Springfield, IL (CAPITOL CITY NOW) – Susana Mendoza, Illinois State Comptroller, spoke on the WTAX Morning Newswatch, about a recent change in state law, allowing her to pay out pensions whenever she wants too now. Whereas prior to the law change, Mendoza could only pay pensions out for the specific month they were for.
This change now allows the Comptroller’s Office to pre-pay pensions. Before this change, a pension marked for February could not be paid before the first day of February. However, the previous ruling didn’t restrict payments to the first of the month, the payments were restricted any day within to their assigned month.
As of now, for example, a pension due for May could potentially be paid in March.
According to Mendoza, this ability to payout early, has allotted more income opportunities to the pension systems
In her interview, Mendoza stated “Since we’ve changed this law, which now means I can payout pensions whenever I want, we have generated an additional 41 million plus dollars in earnings for these pension systems. That alone isn’t going to solve the pension crisis, but doesn’t it seem a bit better to have 41 million in extra dollars by just paying these a little bit earlier?”
Mendoza also spoke about the states ‘rainy day fund’. “When I started the states rainy day fund had about 48 thousand dollars, and that doesn’t even cover government expenses for thirty seconds. Now we’ve built that up to 2.4 billion dollars, which sounds incredible and it is compared to 48 thousand. That still only gives us up to 15 days of emergency reserves, and the average nationally is about 50 days. We still have a long way to go but this still gives us something to celebrate, going from 48 thousand to 2.4 billion”
Credit ratings here in our state have also been going up.
Mendoza stated “Ten years ago, I promised our first credit upgrade. I think back then people thought ‘Oh she has a lot of energy, but she’s probably crazy.’ However, I have now delivered not just one, but my tenth credit upgrade since I started in office. This is a huge deal, because by the way, this is the first major credit upgrade in over 20 years.”
