Agencies pressure state to pay up - Thomas V. Bona, RRSTAR.COM

Public universities are owed $770 million, Knowles said, and have taken their case public to try to avoid slashing their budgets.The University of Illinois College of Medicine at Rockford, for example, pays psychiatrists that do work for the state. It hasn’t been reimbursed for much of that, as well as other state bills, said Dean Martin Lipsky.This, coupled with other state funding cuts, has made the college conservative in its spending, though not yet to the point of affecting services to students, he said.“We’re meeting payroll, we’re trimming lots of expenses to conserve cash, but we could run out of cash in March or April ...” Lipsky said. “Because there isn’t cash within the university system, they’re afraid to allow any unit to go into deficit for any period of time. If everything runs as expected, we’re fine. We just feel like we’re living in an environment where everything is not running as expected.”