SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS (February 22, 2024) — The Illinois Association of Rehabilitation Facilities, representing community providers of services for persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities and serious mental illnesses, issued the following statement February 21, after Governor JB Pritzker presented his 2025 state budget proposal:
“We appreciate the Governor and his administration working with the disability community and ultimately deciding not to pursue a proposed decrease in hours for Direct Service Professionals (DSP) in the proposed budget, an action that would have had severe consequences for the many people our members serve. It’s clear through communications with individuals with disabilities, frontline staff, disability providers, and legislators, they understood that decision would have taken Illinois backwards after our recent progress to better fund services for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
With this decision in mind, and while the Administration is simultaneously seeking to exit the Ligas Consent Decree and proposing to increase state revenues, we are deeply concerned that the Governor’s budget proposal does not include any increases in wage rates for DSPs. We do not see a path to exiting the consent decree, of which the state has been out of compliance since 2017, without minimally achieving full funding of the Guidehouse rate study, which indicated higher wages and benefits for frontline staff as its top priority.
Disability service-providers throughout Illinois continue to face serious pressures and obstacles to attracting DSP workers to provide services, including additional increases in the minimum wage this year and next to $15 an hour on January 1, 2025. Regrettably, the proposed budget’s lack of a DSP wage rate increase represents a significant step backwards in our ability to provide competitive wages and benefits for frontline staff.
This spring, with the leadership of Representative Michelle Mussman and Senator Karina Villa, we will pursue an increase in DSP wages of $3 an hour, to help us stay ahead of these pressures and put us more in line with the progress envisioned by the Guidehouse study two years ago.
We hope the Governor and Legislature will recognize the ongoing struggles of service providers and support this wage increase in the final budget later this spring.”
