The State of Illinois has finally made overdue payments to Knox County after owing the salaries of the state’s attorney, public defender, and supervisor of assessment through December 2015.
County Treasurer Robin Davis reported that even though it took suing the Illinois Comptroller and Director of Revenue, $141,000 in backlogged payments have been received.
To cover those, $115,000 was moved from the the public safety account to the general fund and now that payments have been received that money has to go back to public safety.
But Davis says the Finance Committee needs to take action to straighten out the accounting.
“The problem is when this was done at the last minute there wasn’t an expense added to the general fund to give it to public safety, but we’ll need to do it at this finance committee next week and actually do a budget change,” Davis says. “Until I have an actual expense line item in the budget I can’t give it back to public safety.”
9-1-1 and gambling taxes are also flowing in from the state, in fact Member Shawn Pittman made the comment that the State of Illinois seems to be doing a better job of making payments now than they did in years when they did have a budget.
The general fund and nursing home are the two funds continuing to run at a deficit.
Davis says the general fund is at a $375,000 deficit but will be aided when tax revenues start coming in.
