscal condition is not addressed; or 
• Raise the tax revenue needed to fund those core services to the amounts needed to satisfy demographically driven demand.