>> PEEPER BACK TO WORK FOR STATE

If you take a peek inside the Illinois Department of Transportation’s (IDOT) offices in Schaumburg these days, you might see James Stumpner, 48.

Paid nearly $104,000 a year, he’s the bureau chief of maintenance for the IDOT district based in the northwest suburbs. He had been on leave — or suspension — since March, when he was arrested for peeping into a woman’s Crystal Lake apartment. But now he’s back on the job — as of early July — a month after pleading guilty to one count of misdemeanor disorderly conduct. An IDOT spokesman explained: “The incident took place outside of working hours, outside of state property.”

What’s more, Stumpner served a suspension and “is a vital component to the Bureau of Maintenance in the Chicagoland region. Some of his responsibilities include the direct oversight of the maintenance, operations of snow removal, bridge work, beautification projects.”

Stumpner declined to comment, and his attorney insisted he was not a serial peeper, and was wrongly portrayed as such in early accounts.

Either way, he was sentenced to supervision, fined $500 plus court costs, and ordered to perform 30 hours of community service and complete counseling, according to Demetri Tsilimigras, deputy chief of the McHenry County state’s attorney’s office criminal division. Stumpner also was given a 30-day jail term, but he won’t have to serve it if he keeps his nose clean, Tsilimigras said.

In the meantime, he’s back to making sure our state roads are clean.

>> GOVERNMENT 101

You’d think a public agency with offices smack dab across the street from the BGA’s headquarters would take greater care in following the rules.

A sleek black 2010 Chevy Tahoe hybrid used by the City Colleges of Chicago — which includes seven taxpayer-supported schools — was parked in a tow zone in front of the agency’s headquarters on the 200 block of West Jackson Boulevard on and off for weeks this summer, even after a BGA reporter called to inquire about it. Other vehicles owned by the public college system also park there on occasion.

While it’s certainly not the worst thing City Colleges has ever done — anyone remember the huge financial losses suffered in the mid-1990s when the system invested in risky derivatives? — it’s also not the message regular joes like: that M-plated government vehicles don’t have to follow the rules. Which leads us to a request:

>> GIVE US A JINGLE

If you spot government workers slacking, or breaking the rules, please let us know. If you catch it on camera, even better. Send tips to rherguth@bettergov.org or prehkamp@bettergov.org.

>> WHAT A LOAD

Of course it’s not always public employees being naughty — sometimes they’re the victims. Just to see what we’d find, the BGA Investigative Team requested information on thefts from several local governmental agencies.

A lot of pretty basic stuff, it turned out, including leaf blowers swiped from Chicago’s Department of Streets and Sanitation. Among the more noticeable things stolen, though, was a $41,550 Caterpillar Skid Steer Loader from the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago (MWRDGC).

It was purchased a few years back, and within two months of delivery was gone, poof. The sanitary district submitted an insurance claim, but it was denied, officials said.The agency ended up buying another loader, and the thief never was caught.

>> BRINGING DOWN THE HAMMER

There’s a new book out from Ed Hammer, who investigated misconduct in the Illinois secretary of state’s office under George Ryan — or more to the point, tried to investigate misconduct, but often was thwarted.

>The book is called “One Hundred Percent Guilty,” and among many other stories, it recalls Hammer visiting Ryan at the ex-governor’s Kankakee home shortly before Ryan headed off to prison for corruption. Hammer asked for an apology for the injustices done to him and his co-workers while Ryan was their boss. Ryan refused.

“I don’t believe the man has a conscience,” Hammer said of the encounter.

Hammer retired from law enforcement in 2002. He sat as a witness in Ryan’s trial, and began working on the book around the same time. He plans to do more writing in his retirement, and has several fiction projects in the works. He also does contracting work with the Illinois Law Enforcement Training & Standards Board, and does some substitute teaching.

Despite all the public corruption he’s witnessed, Hammer still professes some faith in our system of government and its ability to hold public servants accountable. Why?

Hammer laughs.

“My personal experience was, all I heard from the time that Dean Bauer and Scott Fawell and George Ryan took over, . . . that you’re not going to be able to do anything [about corruption in the secretary of state’s office because] George Ryan . . . is the most powerful Republican leader in the state,” he said. “But [the feds] took down the house of cards. The system did work with George Ryan.”

It simply “took a while.”

>> STAY TUNED

Please keep visiting the BGA’s soon-to-be redesigned website, and this blog, because we have a number of investigations about to pop with various media partners.

The staggering level of corruption and waste underscores the importance of an organization such as ours.

These entries were reported and written by Robert Herguth, Pat Rehkamp, Joel Ebert and Sam Barnett. Contact us with tips, suggestions and complaints at , or at rherguth@bettergov.org.

By Andy Shaw, BGA President & CEO

Last month, the BGA and FOX Chicago exposed Chicago city officials spending your tax dollars on lavish meals, first-class seats and fancy hotels, and even red-light camera tickets. These investigations had results:

• 6/1: BGA Investigations Prompt Early Exits for Parks Chief
• 6/3: Emanuel Cuts Credit Card Use After BGA/FOX Investigation
• 6/14: Embattled CHA Chief Resigns After BGA/FOX Investigation

Today the city is making big changes to rein in city spending and credit card abuse. Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced he’s eliminating most of the 500 city credit cards and banning the use of petty cash altogether.

Here’s what the Sun-Times had to say this morning:

Mayor Rahm Emanuel is cutting from 500 to just 30 the number of credit cards used by local government agencies — and banning the use of petty cash altogether —after alleged abuses that ousted the chiefs of the CHA and Chicago Park District.

Government employees will also be expressly forbidden from spending taxpayers’ money on everything from alcohol, flowers, office decor and restaurant meals within a 50-mile radius of Chicago to sponsorships, charitable donations and parties celebrating holidays, birthdays and employee appreciation.

To guard against future abuses, only five credit cards will be issued to each of six agencies: the CTA, CHA, Park District, Chicago Public Schools, City Colleges and Public Building Commission. Their use will be confined to top executives, whose expenditures will be posted monthly to shine the light on credit-card spending.

Last month, a joint investigation by the Better Government Association and WFLD-TV uncovered alleged credit-card abuses at the CHA and the Park District.

The card issued to Chicago Housing Authority CEO Lewis Jordan had been used to pay for costly meals at Gibsons and other upscale restaurants.

The investigation also found CHA credit cards were used to buy thousands of dollars worth of flowers, cakes and holiday gifts for employees, a suite at the United Center and to pay red-light camera tickets.

Emanuel has made ethics reform a central theme of his new administration and pounced on the abuses. He called a halt to credit-card spending and ordered a sweeping audit of agency policies. Jordan subsequently resigned.

The investigation also hastened the departure of Park District Superintendent Tim Mitchell, a political operative for former Mayor Richard M. Daley who had been angling to stay under Emanuel.

Now, City Comptroller Amer Ahmad — with pro-bono help from Sidley Austin LLP and the Civic Consulting Alliance — has completed his review. It wasn’t pretty.

He found that the city’s loosey-goosey or non-existent policies governing credit cards, petty cash and employee reimbursement had opened the door to an array of abuses that circumvented city contracts that would have offered taxpayers a cheaper bulk price.

“Although all policies specifically stated that the card must be used exclusively for business purposes, questionable and/or inappropriate expenditures were identified, such as: extensive local meals/refreshments; entertainment; excessive professional development/executive coaching; parking/ red light tickets; car washes; sporting goods; flowers [and] cable bills,” said the report, obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times.

The city’s petty cash policy is supposed to limit accounts to $1,000 and individual expenditures to $1,000. Even so, there were “numerous reimbursements in the thousands of dollars and one as high as $34,000,” the report stated.

Sources said the $34,469 expenditure was for gasoline. That’s even though recurring fuel purchases are supposed to fall under the city’s competitively bid fuel contract.

City Hall will continue to steer clear of credit cards. The 30 cards issued to other government agencies will be confined to “emergency purchases.” They will be controlled by the agency’s chief financial officer and registered with the city comptroller. “If it is determined that an expenditure purchased with a procurement card is not for emergency purposes, the agency’s access to procurement cards will be revoked,” the policy states.

From now on, employees will be required to submit their non-travel expenses within 30 days and explain why the item was not purchased “through the normal purchase order/ procurement process.”

“The primary means of purchasing valid goods and services necessary for conducting City of Chicago business should be through a competitively bid procurement process,” Ahmad wrote in a memo to city department heads.

A five-night getaway to Puerto Vallarta can run about $650 a person—covering round-trip airfare and a room at a classy hotel in the Mexican resort town.

Steven Rosendahl’s tab ended up considerably higher when he visited there over Thanksgiving—and taxpayers covered part of the bill.

Rosendahl is the 57-year-old Lemont Township supervisor, an elected part-time post in the southwest suburbs that carries a $20,900-a-year salary—and use of the iPhone.

While away on vacation with his family, Rosendahl decided to check his work email on his smartphone, he recalled in a recent interview with the Better Government Association. But in the process he accidentally downloaded all of his emails, racking up huge data-transfer charges.

The resulting bill, which came due in January, totaled $1,760.81—with roughly $1,616 of that coming from the mistaken data dump in Mexico.

Rosendahl ended up expensing the entire tab, meaning taxpayers paid for it.

His logic: the mistake occurred while he was doing work, so work should pay for it. And they—well, we the public—did.

“I wasn’t happy about it,” Rosendahl said of the bill. “I tried to protest it [to AT&T] but they said there was nothing I could do. It didn’t give me any warning. I was just checking my email.”

Rosendahl, who has been supervisor for the past six years, said he threatened to cancel his service if the carrier wouldn’t help lower his bill. But he never got around to following through on the threat, he acknowledged.

Jim Chilsen, a spokesman for the watchdog Citizens Utility Board, said that, unfortunately, the story from Lemont Township isn’t that unusual, although his group doesn’t keep statistics on the scope of the problem.

“It’s easy to inadvertently rack up a huge bill,” Chilsen said. “You have to be very careful when you use your cell phone outside U.S. borders.”

He said telephone companies should be more sympathetic to such mistakes, instead of engaging in “this gotcha mentality.”

An AT&T spokeswoman said the company does not comment on individual phone bills.

For what it’s worth, Rosendahl’s phone cost $1,781.61 for all of 2010, according to records obtained by the BGA under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act.

Lemont Township Trustee Francis Wozniak, who is among those to approve spending within the organization, said he hadn’t heard about the bill—even though the board he sits on apparently signed off on it.

“I’m going to have to ask some questions and I got to find out what’s happening,” said Wozniak.

The township—which maintains some local roads, provides property tax assistance and offers social services for residents—paid for seven phones in 2010 costing a total of $12,036.62, records show.

Critics of the township form of government decry it as outdated and wasteful, and it’s a topic the BGA has taken an interest in this year and plans to keep writing about.

>> DRIVING COARSE AT CITY COLLEGES

Maybe City Colleges of Chicago should start offering drivers education courses…for its own employees.

Since 2008 the college system’s fleet of around 80 vehicles have wracked up about two dozen tickets.

The most common violation: running red lights — there were 16 citations for that.

The rest were an assortment of parking-type offenses. (One citation was for failing to have or properly display a city sticker, although it ultimately was dismissed. Two other tickets likewise were tossed, records show.)

At least 10 of the violations traced back to the system’s inspector general’s office.

So who coughed up cash for the tickets? We the taxpayers?

Perhaps in one instance, a City Colleges spokeswoman acknowledged.

But in most of the cases, the responsible employees had to pony up, she said.

>> QUID PRO…FORE?

In Illinois, the line between government and politics is routinely blurred.

Sometimes the blurring is obvious, like when city hiring is rigged to reward campaign workers — just ask Robert Sorich.

Sometimes it just seems stupid.

Until recently at the 19th Ward’s “online service office,” www.the19thward.com, you could, on the same landing page: “request a service,” and learn about Matt O’Shea’s Sept. 30 golf outing/political fund-raiser in Lemont, Ill.

Should we infer there’s a connection between donations and city services on the Far Southwest Side?

“Not at all,” says O’Shea, the 19th Ward Democratic committeeman running to replace the retiring Ginger Rugai in the City Council. “Anybody calls for a city service, we drop everything here and try to get it done as fast as possible.”

There have been a few complaints about the website, although O’Shea suggests a political rival might be the one stirring up the trouble. (Either way, the Chicago Board of Ethics is looking into this.)

O’Shea points out that no tax dollars are used to support the website — which, by the way, includes a downloadable sign that constituents can post in the entryways of their homes. It’s message: “No Soliciting!”

>>A CIVICS LESSON IN THE ‘BURBS?

Racial dynamics in politics certainly aren’t exclusive to the city of Chicago.

Consider a lawsuit heading toward trial in federal court that claims a now-former security official with Proviso Township high school district in the west suburbs was demoted because he’s white – and because he stopped providing political help to the school board president, who’s black.

This is the fifth lawsuit in the past eight years or so alleging reverse discrimination, political shenanigans or both at Proviso, records show.

School board president Chris Welch called the suits “baseless,” and said the district is taking “a stand” on this latest one (filed in 2008, with a trial date likely to be scheduled in a few weeks.)

Among other things, the former security official, Michael Klean, claims that he was pressured to sell political fundraising tickets to keep his job.

This all presumably will be sorted out at trial, unless it’s settled beforehand.

Either way, Proviso East and West students looking for a real-life civics lesson might want to follow this case.

This blog entry was reported and written by Robert Herguth, Pat Rehkamp and Joel Ebert. Contact us with tips, suggestions and complaints at , or at rherguth@bettergov.org.

Taxpayers are left holding the bag as Lansing leaders give pay hikes to cops and firefighters as they retire – prompting pensions to soar. Read more…>

By Andy Shaw, BGA President & CEO

She is somebody somebody sent.

In the best—or maybe it’s the worst—tradition of local politics. And she was pressured into voting for a multi-billion dollar hike in the state income tax in the wee hours of Wednesday morning. By her Democratic Party allies in Springfield.

Some of her friends and neighbors may be unhappy with the tax vote but she won’t be facing any political consequences or voter backlash. And here’s why: She stepped down as an Illinois State Representative at noon on Wednesday. After one week on the job. That’s right—one week. She was, in simple terms, the lamest lame duck in a feckless Springfield flock. A billion-dollar baby.

“She” is Kathy Moore, a Lincoln Park friend and former public school teacher who was put in that unenviable position by the stark reality of political hide-and-seek. Or, in this case, seek-and-hide. Her reliably Democratic 11th District, which includes Lincoln Park and Lakeview, elected a brand new state representative, Ann Williams, in November, to replace John Fritchey, a popular long-time rep who won election to a seat on the Cook County Board. Fritchey began his new job in December, so Williams could have been sworn in as a state rep a month ago to represent the district in the lame-duck session going on in Springfield this past week. That was her initial plan.

But there were questions about how she would vote if a tax plan was on the lame-duck agenda. Williams claims that local Democratic leaders, including Fritchey and Senate President John Cullerton, wanted her commitment to support the tax hike before arranging for her to be sworn in. They say she got cold feet and decided not to start early—choosing instead to wait until Wednesday, when the rest of the freshman legislative class was sworn in.

(That, parenthetically, will save the taxpayers a few bucks because Williams won’t qualify for a more generous legislative pension than the one awaiting the new class in Springfield, thanks to a modest pension reform bill that took effect on Jan. 1. But her decision will cost the 11th District politically because, instead of moving to the top of the seniority list of new legislators by starting in December, she will be near the bottom since she’s entering with all of the other newbies, and her last name begins with “W,” a letter near the end of the alphabet. Oh well.)

Meanwhile, back at the raunch—yes, I said raunch and not ranch—Williams’s decision not to be seated early meant the political bosses in the district—Fritchey, Cullerton and the other ward committeemen—had to find someone else to fill the seat for the one-week lame-duck session. So they recruited Kathy Moore, the wife of Tom Moore, a well-known Lincoln Park zoning lawyer—because Kathy had the time and the willingness to “serve.” And down I-55 she went. Admitting sheepishly at a party last week that “they tell me what (voting) button to push and I push it.” Democracy in action.

So when the tax bill passed, without a single vote to spare, our lawmaker-for-a-week was a major reason. She says she’s not happy about voting for a gargantuan tax increase but she doesn’t think that she, or the state, had any other choice. Even though, as of Sunday, she hadn’t seen a bill. Or a press release. Or a fact sheet. Or a list of cuts, accountability measures and streamlining to go along with the increase.

“I hope it works,” she said wistfully in a text message on Wednesday morning. Williams says, for the record, that she would’ve had a hard time supporting the tax bill in its present form.

In any event, Kathy Moore was back home in Chicago by Wednesday night after morphing into a regular resident following her week as a political pumpkin. Kind of like “Cinderella” in reverse. And she may not be the life of the cocktail parties in the neighborhood for awhile, at least among the well-healed wine-and-cheese folks who will have several-thousand fewer dollars in their pockets for each of the next four years.

As for Ann Williams, the newly elected House member, she assumed her duties as the new representative of the 11th district at noon on Wednesday. And my spies at her Springfield welcoming parties report there was no evidence of any dust, dirt or snow from the rock she’s been hiding under.

Don’t you just love the Illinois Way? And can’t you see why we love being civic watchdogs?

A relatively small but innovative grant program designed to help Chicago police officers, firefighters and paramedics buy homes in lower-income neighborhoods was among Mayor Daley’s 2011 budget cuts.

Launched in 1995, the Public Safety Officer Homeownership Incentive Program made meeting residency rules—city employees must live within Chicago proper—more manageable.

Over the last two years, 51 Chicago Police Department employees and five Chicago Fire Department employees tapped into the program, receiving grants between $3,000 and $7,500. In total, the program offered $172,500 in assistance since January 2009.

The neighborhoods ranged from Austin to Rogers Park to Pullman. (Even a sliver of Lakeview qualified.)

But now, the program is gone.

“This is one of the many cuts that were made in putting together the 2011 budget,” Pete Scales, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Finance, said. “We cut [$97 million] in expenditures.”

Chicago’s home-buying cops and firefighters can still apply for a similar program, offered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

When Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel holds a news conference, Gene Mc Neil is the city employee who makes sure the sound system runs smoothly.

But the veteran city employee was a little too smooth with the ladies, police reports indicate.

Mc Neil was arrested twice since 2005 for allegedly soliciting undercover cops who were posing as prostitutes. One of those arrests came while he was on the clock for taxpayers, he acknowledged.

Mc Neil, 55, was not convicted in either case; the arresting officers didn’t show up for some reason, so the cases were thrown out, court records show.

Reached just before a mayoral news conference a few weeks ago, Mc Neil said the arrests were misunderstandings. He said he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In 2005, Mc Neil was arrested for allegedly soliciting oral sex for $10, court records show. In 2007 he allegedly offered $25 for sex, records show. In the second instance, Mc Neil relayed to us that he was on the clock and en route to buy a newspaper when a woman approached him on the street and starting walking with him.

Referring to the Chicago Police Department, he said, “I understand they’re trying to get their numbers up. . . . I didn’t make any overtures.”

Whatever the truth, it’s interesting to consider Mc Neil’s proximity to a politician known for such a carefully crafted image.

When asked about Mc Neil, an Emanuel press aide said this was the first she heard of his troubles. But within an hour, word came down that Mc Neil was being transferred to other duties, at least for the time being.

Mc Neil, who’s been on the government payroll for 25 years and worked for Richard M. Daley as well, has a salary of about $84,000 a year.

He’s a man of the Good Book who may not be particularly good with the books.

Some weeks back, the Better Government Association wrote about the Rev. Tyrone Crider, who sits on the board of the Regional Transportation Authority, a public agency that regulates Metra, Pace and the CTA. On the side, Crider is the publisher of a monthlyreligion-oriented newspaper called The Gospel Tribune, which, the BGA discovered, has accepted tens of thousands of dollars in advertisements from the very transit agencies Crider helps oversee.

Seems like a pretty clear conflict of interest.

Now we’ve learned Crider’s newspaper corporation wasn’t even in good standing with the state at the time he was accepting some of those fees.

Even as the newspaper kept publishing, the corporate entity was involuntarily dissolved earlier this year, apparently because Crider failed to “file an annual report and pay an annual franchise tax” with the Illinois secretary of state’s office, documents indicate.

Crider recently tapped an attorney to help him sort through the paperwork and requirements.

Someone who knows Crider portrayed him as well meaning, but not really “a business expert.”

Which raises this question: If Crider can’t handle his own business affairs, is he qualified to sit on a board that is responsible for hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars?

Crider emailed us a statement indicating he’s in the hospital for heart surgery, so he’s focusing on his health right now. But, he wrote: “We have just completed an election where candidates exposed each [others’] flaws, mistakes and errors. I, too, am not perfect. If and when it is determined that I made any mistakes or errors in completing my economic disclosure forms, filings for corporate governance [or] any other business or personal matter, I will immediately begin the process to correct such matters.”

This blog entry was reported and written by Robert Herguth. Contact us with tips, suggestions and complaints at , or at rherguth@bettergov.org.

So a minister, a developer and a registered sex offender walk into a polling place…

Sounds like the start of a joke, but this being Chicago, and election season, it’s not far off from the truth.If you’ve been following the news, you know that questions are swirling around a homeless man—identified in the papers as a convicted sex offender named Arthur Hardy Jr.—who reportedly circulated nominating petitions to help a minister (the Rev. James Meeks) and an industrial developer (Robert Halpin) get on the ballot for Chicago mayor.Among the questions:

• Were voter signatures forged on the petitions?
• Did Hardy really circulate all those petitions himself?
• Was the notary public stamp a fake?
• How did Hardy end up in the employ of two supposedly rival campaigns?

Hopefully definitive answers will be forthcoming, although Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown has been doing a good job at chipping away at the mystery. Brown also answered a question many folks likely have: Is it even legal to pay folks to circulate nominating petitions?Yup, “and a lot of candidates do it,” wrote Brown.It’s also legal to hire felons to do the signature gathering. Illinois law “only requires that petition circulators be 18 and a U.S. citizen,” according to the Chicago Tribune. For more on this, Steve Edwards at WBEZ put together a nice primer on Chicago mayoral nominating petitions. Also helping to sort this all out will be the cops. State police now are looking into allegations of hanky panky with petitions.Anyway, the Better Government Association got a hold of nominating petitions for all of the mayoral candidates, and we put them online as a public service. For many would-be voters, what we’re releasing here might not seem terribly exciting. But we’re making the petitions available regardless, in the interest of promoting transparency and access to information that’s not easy for most folks to get at. Consider this a beginning; as the election forges ahead, we’ll be adding more resources.

NOTE: M. Tricia Lee’s documents weren’t available in electronic format, according to the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners. However, they can be inspected at the board’s offices at 69 W. Washington St. Also, Tyrone Carter filed a statement of candidacy, but no signed petitions. Please let us know if you see anything else strange in the documents.After all, we need a good punch line.This blog entry was reported and written by Robert Herguth, the BGA’s editor of investigations. Contact us with tips, suggestions and complaints at , or at rherguth@bettergov.org.