Democratic Chicago City Clerk Susana Mendoza wants the job of paying Illinois’ bills. Her campaign to be Illinois’ next comptroller brought her to Galesburg yesterday.Incumbent Republican Comptroller Leslie Munger said Thursday that the state’s backlog of unpaid bills will exceed $10 billion by the end of 2016.
Outside of payments ordered by court orders and consent decrees, her November opponent, Mendoza says the rest can be prioritized by the comptroller.
She said she would have payments to MAP grants, disabled veterans and seniors as a high priority.
Meanwhile, Mendoza blasted Munger for a lack of transparency saying the Republican is just asking citizens to “take her word for it.”
She thinks the comptroller’s office should be a “truth-telling fiscal watch dog” independent of the governor’s office.
As far the stop-gap budget passed at the end of June, Mendoza tells WGIL it’s a “temporary band-aid on a huge problem.”
“Really I don’t know anyone yet because they’ve not received their funding,” Mendoza says. “They still don’t have their money and I think people in Illinois deserve to know who is going to get paid exactly. Not in generalities. Who’s getting paid and in what order. That’s real transparency that does not exist today.”
Munger, in a news release last week, says she’s treating payments on a “first-in, first-out” basis but is prioritizing higher ed institutions, MAP grant students who faced cuts and delays, as well as non-profits and businesses that provided goods and services without a FY16 budget.
