Procrastinate means to delay or postpone action, or to put off doing something.
Our Editorial Board once nominated then-Gov. Pat Quinn as Procrastinator of the Year for putting off his 2014 budget address for five weeks. His delay until after the primary election that year appeared to be politically motivated and drew our attention.
But Quinn’s speech postponement is nothing compared to the political dawdling we’ve seen this year.
A strong contender for individual Procrastinator of the Year has to be Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who delayed for months the release of an October 2014 video that shows a white Chicago police officer shooting a black teenager 16 times.
Emanuel, who won re-election earlier this year, claims politics had nothing to do with his efforts to keep the public from viewing the video of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald’s death.
After a judge ordered the video to be released last month, the public saw the police department’s version of events did not correspond with images on the video. The public fallout afterward has been intense.
The controversy continues after the weekend shooting deaths by Chicago police of a 19-year-old Northern Illinois University student and a 55-year-old Chicago woman.
In the group category, the leading candidates for Procrastinators of the Year have to be Illinois’ statewide leaders: Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, House Speaker Michael Madigan and Senate President John Cullerton, both Democrats who control their chambers, and Senate Minority Leader Christine Radogno and House Minority Leader Jim Durkin, both Republicans.
Since the start of the fiscal year July 1, the state of Illinois has been forced to operate without a full-fledged budget because state leaders have been unwilling to compromise on a spending plan that deals with Illinois’ extreme financial difficulties.
Unaddressed by the Legislature and governor are chronic imbalances in state revenue and spending, not to mention the need for a legislative solution to the employee pension system, which is underfunded to the tune of $111 billion, after the Illinois Supreme Court earlier this year rejected a 2013 overhaul.
It’s not that the House and Senate failed to approve spending bills for 2015-16. They did, but Rauner chose to veto most of them, except for the education budget, because of the large gap between revenue and spending. The governor insists his “Turnaround Agenda” of structural changes to government be approved first before negotiations turn to raising taxes to close the gap.
So the state entered the fiscal year without a budget, and that’s where things remain in this game of political chicken – despite the financial fallout to social service agencies, employees, taxpayers and students who depend on various state services.
Only late in the year did Rauner, Madigan, Cullerton, Radogno and Durkin meet to discuss the budget; they hadn’t done so since May.
Voters don’t elect leaders to dally, stall, drag their feet and excel at the art of delay. Voters elect leaders to confront problems and reach solutions.
On the vital public issues of our time, Illinoisans deserve more action and less procrastination in 2016.