Issue date: 11/12/08 Section: News

Mike Lawrence, the former press secretary and senior policy adviser to Gov. Jim Edgar, speaks to students and faculty in the Buzzard Auditorium on Tuesday. Lawrence focused on the current state of the economy in Illinois during his speech and also mentioned the media's role of informing the public of government and politician actions. (Karolina Strack / The Daily Eastern News)

Mike Lawrence, former press secretary for Gov. Jim Edgar, spoke out Tuesday night against the current budget crisis Illinois is facing.

When Edgar left office, Illinois had a positive balance in excess of $1 billion dollars.

Now, due to poor fiscal discipline, the state is facing one of its largest deficits in years.

"The state of the state is not at all good," Lawrence said.

Lawrence said the state is $2.5 billion over revenue, has borrowed billions, ducked its public pension obligations and has used one-time revenues to fund on-going expenses.

Lawrence tops the list by revealing the state has delayed payments to health care and social service providers. This has forced many businesses to shut their doors and lay off employees, he said.

"The state of Illinois is a shameless deadbeat," Lawrence said.

Lawrence said for Illinois to once again be a healthy state, the state leaders and residents all need to restore the fiscal discipline and fiscal sanity that Edgar's administration stood for. The state of Illinois must do all this without neglecting critical needs.

In addition to bringing critical fiscal concerns to the audiences' attention, Lawrence also challenged the media.

He said to make the people of Illinois more aware of all the things they could do to help the state, it is not enough to just quote the politicians anymore.

Lawrence said the media need to hold them accountable by demanding details and bringing these issues to the knowledge of Illinois residents in a way that hits home.

Lawrence said in Springfield, 61 percent of the media coverage dealt with horse race and strategies of the candidates.

He said without better coverage from the media, the people of the state will not be as well as informed as they need to be.

Many of the students in attendance were political science majors and already knew about the current situation Illinois is facing.

Kyle Simpson, a political science major, said he was not surprised about what Lawrence said.

"No I wasn't surprised, but I was surprised at how bad it actually was," Simpson said.

Eric Wilber, a political science and philosophy major, agreed with Lawrence's opinion about Illinois' budget.

"The state of the state is really bad," Wilber said. "As he said, bringing revenues up is one of the biggest things that we have to do, we can't just cut our way out of this."

Dave Holzrichter can be reached at 581- dwholzrichter@eiu.edu.

Page 1 of 1

Article Tools

The Daily Eastern News encourages on-topic, civil discussion on its articles posted online. It is our policy not to screen comments before they are posted or edit them after they are posted. However, we reserve the right to remove comments that are off-topic, malicious, libelous or include excessive foul language. The DEN also reserves the right to turn off all comments on any story it deems necessary.

Comments violating copyright law will also be removed.

Users who repeatedly violate this policy will be banned from commenting.

If you have any questions on our comment policy or wish to report a comment that you feel violates these standards, please e-mail a link to the article to our Online Editor at DENNews.com@gmail.com.