Lawmaker who backed 67 percent tax hike up for state ag director job
Anyone still wondering why your local governments want the names of applicants for public-sector jobs exempted from the Illinois Freedom of Information Act? Anyone? Hello?
As I blogged yesterday about provisions of a House bill that would exempt applicants and applications for public jobs from FOIA, Gov. Pat Quinn was preparing to announce that he is nominating former Democratic Rep. Bob Flider to be director of the Illinois Department of Agriculture. Flider, of Mount Zion, was one of the lame-duck lawmakers in January 2011 who, in their last hours before the swearing-in of the new General Assembly, voted to increase the income tax by 67 percent on residents and 46 percent on businesses.
To put it another way, as I prepared my argument Tuesday that state and local lawmakers would love to keep a key part of Illinois' culture of corruption a secret – awarding government jobs and pensions to the politically faithful – Quinn prepared my Exhibit A.
Well, Exhibit B, given that Quinn gave fellow lame-duck tax hiker Careen Gordon, D-Morris, an $84,000-a-year job as associate general counsel for the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation.
Okay, Exhibit C, because Quinn first tried to appoint Gordon to the Illinois Prison Review Board and the $86,000 salary that came with the position, until she withdrew her name rather than face a confirmation hearing grilling from GOP lawmakers alleging a Quinn pro quo.
Both Gordon and Flider had been on the record opposing a tax increase before they lost her re-election bids.
[UPDATE: Thanks to Capitol Fax, I'm reminded that two other lame-duck tax increasers – Mike Smith, D-Canton, and David Miller, D-Dolton, got rewarded with state jobs with the Educational Labor Relations Board and the Illinois Department of Public Health, respectively.
If you include the two lame-duck tax increasers who got jobs with Cook County – John O'Sullivan and Michael Carberry, both D-Oak Lawn, that's Exhibits D through G.]
House Bill 3137 is one of many I've been writing and blogging my shaved head off about that are aimed at weakening the FOI, Open Meetings and Public Notice acts that protect your right to know. Your county board, municipalities, school districts, public libraries and townships have been paying lobbyists, with your tax dollars, to get these bills passed.
Our language borrows a Russian word coined during the Soviet era, "apparatchik", to describe people appointed or hired because of their political reliability rather than knowledge of the job. A derogatory term when the KGB or the stukatch in your apartment building wasn't listening in on you, the apparatchik was the comrade put in charge of the factory who could quote Marx chapter and verse, but had never worked on an assembly line and didn't know Lenin from lug nuts.
It's up to the Illinois Senate to decide on Flider's hiring. He served on the House Agriculture and Conservation Committee, the Illinois Farm Bureau named him as an "agriculture certified legislator" in 2004, and listed him as a friend of agriculture in every subsequent election until he lost.
Qualifications aside, the fact that Flider's appointment looks like a reward for approving the income tax hike we're all enjoying reeks. It reeks to high heaven. I don't need to delve into my extremely rusty Russian – plenty of words in my native English come to mind to describe how bad this looks.
If anyone thinks this kind of hanky-panky is limited to Chicago and Springfield, how about some food for thought in the form of an award-winning 2007 Northwest Herald investigation showing that all but three of McHenry County's 17 townships had family members of township officials on the payroll?
I'm sure some of these employees were in fact qualified for the job. I'm also sure that the sole qualification for an equal number of others was having a genetic sequence similar to a public official or a spouse of one.
It's these reasons, among many others, why local taxing bodies are cheering on a bill to keep job applicants secret to give you and me a lot less time to react.
I promised yesterday that I'd give you a list today of the anti-sunshine bills your local governments are pushing that you should be the most concerned about. I figured you wouldn't mind a raincheck in exchange for bringing you the news that part of your 67 percent tax hike may go to the salary, and pension, of one of the lawmakers who helped make it possible.
Senior Writer Kevin Craver can be reached at kcraver@shawmedia.com.
