Open Illinois.org

Ever wonder how much of your money the General Assembly appropriates in the budget bill each year, or how much that number has grown recently?  I sure do, and today, on a quest for such information, I was stunned to find that the answer is quite difficult, if not impossible, to find.  My request was simple – I wanted the total amount of the appropriations budget that is passed by the General Assembly each year, not the numbers for a specific department or project or any such complicated figure.  After being redirected through 4 different government agencies and bothering a poor researcher at the Illinois State Library all morning, I’ve finally given up.  According to the librarian, the appropriations are so murky and changed so often that the only decent estimate available is the governor’s yearly proposal to the General Assembly.

But as we all know, the Assembly must approve the proposal, and in the process it makes many changes and billions of dollars in additions – many of which come after the initial budget agreement is passed.  There are nice clean numbers accesible on the Comptroller’s website for a couple of years in the past, but even the librarian admits they are too nebulous to be of reliable research value. Would it really be so hard to let the taxpayers know exactly what the legislature is doing with their money?