Bailout won't stop leak of tax dollars

Bailout won't stop leak of tax dollars
By CAROL MARIN cmarin@suntimes.com
Copyright byu The Chicago Sun Times
June 3, 2007

One of the most disturbing aspects of the Democratic debacle playing out in Springfield is the willingness, even now, to throw taxpayer cash into a money pit. How else can you account for House Speaker Michael Madigan's willingness to reward the so far abysmal performance of Cook County Board President Todd Stroger by handing him $100 million to bail out a still bloated, patronage packed, bureaucratically top heavy Bureau of Health?

Even Illinois' congressional Democrats who supported Stroger's November election bid refused last month to be embarrassed further. When Stroger came asking for federal cash, faithful Democrats Sen. Dick Durbin and U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky reportedly took Stroger to the woodshed, telling him behind closed doors to clean up his act.

But Stroger, who continues to pad his payroll with six-figure-salaried friends and associates while firing doctors and nurses, appealed to Madigan, whose 13th Ward has its own patronage army inside the county. The speaker's bailout plan passed, only to hit a parliamentary snag that keeps it open for debate.

"Unconscionable" is what Rep. Rosemary Mulligan (R-Des Plaines) called it last week on the House floor. "The lines are long. They're not paying doctors. How can you justify giving them $100 million that is a grant? I do not understand that," Mulligan said. "They've gone out to lab services that are a friend of the current County Board president. They've ceased to do mammograms. There are 4,000 mammograms sitting there unread from the most vulnerable people. And you're giving $100 million to a most corrupt system?"

There is absolutely no doubt the county hospital has a crying need for money and help. But not until Team Stroger and the supremely powerful speaker show us that money won't go down the same political payroller drain.

$$$$$$Springfield summer camp
A man walks in to his employer and says, hey boss, remember that job you hired us to do? We couldn't get it done. I don't like Tom, and Dick really hates Harry, and Harry can't stand me. So even though we've been at it for a couple of months, it's going to take us a few more weeks of work and you have to pay extra for it.

And oh, by the way, we need a 10 percent pay raise.

Welcome to the silly, goofy, costly world of the Illinois Legislature.

How costly you ask? You mean, on top of lawmakers' part-time salaries of $57,000 to $80,000?

Try about $1.6 million just for the regular session.

Each member of the Legislature is given a $125 per diem when the governor declares a special session, as is likely. On a day when the full House is in session, that's $14,750. For the Senate the bill is $7,375 a day.

Plus, each lawmaker gets reimbursed at 48.5 cents a mile. Members of the House get a combined $19,907 a week. In the Senate, it's $9,811.

According to the calendar on the Illinois General Assembly Web site, starting back in January, the House has been in session 52 days and the Senate 56 days over the course of 15 weeks.

Now we're paying to send them off to Springfield Summer Camp.

Small victory
Congratulations to state Rep. Ruth Munson (R-Elgin), state Majority Leader Debbie Halvorson (D-Crete) and their co-sponsoring colleagues for caring about a large group of mostly elderly people who have been begging for two years for a break.

Some 200,000 people, many of them retirees, live in manufactured home communities, often referred to as mobile home parks. They have very few tenant rights. In recent years, big companies, including billionaire mega-landlord Sam Zell, have bought up a lot of those places, jacked up the rents on the plots of land on which those homes sit, and virtually forced folks to abandon their houses because they couldn't pay the rent for the ground beneath them.

Finally, despite furious lobbying by real estate interests and the corporations themselves, a tiny bill has made its way out of the Senate and the House that would provide a few consumer protections, like giving tenants a written lease and 90 days' notice of a rent increase. It awaits the governor's signature.

It took hard work and bipartisanship.

And, dare I say it, women?