Governor paying staff out of own pocket almost seems like a bribe

We have a new governor, and several high-ranking members of J.B. Pritzker’s staff will wind up being paid significantly more money than their predecessors did.

PRITZKER: New governor offers to pay double

One of the benefits of having a governor who has significant financial wealth.

IT SEEMS HE wants to pay some 20 of his staffers about double the amounts of money that the state payroll calls for.

It means that the staffers will receive their state salary – along with another check from East Jackson Street LLC. Which is a private company that is amongst Pritzker’s business interests and one that Pritzker supposedly controls completely.

All of which creates questions about ethical and moral issues – is it proper for an outside entity to be paying government employees anything? Even if it would seem it’s the newly-inaugurated governor himself who is coughing up the cash for the extra salary payments!

I can’t help but question it because one of the basic principles of government employment is that one is doing such work out of a sense of public service. And also to gain significant experience.

SERIOUSLY, WITH THE exception of Michael Madigan himself, nobody is meant to hang around the Illinois state payroll for a significant length of time.

Those people are gaining a certain level of experience and making contacts so that eventually, they will be able to gain significant compensation within the private sector.

This almost seems like Pritzker wants to buy a certain level of experience that the state payroll usually wouldn’t be capable of accommodating. Either that, or he’s expecting to buy a certain level of loyalty toward himself – rather than to the entity of Illinois State Government that is supposed to be the focus of such a job. 

Govt. attitudes changed since old days

There’s a reason that government employment is often semi-jokingly described as “the people’s business.” Government staffers are supposed to be doing their work  for the betterment of the public at-large.

UNLESS YOU’RE OF the mentality that thinks the Age of Trump our federal government now operates under is somehow proper. Then, you think the public at-large is a batch of chumps because they’d rely on government to fulfill certain responsibilities toward them.

So are we creating an ethical mess in which certain government employees – not all, I should say – will have the appearance of gaining financial bonuses?

Would it be little better than some private company with special interests on select issues suddenly offering up salary supplements to ensure that the actual government staffers act on their behalf – rather than that of the public.

Actually, if you describe the extra salary in such a manner, it almost sounds more like a bribe. Does Pritzker literally have to offer “pay offs” to get his people (who are supposed to be extra loyal to him) in order to get them to work?

NO MATTER HOW one chooses to think of it, such salary supplements sound kind of fishy. Also problematic because they wouldn’t be lasting. Are we literally going to have a fluctuating government payroll – based off who is in charge?

TRUMP: He'd love to buy cooperative govt.

Are voters going to have to contemplate who can afford to pay their workers the best when they decide whom to cast a ballot for? With the idea being that anybody who can’t afford to toss in some extra money for salary is too much of a chump to run for public office?

I’m sure that now-former Gov. Bruce Rauner wishes he had been able to buy a more supplicant staff to work during his four years as governor, Then again, what he really wanted was a more supplicant Legislature – which is something the voters never gave him.

So what should we think of the Pritzker years; will they turn into an era in which the governor has to use his wealth to buy his political influence? Or will it turn out to be a period in which the usual factors that split Democrats into different factions wind up making our state government as ornery as they always have been?

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Is Lisa Madigan on right track toward getting state to a balanced budget?

I’ll make one bold declarative statement before admitting I don’t have a clue how the situation concerning Illinois state government and its lack of a balanced budget is going to be resolved.
 

MADIGAN: Fighting for state budget

That statement is to say that Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan has the spirit of Illinois law clearly on her side when she and her staff of attorneys argue that Illinois government employees ought not to get paid until the budget mess is brought to an end.

THAT DOESN’T MEAN I believe her legal actions filed last week in the courts are going to be successful. Because having the “spirit” of the law on one’s side is nice, but doesn’t necessarily mean squat.

It could turn out there’s a technical legal interpretation that will be concocted by attorneys somewhere who are able to convince a judge of its merits. The fact that state law intended for the lack of a balanced budget in place to prevent government from operating might wind up meaning less than the 49 percent of the electorate that gave Hillary Clinton a plurality for the presidency.

She still lost! And it’s possible the courts will not think much of the Madigan move that asks the courts to issue an order preventing the Illinois comptroller’s office from meeting state payrolls come March 1.

Some think that Madigan’s real intention is to put pressure on the General Assembly (including the Illinois House of Representatives led by her father, Illinois House speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago) and Gov. Bruce Rauner to put together a budget.

AS IN HER legal request would become a moot point IF legislators and the governor can put aside their partisan political differences and approve something before Feb. 28.

 

Will Rauner, Madigan be able to resolve budget,...

Of course, they have been unable to do anything ever since Rauner became governor in January 2015. They did have that tentative spending plan in effect for the second half of 2016, but that expired when the balloons came tumbling down at New Year’s Eve parties all over the state.

Right now, we’re back in the same situation where state tax dollars are being collected and money exists, but it cannot legally be spent because of the lack of a specific plan detailing how it is to be spent.

Which is not an irresponsible idea at all. We ought to be able to see exactly how our tax dollars are going to be used. Would you really want any government officials to be able to spend the public’s money based on their own whims?

... thereby making speaker's daughter moot?

THE ONLY THING that has kept state government going since July 2015 is that some government programs operate under federal court orders that prevent state budgetary requirements from being literally applied to them.

There also was the previous legal exchange in which a Cook County judge issued an order saying the state payroll could not be met, but then a judge in St. Clair County (on the Mississippi River near St. Louis) ruled it had to be met. Although the Illinois Supreme Court came up with a ruling later that poked away at the St. Clair action.

The logic of meeting the state payroll without a budget is that the state, after all, has contracts with its employees’ unions. In fact, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees is opposing Madigan’s current legal maneuver. They want state workers to keep getting paid – regardless of the top-ranking officials’ political ineptitude.

That ultimately is what a judge somewhere is going to have to decide – is the long-term fate of the state worth the hassle of the working stiffs getting their paychecks delayed? Which I’ll acknowledge would be a hassle to people who need that money they’ve earned in order to survive.

BUT THERE ARE other people suffering because the government programs upon which their livelihoods depend are being delayed. There are public schools across the state whose aid payments don’t come close to arriving on time. Just listen to your local school officials when they start talking bluntly about what they think of Illinois state government!

Perhaps the reality of being a government employee is that, while there are many perks and benefits to such jobs, one of the drawbacks is that you can be caught in the crossfire whenever people like Rauner and Madigan (Michael, that is) decide to take each other on.

The one plus is that having all these people angered over their incomes being tampered with probably is the only way that Rauner, Madigan and the other legislators will be motivated to give our state a balanced budget proposal.

Which, in the end, is the long-term solution to resolving the financial issues that make Illinois government a particularly laughable entity for government geeks to consider.

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A little late on payment delays, but is it better than never for Illinois?

Illinois Comptroller Leslie Munger made what I’m sure she wants us to believe is a radical decision, one that shows great political courage on her part.

Because we’re about to finish month 10 without a balanced budget in place for Illinois, she’s going to delay payroll for state legislators and constitutional officers – including herself. After all, if other bills are not being paid, why should the legislators get paid?

IT’S A SOUND theory, and one that will offend the legislators who will claim they did their work. They were the ones who sued when former Gov. Pat Quinn tried to delay their paychecks, and they won – although the state Supreme Court recently ruled that the lower courts were probably wrong in favoring the legislators in that case.

But anyway, we now have the prospect of the General Assembly members not receiving their legislative salaries – all to make some sort of point about the current financial situation where the unpaid bills are now in the billions of dollars.

I’d be willing to respect Munger for doing this, except that I think she’s ridiculously late. And it is her delay in taking such action that has caused the total of unpaid bills by state government to climb so high!

If anything, I wonder if she’s really trying to pressure legislators into breaking with Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, and siding instead with Gov. Bruce Rauner?

I THINK WE’RE beyond the point where anyone is going to change their stance Although if there had been a cut-off of pay back last year when this situation was just beginning, perhaps the threat of a lack of income would have been enough to scare political people into a serious compromise mode.

By now, political people are too hard-headed. It would probably take more than this to shift support from one side to the other.

Although it did come off as greedy all those years ago when the legislators defied Pat Quinn when he threatened payment of their salaries. But it comes off equally greedy now to cut them off for partisan reasons.

Besides, the simple fact is that the payroll for our General Assembly is just over $1 million per month. Something like $14 million for the year.

WHEN YOU CONSIDER that unpaid bills are at $7.8 billion and growing, the Legislature’s payments are nowhere near enough to close the gap.

This really is a move meant to irritate the Legislature with its solid Democratic Party majority that gives Republican Rauner no chance to prevail on his desires to impose several measures meant to undermine the influence of organized labor over state government.

Or perhaps it should be described as his desire to bolster the influence that big business and corporate America has over this state.

I’ll be the first to admit that Madigan is more than capable of being a hard-head whose primary concern is to ensure that his political authority over the Illinois House of Representatives is not challenged. It wouldn’t surprise me if on some level, he’d be willing to consider some of the suggestions that Rauner has made.

IF ONLY THE governor had asked a little more respectfully, perhaps? Or if this issue hadn’t started out as the need to undermine the current ways of doing things, just to benefit big business?

This budgetary situation is literally going to have to be resolved by the two of them. I don’t think it’s possible to drag the individual legislators in. They’re going to follow orders (whether Democrat or Republican) to the very end.

So as for Munger, who a year ago resisted the idea of delaying the payments of state employees of any kind because of the lack of a budget, she may think she’s being noble by now threatening to hold the legislative payroll to the letter of the law.

But it really comes across as, “Too little, too late!”

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