If we have to pay a fee to file a lawsuit in court or file a document with the county, shouldn't our legislators have to pay to introduce legislation?

Bear with me here – you'll be calling your legislators urging them to enact this law once you see how much it can generate.

As we all know, our state is in deep financial trouble. And if the run-up reports are correct, even Gov. Pat Quinn has finally realized it. At noon tomorrow he will present a 2013 budget message to the General Assembly rolling back government spending, closing facilities and taking other long-overdue austerity measures.

Quinn will deliver his budget address to 59 senators and 118 representatives whom, as we have seen over the years, are more willing to draft nanny-state legislation banning foie gras, granting ownership rights to road kill and regulating maximum-strength drain cleaner than addressing the huge budget and pension hole they've dug us into.

In a state where future taxes on breathing, eating and sleeping are not out of the question, why not a tax on legislation? Quinn tomorrow will be staring a cash cow right in their legislation-happy faces.

I got inspired – as in The Blues Brothers, shaft of light in the church, "The Band!" inspired – watching the recent slew of anti-gun bills filed by faithful cogs in the Chicago Machine (which I blogged about here). With courts around the nation throwing out gun bans, some  lawmakers are now seeking to discourage gun ownership through classifying numerous guns as "assault weapons", talking about a $65 registration fee per gun, and a tax on ammunition to pay violent crime victims.

From guns to Drano to goose liver, if our legislators want utopia, it's only fair that they should have to help pay for it.

We're talking a lot of money to be made here. How many bills have been filed in this General Assembly? Ready for it?

9,755.

That's 3,827 in the Senate and 5,928 in the House as of noon today (look here). And boys and girls, we still have 10 months to go in the two-year session of the 97th General Assembly.

(This total of course includes "shell bills" that are merely placeholders for future legislation, but these often become the real thing and carry legislation in the late spring session and the fall veto session).

So, let's crunch the numbers of a hypothetical law – let's call it the Nanny State Implementation Act – that gives each legislator three free bills a year, but requires them to pay $500 to file each additional bill.

Rounding up to 10,000 bills in this 97th General Assembly, that's 1,062 free bills for the state's 177 lawmakers. Take the 8,938 remaining bills at $500 a bill, and that's almost $4.5 million.

That would go a ways toward helping pay Deadbeat Illinois' backlog of bills. As a reminder, the state owed McHenry County vendors $30 million as of October, not counting late Medicaid payments.

Of course, the Nanny State Implementation Act would need some safeguards:

• The fee must be paid by one and only one chief sponsor – none of this two do-gooders splitting the difference garbage.

• The fee increases annually based on the rate of inflation.

• If not paid up front at the time of the bill's filing, the amount will be automatically deducted from the lawmaker's paycheck or per diem reimbursement.

• All revenues will go to paying down the state's backlog of bills.

• This one is for the schools – the filing fee doubles to $1,000 for any bill imposing an unfunded mandate on a local government.

• The fee becomes $2,000 for any bill increasing state spending without an offset.

Would this bill, assuming that the fellow who really runs Illinois would ever let it get to the House floor for a vote, generate all that money? Of course not. Even our most obsessive nanny-state legislator would never want to have to choose between trying to enact their latest whim and Christmas presents for the family.

But on the upside, we'd be rid of this never-ending slew of laws that are making the book of Illinois Compiled Statutes stretch the height of a downtown skyscraper. Our legislators would decide if they want to pay out-of-pocket to continue this assault on our open-records laws at local governments' behest. And maybe, just maybe, our lawmakers will decide to stick to the important issues and knock off this "there ought to be a law" mentality that's killing us.

To heck with raising a few million more to pay down bills – our lawmakers leaving us alone could be more precious than gold.

Senior Writer Kevin Craver can be reached at kcraver@shawmedia.com.
 

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.

Anyone who has ever had to give a dog a pill should recognize the trick that your politicians are using to attack your fundamental right to open records in a democratic society.

If you wrap that pill in bacon, it's in your dog's mouth faster than you can blink. If you're a politician wanting to help local governments keep public records private, you wrap your attack in common-sense exemptions that no logical person would oppose.

And through subtlety, you make people afraid of the Illinois Freedom of Information Act and you wrap it in that fear as well.

Cal Skinner over at McHenry County Blog wrote about my Monday blog post regarding House Bill 3137, which among other things would amend FOIA to allow governments to exempt drafts of reports and presentations prepared by government staff. It's one of a slew of bills that the McHenry County Board and 14 other counties, through their lobbying group paid for with your tax dollars, are trying to push through Springfield to curtail your right to know.

The example I cited was how draft reports contributed to the Northwest Herald's award-winning coverage of the county's repeated mishandling of the McCullom Lake brain cancer cluster – coverage, I'm sure, that county officials wouldn't mind going away.

I didn't include other exemptions proposed in the bill – date of birth, medical and health information of public employees – because such information in my opinion is already exempted under FOIA as "clearly unwarranted invasion[s] of personal privacy." As a matter of fact, medical records are plainly listed as private information, as are "unique identifiers."

I assumed that these provisions were not a big deal because they're already covered under FOIA. I owe Skinner and the person who commented on his post a debt of gratitude for showing that I assumed too much. And as my drill sergeant used to say (cleaned up for a G-rating), if you parse the word "assume," it makes something bad out of "u" and "me".

I'll bet anything that most, if not all, of the people who read about House Bill 3137 will only focus on the birth date and medical records exemptions that are already exempt. If I didn't know anything about FOIA, the idea that a journalist or business could FOIA my medical records would scare me stiff. I would then call my legislator and demand that they get the bill out of committee and pass it with all haste.

And that, my friends, is precisely the point. Planting a false fear that the evil liberal media might run your last colonoscopy on the front page makes you want to curtail open-government laws.

Besides draft reports, the bill also exempts names of applicants for public employment and applications for public employment. Again, I award points to Skinner for bringing up the county's recent problem with the background of a regional superintendent of schools candidate as to why keeping such information secret is a really bad idea.

Now let me meet Skinner's example, and raise him. How about the annoying tendency for people who scratch Illinois' politicians backs to end up with government jobs and the pensions and benefits that come with them? How about Gov. Pat Quinn giving state jobs to lame-duck lawmakers who helped him get that 67 percent income tax increase approved?

Lawmakers would love to keep applicants for government jobs – the ultimate patronage award that Illinois government can bestow, corruption's Medal of Honor – a secret until the last minute. In a state trying or at least pretending to care about cleaning up a system that has sent 1,000 public officials and businessmen to prison since 1970, including three or four governors depending on how you count, exempting this information would be a huge step backward.

And in this state, there isn't much room to step backward before we fall off of the cliff.

While I started this post off with a dog analogy, I'll end it with a cat analogy. I'm a lifelong cat owner who now owns two Siamese cats, a brother and sister named Fred and Ginger.

Ever try to give a cat a pill? Claws and fangs aside, wrapping the pill in something yummy doesn't work. A cat eats the tasty coating, and leaves the pill laying on the kitchen floor to the frustration of its owner.

Maybe we can learn something from our feline friends and do the same thing with some of these laws our state lawmakers are proposing. And outright spitting out all of what they're offering us is just as good.

Because this backlash from state and local lawmakers against our sunshine laws, and the fact that they're spending our taxpayer dollars to lobby for them, has been a very bitter pill to swallow.

Tomorrow, I'll list the anti-sunshine bills that your county, municipal and school lobbyists are pushing that I'm the most concerned about, and will neutralize any future argument that said bills are being backed in the name of your personal privacy.

Senior Writer Kevin Craver can be reached at kcraver@shawmedia.com.

We may finally get an explanation as to why certain aspects of our state's sunshine laws strain the finances and resources of a County Board that has amassed a $47 million reserve.

As I wrote in Sunday's newspaper, my stories chronicling local governments' clandestine war on public records laws came up at Thursday's meeting of the Legislative and Intergovernmental Affairs Committee. The committee met for the first time with Katy Lawrence, the new executive director of Metro Counties of Illinois, which lobbies in Springfield to represent the interests of the state's 15 largest counties.

As I have written and blogged about since August, Metro Counties is one of several local government lobbying groups pushing a slew of bills aimed at scaling back our state's Freedom of Information, Open Meetings and Public Notice acts, or opposing bills strengthening them. Your tax dollars are paying for the effort.

Several members of the committee, such as Nick Provenzano, R-McHenry, said Thursday that the county has to do a better job explaining to the public why they are backing such legislation, and explaining to the public why the sunshine provisions in question are "burdensome".

I'm all ears. I think the taxpayers of this county are owed an explanation as to why their tax dollars are being spent to fight their right to know.

I'm especially curious about the following three:

* Part of House Bill 3137, backed by Metro Counties, would allow governments to exempt outlines and drafts of statements and presentations of public officials.

Color me suspicious, but draft reports have been a key component of the Northwest Herald's investigative stories that have exposed the numerous shortcomings of the county's investigation into the McCullom Lake brain cancer cluster.

In 2007 I wrote an in-depth six-part investigative series on lawsuits – 33 as of today – alleging that air and groundwater contamination from the Rohm and Haas chemical plant in Ringwood caused a brain cancer cluster in and around McCullom Lake. Among the stories was a piece that debunked the "science" behind a 2006 study by the McHenry County Department of Health concluding that nothing was amiss.

Drafts of the health department's work, which I obtained through FOIA, were vital in helping prove the shoddy nature of the research. Besides debunking the epidemiology, the drafts helped prove that much of the department's early environmental analysis consisted of taking Rohm and Haas' work and slapping the "MCDH" logo on it. The drafts helped lead me to other documents the health department had long possessed, but decided that the public didn't need to know about, such as documents showing uncertainty about the accuracy of pollution maps, and documents showing that plant officials knew about the pollution a decade before reporting it.

Is the county's sponsorship of House Bill 3137 really about saving money? Hopefully the committee can share with us just how much it costs county staff each year to find and photocopy draft reports for FOIA requests.

* House Bill 1869, backed by Metro Counties, would allow governments to publish their meeting and taxation notices online rather than the local newspaper of record.

Undoubtedly it costs money to print public notices. But is this bill about saving taxpayers money, or trying to hit print media in the pocketbook to further strain resources and keep its prying eyes off of government?

Let's get an analysis of that cost from county officials. And then let's get an explanation, as I joked here, as to why it's supposedly easier and more convenient for us to bookmark and follow the websites of the dozen or so governments on our property tax bills than it is to pick up the newspaper.

While we're at it in this election year, an explanation is owed to the one American in three that don't use the Internet (according to a Department of Commerce report) as to why they're out of luck if they want to know when their governments meet or what they're meeting about. Ditto for the 60 percent of senior citizens who don't use the Internet, according to a 2011 Pew Research Center report. As a reminder to all 24 County Board members, 118 state representatives and 59 state senators up for election this year, seniors love to vote.

* Along a similar vein, Metro Counties and other groups are backing House Bill 1715, which would allow governments to deny FOIA requests if the information the requesters seek is online.

Undoubtedly, that measure if approved would save governments some money. Let's see a figure for how much, which like the cost of providing draft reports we can then compare to the $47 million reserve, how much in raises that the County Board plans to hand out to its staff next year, etc.

Again, the county owes an explanation to constituents without Internet access as to why their FOIAs don't matter.

***

The McCullom Lake issue is one of many that prove FOIA's power, and maybe why many governments appear to be working to curtail it.

Was there a logical reason why the health department, in one of its earlier drafts I obtained of its epidemiology report, took an unprofessional crack at "big-city lawyers promising residents millions of dollars" having the audacity to "raise the hopes of residents"?  Such a statement has absolutely no place in a legitimate scientific study. It speaks volumes.

A rational person could read that passage and my stories - which to this day neither the health department nor county government have credibly challenged - and question the health department's and county government's motives. Was their work a genuine attempt to address a public health emergency, or a political mission aimed at spending your taxpayer money to come to the rescue of a multi-billion-dollar chemical company that, with a string of court victories, clearly doesn't need to be rescued?

I argue that the same rational person could  look at the legislation that local governments are pushing to fight open-government laws and question whether this has anything at all to do with saving money or staff time.

I have to show my work when I write an investigative or enterprise piece. So I hope that the legislative committee isn't blowing smoke and will offer solid evidence as to why it's backing all of these bills aimed at our right to know.

And come to think of it, I think our municipal, school and township governments owe us explanations as to why they're also pushing the changes through the Illinois Municipal League, the Illinois Association of School Boards and Township Officials of Illinois.

Senior Writer Kevin Craver can be reached at kcraver@shawmedia.com.

Some McHenry County Board members had a few choice words Tuesday for state Rep. Jack Franks and bills he has filed aimed at the structure of county government.

Franks, D-Marengo, filed bills last month aimed at requiring counties with more than 300,000 people (read: McHenry County) to allow voters to directly elect the board chairman, and to allow voters to have the power of cumulative voting (meaning you can assign more than one of your four votes this year for your County Board representatives to any given candidate).

Although the county is still formulating an official response to Franks' offer to pull the bills in exchange for two binding referendums for direct chairman election and a 17-member board, a number of members during closing comments at their meeting formulated their own unofficial response: Mind your own business.

"He was elected to straighten out the mess in Springfield," a visibly angry Peter Merkel, R-McHenry, said.

Merkel called the bills politically-motivated hit jobs aimed at Koehler – a sentiment Koehler wholeheartedly shares but did not air Tuesday – and said he cannot remember ever seeing Franks at a County Board meeting to talk things over or address concerns. Merkel also mentioned other Franks initiatives in the same vein, such as efforts to remove Jack Schaffer as the county's representative to the Metra Board of Directors in the wake of the Phil Pagano scandal.

The reason Franks does such things, Merkel said, is to get his name in the paper – Merkel said the words "the paper", "headlines" and "front page" about half a dozen times before I stopped counting.

"It's time somebody called him out on this. If he has a problem, come talk to us," Merkel said.

Ersel Schuster, R-Woodstock, was one of several board members who said they were glad that Merkel spoke up. She said the Franks letter offering to pull back his bills in exchange for referenda "sent her over the top."

"I felt as though there was a little bit of blackmail there," Schuster said.

Mary Donner, R-Crystal Lake, chimed in to oppose another Franks bill that would make the county a "pilot program" for his unsuccessful effort to forbid governments under the tax cap from collecting property tax increases when their total assessed value decreases from the previous year.

"He targets McHenry County all the time," Donner said.

But others told Koehler they want to have a Committee of the Whole meeting to discuss the possibility of a referendum regarding the chairman's election. Chief among them was Randy Donley, R-Union, who has advocated for the past couple of years doing so. He stressed to members that his beliefs are nothing personal regarding Koehler.

"We have 300,000 people, but 13 [board members] elect the chairman?" Donley asked, referring to the majority vote of the 24-member board.

Koehler, who has been chairman since 2004 and has been re-elected elected by the board three times since, said he would schedule such a discussion, provided Franks' bill passes legal muster. Koehler said the state's attorney's office is reviewing the law to determine if what Franks is requesting is in tune with state statutes.

"There are some issues of law that Mr. Franks is not taking into consideration," Koehler said.

State law gave the County Board a window last year following post-census redistricting to change its makeup and the election of the chairman without having to go to referendum. Both were discussed in the Legislative and Intergovernmental Affairs Committee in charge of redistricting, but rejected.

Following that discussion, County Board members in May approved guidelines for the committee's redistricting process on a 16-4 vote, that kept the current structure as is. County boards in McHenry and Lake counties elect their chairmen – the public elects them in Cook County and the remaining collar counties (Will County has an executive).

From what I'm hearing, the reply being formulated to Franks' last letter is contingent upon what the state's attorney's office concludes.

What will it say? Stay tuned.

(NOTE: This post was corrected from an earlier version that did not state that the Lake County Board elects its chairman.)

Senior Writer Kevin Craver can be reached at kcraver@shawmedia.com.