State Rep. Rosemary Mulligan has served the 65th District for 18 years and this election season she looks to add another two-year term in Springfield to her resume.

The district, which comprises portions of Des Plaines and 12 other townships and municipalities, is being contested by her Democratic opponent, Wendy Gruen.

During her time as a representative, Mulligan has worked hard to push for reform in fields like health care and Medicaid. These efforts have earned her many honors and awards, including the 2008 American Cancer Society Leadership Award for the Smoke-Free Illinois Act, a law banning smoking at public sites and public workplaces.

Along with focusing on various areas of health care, the Republican incumbent has taken a leadership role on early childhood education, family issues and the state budget.

Mulligan served on the state House's Human Services Appropriations Committee and most recently on the Governor's Human Services Commission. Outside of state capital, the Des Plaines resident is an advisory board member of Avenues to Independence, a nonprofit that provides programs to autistic adults.

As part of Patch's Election 2010 coverage, we sat down with the candidate to discuss the issues facing Illinois and her plans if re-elected.

Patch: Tell me one thing in your background that best qualifies you to run for this position?

Rosemary Mulligan: I'm the [Illinois] House Republican spokesman for human services appropriations, so I work on the budget for human services and I'm one of the people that's going to be really involved, I think, in trying to straighten up what's going on with the state.

Hopefully, they will go back to the old way of doing appropriations were the legislature actually does the line items. The last couple of years Speaker [Michael] Madigan and Senate President [John] Cullerton have given the budget without any individual line items to the governor, which is not correct in how you give the budget. That and I think I've represented the district really well.

I've brought home money for flooding, and I've changed laws. I've changed laws that would not allow the unincorporated area to enter into agreements with local municipalities in order to receive money for flooding, since they weren't able to do that before we passed the law.

And I have a really good background. Before I was in the General Assembly, I was a paralegal for municipal law and land development. I have a pretty good idea of how to help the local districts from when I'm working at home, and in the General Assembly, I have an expertise in human services and the budget.

Patch: In what way should the state of Illinois pay its bills and balance its budget?

Rosemary Mulligan: I think they need to take a good, hard look at all the programs and they need to set a ratio of whether the program provides enough services compared to administrative costs, and then I think they need to eliminate programs that are too heavy on the administrative side and don't provide enough services to people.

I think they need to take a good, hard look at opening the budget midyear; they passed legislation that gave the governor unusual powers, but they didn't make it good for the whole year. So in January, all of the governor's extraordinary powers are going to go away and we're still going to have a budget problem. The General Assembly will probably have to take a look at getting an audit of where each agency is and then going in and seeing if we need to reopen the budget.

 And then I think they need to be very carefully fiscally. I've recommended and tried to introduce several times to have an independent bureau of the budget so that we'd get better factual numbers while we're trying to work on the state's problems. I mean, it looks like we have a chance of maybe taking the House to be Republican, which would be good. I think it's a detriment to have total control by one party because it lets them put things through that aren't necessarily negotiated out to a better solution for the public.

Patch: Does the state have to consider raising taxes?

Rosemary Mulligan: There are things that House Republican Leader [Tom] Cross asked for the governor to take a look at reforms before we consider any taxes. So Medicaid is one area where we are looking at reforms on how to save money, maybe go to some HMO's and try to make some changes, and then try to figure out how we are going to [move] forward with pensions.

I think the first thing before you look at how you're going to do taxes is how many reforms have we made and who's going to be spending the money? It seems like the more money we give the more money is spent and the reforms are never there that save the money to balance it off. It's important to take a look at what reforms can be made before we take a hard look at raising any taxes.

Patch: How would you retain businesses in Illinois and attract new businesses?

Rosemary Mulligan: We have to be very careful with the legislation, particularly not raising taxes. If you raise taxes what you do is you take away discretionary spending, both for individuals and businesses. The discretionary spending is what sometimes allows them to have a business.

 I served on the workforce and resident board for five years under [Gov. George] Ryan's administration and going into [Gov. Rod] Blagojevich, and Blagojevich did not use the board correctly. The workforce and resident board was a large board that qualifies for federal funding, and it looked at how you combine education and business and things like that, how you work them all together in creating an educated workforce.

One of the pieces of legislation that came out of that was to funnel money into community colleges to do job training. So if you wanted to bring a business here or you wanted to stay in your business and train your employees, you could go to the community college and the state would have given them some money and they would be able to assist you.

I think you need to encourage business by having less regulation and more incentives and tax breaks.

Patch: What measures do you endorse to end Illinois' culture of corruption? Would you support campaign disclosure laws?

Rosemary Mulligan: We have pretty extensive campaign disclosure laws and people abide by them. I think that Illinois has very open things that you have to report.

I've sponsored several bills--one of them was that you could not have a campaign committee that did not say who it benefited, so you can't have a blind name. I've tried to get that bill passed but the [House] Speaker would not let that bill go through. I wanted to have campaign committees more defined.

I think that we should have extensive reporting, and I think that the leaders should be obligated to stick to the same campaign contribution limits that everyone else has to.