Senate Republicans blocked a multi-billion dollar borrowing plan April 6, because the proposal did not provide funds to repay the debt, contain details about the how the money would be spent, provided no assurances that funds would be distributed according to need rather than politics and ignored demands for protections against “pay for play.”

Senate Bills 668 and 3053 called for $4.3 billion in borrowing – $1 billion more than the Governor proposed in his State of the State address – with $3.3 billion earmarked for transportation projects and $1 billion for school buildings.

The plan, which was unveiled publicly only an hour before it was pushed through the Senate Executive Committee, did not receive the 36 votes it required to pass in the Senate.

The new debt would have equated to $1,400 for every single household in Illinois, at a time when Illinois already has a record high state debt, record high government spending, and is $2 billion behind on unpaid bills.

Legislators noted that it took Illinois nearly two centuries to accumulate the $10 billion in bonded debt owed when Governor Rod Blagojevich took office, but only three years for Blagojevich to more than double that debt to $23 billion. Had the new proposal been approved, state bonded debt would exceed $27 billion.

That total includes only "hard" bonded debt and does not factor in such "soft" debt as pension obligations and the administration's strategy of delaying payments to doctors, hospitals, contractors and others who do business with the state.

For the past three years many Senate Republicans have consistently said they could support a capital construction plan, but that it must:

• Have a clear revenue source to assure that the debt will be repaid;
• Clearly identify how the funds will be spent;
• Provide strong protections against "pay to play" and other contract abuses that have become endemic to the Blagojevich administration;
• Prevent the Governor from playing political games with the distribution and disbursement of funds.

Instead, the plan presented April 6 failed to address even one concern that the Republican Caucus has expressed.The proposal provided no clear source for repaying the debt, did not contain any language identifying how or where the funds would be spent, offered no protections against contract abuse and left the Governor and agencies that have been the subject of scathing audits in control of the distribution and administration of funds.

The single-most difficult hurdle remains the lack of trust in the current administration. During debate on the borrowing plan, Republican senators quoted past comments from Democrats who acknowledged that members of his own party do not trust him to keep his word.

Interestingly, the proposed road projects could have been paid for in cash, without borrowing more money, if the Blagojevich Administration had not raided $1.2 billion from the Road Fund the last three years.