South Cook News

Orland Park Mayor and congressional candidate Keith Pekau recently criticized irresponsible spending, as reports show that Illinois has some of the highest state and local government spending in the country.

Illinois was ranked as the seventh biggest spender in 2021 by U.S. Government Spending; the state government spent an estimated $76.6 billion and local governments spent approximately $87 billion, for a total of more than $163 billion.

"Before being elected mayor of Orland Park, career politicians got rich, Orland Park had a fiscally irresponsible government with $111 million in village debt, and businesses were being driven out," Pekau said on Facebook last week. "But, since then, we’ve put people over politics, and this is the same common-sense leadership we need in Congress." 

When the village of Orland Park passed its FY 2022 budget, Pekau told Patch, "When I arrived here and sat through my first budget meetings, I realized that frankly, I had inherited a complete mess. Our reserves were projected to be completely depleted by the end of next year. What is scary is that the board had known this for five years prior to that and had not taken any action to fix it ... After the end of this budget year, we will have taken $46 million off of our books since the day I arrived, including the money we are spending this year."

Pekau has doubled investments in the village's infrastructure during his term as mayor, while managing to reduce total operating costs by 14%, according to his website. He also lowered property tax rates and paid down more than $50 million of the village's debt.

Forbes reported that governments with large debts and deficits run the risk of exacerbating inflation. Inflation functions as an additional tax on consumers, while also causing uncertainty for investors, leading to slowed economic growth.

As of 2019, Illinois had the fourth highest outstanding government debt in the country, according to Statista. Illinois' debt stood at $165.1 billion, less than only California, New York, and Texas. 44 states and Washington, D.C. have outstanding debts of less than $100 billion.