March 11, 2010
The Civic Federation has received an overwhelming response from the residents of Illinois to our recently-released “Fiscal Rehabilitation Plan for the State of Illinois,” including scores of emails and telephone calls. The Civic Federation has taken into consideration your comments, recommendations, praise and criticism.
While not all the feedback we have received has agreed with the Civic Federation’s recommendations, the report has fulfilled our goal of contributing to an urgent discussion that must take place between Illinois’ leaders and their constituents about what path the state should take out of its historic fiscal crisis.
Illinoisans cannot afford to continue to ignore the fiscal crisis or allow state officials to put off critical reforms once again. As the Federation has said repeatedly, doing nothing will only make a dire situation—and therefore the remedy—more painful.
Thank you to the thousands of people who have visited our website in the past weeks for taking the time to read our fiscal rehabilitation plan. We hope you found it useful—whether you agreed with its conclusions or not.
The Civic Federation and our Institute for Illinois’ Fiscal Sustainability will continue to contribute to the public policy dialogue as the state budget process unfolds over the next several months and we urge all Illinoisans to do the same.