Deadbeat Illinois: Mental-health agency struggles to pay its bills

ROCKFORD — The state’s $5 billion backlog of unpaid bills didn’t quietly creep up; it announced itself like the first violent flashes of lightning in a coming storm.

By Greg StanleyRockford Register Star

Editor's Note: This is the latest installment in the Deadbeat Illinois series, where reporters from GateHouse Illinois newsrooms examine the real-world effects of the state's failure to pay its bills. Each Monday, we share the stories of those affected. See more on the Deadbeat Illinois Facebook page.

ROCKFORD — The state’s $5 billion backlog of unpaid bills didn’t quietly creep up; it announced itself like the first violent flashes of lightning in a coming storm.

Stephen Langley, executive director of Stepping Stones of Rockford, felt it in 2007, the first time his nonprofit had to borrow money to make payroll while it waited for state payments to arrive. Over the past six years, this has become more of the norm, Langley said.

Now, the organization that cares for 150 adults struggling with debilitating mental illnesses survives on a month-to-month basis, struggling to keep enough cash on hand as it waits on the inconsistent ebb and flow of payments from the state.

The deadbeat practices of a state that’s broken have, like the sins of the father, turned the 50-year-old mental health organization into a reluctant deadbeat itself.

“You have to make payroll,” Langley said. “And you have to maintain your insurances and make payments to the bank when the bank is the one that’s supporting your cash flow.”

Other bills, still important, are deemed less critical. So at times, the utilities are shut off.

Some Stepping Stones group homes temporarily have lost water, electricity or heat. The agency must either borrow or wait for the money to turn the utilities back on.

“Our vendors, the people we owe money, begin to see us the same way we see the state,” Langley said. “We’re forced to deal with all our vendors the way the state deals with us.”

With about 90 percent of Stepping Stone’s roughly $5 million annual budget financed by the state — the bulk of which comes from Medicaid — program directors must sometimes decide which bills to pay and which to delay.

Stepping Stones serves the chronically ill — people with major behavioral problems and medical needs. They’re the people who have not done well in programs with less structure and less staff involvement, Langley said.

Most of the clients live in Stepping Stones housing, which is divided into group homes and apartments.

It’s the first place where Aaron R. Ayen, who has been treated at Stepping Stones for 10 years, has trusted the staff and the staff has trusted him, Ayen said.

“I don’t have to be on survival mode” he said. “I don’t have to worry about being hurt.

“These have been the best 10 years of my life.”

The clients require round-the-clock care, checkups in the middle of the night and trips to a walk-in clinic. The program has a staff of about 100, including two part-time psychiatrists who can issue emergency prescriptions.

The program has enough cash now to make it to the new year, Langley said.

Money typically arrives from the state in the spring, around the time Illinois residents are paying taxes, he said. Money tends to dry up later in the year.

Stepping Stone’s cash-flow problem is shared by most Illinois nonprofits and organizations that rely on Medicaid funding. The money is filtered through the state, which purposely delays payments to keep enough cash itself to pay its own bills. Meanwhile, ambulances and emergency responders, health-care providers, addiction facilities, group homes for severely disabled or ill adults and children and other programs that target some of the most vulnerable and at need in society, wait.

Langley has worked at Stepping Stones for more than 34 years, nearly half his life. At 70, he expects he’ll be retired by the time the state’s fiances are caught up — if he even lives to see it.

What’s hard, he said, is that instead of looking for ways to add services, innovate or build a better product, all energy over the next several years will be spent simply on scraping by.

“It just makes everything static,” he said.

Greg Stanley can bea reached at (815) 987-1369 or gstanley@rrstar.com.

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