By Cynthia Grau/WJEZ News

State Legislators are closing in on the creation of a balanced budget, something they haven’t had a lot of luck with in the past few years.

State Senator Jason Barickman talks about the optimism he currently has.

“We’re on the front end of it, and, I supposed you could say there’s a lot of ways and reasons we may get off track with it, but really, over the last three or four years here, I feel more optimistic today that we’re going to come together on a 12 month balanced budget agreement. I feel more optimistic about that today than I have in years,” Barickman said.

He also talks about how past budget woes hopefully won’t be repeated.

“I thought it was a bad decision to pass yet another unbalanced budget. They did it with a tax increase. They did it over the objections of the governor, who vetoed that. They did it over the objections of most of us Republicans who said we have to stop making these bad decisions. I hope that this year, we can come together and make a good decision. I think the benchmark this year is it needs to be a full year budget, it needs to be balanced and it needs to have no other tax increases in it. Those are not unreasonable requirements of a budget proposal. I hope we can get that done and if we do, I think we turn around the next day and focus on continuing to bring our spending down and try to bring some relief to the taxpayers who are, quite frankly, fed up with the situation,” Barickman said.

Barickman was a guest on a recent Community Forum, where he talks more about what’s happening in Springfield. That is available at WJEZ.com.