This was supposed to have been the year of ethics in state government.
The General Assembly this spring enacted sweeping reforms requiring lobbyists to disclose more about what they do and whom they do it to.
And a legislative committee proposed several ways to clean up the way the state buys goods and services from oft-times politically connected vendors.
But is Illinois ready for reform? Apparently not yet.
In recent days, there has been a mad rush to new acts of ethical impropriety beneath the Capitol dome before lobbyists face the Jan. 1 implementation of the new disclosure rules.
Last month, the low point was provided by Al Ronan, who has parlayed 14 successful years in the House as a Democratic power broker, fundraiser and influence peddler into a flourishing lobbying career.
Ronan, whose clients include the Empress River Casino in Joliet, called a number of his former colleagues out of the House chamber to pass out envelopes containing checks of $50 to $300.
In his defense, Ronan said his payment of campaign contributions to lawmakers while standing so close to their voting switches was no different than lawmakers using the third-floor rail of the Capitol rotunda to hawk tickets for fundraisers.
A week earlier, questions were raised about Gerald Shea, who has turned his talents as the late Mayor Richard J. Daley’s House floor leader in the 1960s and ’70s into a highly successful lobbying career.
Shea stepped down as the executive director of a legislative task force assembling a strategy for the next phase of governmental high-tech computers after the issue of impropriety was raised.
State records showed that Shea had become an official of a computer firm doing business with the state shortly before legislators created the task force-at his behest.
Shea never told task force members of his connection to the firm.
Still, there was nothing illegal about those two incidents.
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Indeed, Ronan’s first response was: “What’s the big deal?” And Shea, according to some task force colleagues, said he was merely trying to help create “good government” by running the task force.
But is it any wonder why Illinois has been referred to as the “Wild wild West of ethics?”
“On an ethical front, it’s almost a lawless society,” said Tracy Litsey, executive director of Illinois Common Cause, a political watchdog group.
“These examples just show that we’ve operated without ethical rules for so long that people have lost any sense of propriety and ethical responsibility and accountability,” she said.
The passage of the lobbyist disclosure rules earlier this year marked the first time in a decade that lawmakers took it upon themselves to approve a major piece of ethics reform. But it was the only bill to survive out of more than 80 ethics-related measures introduced in the spring session.
Litsey believes that Illinois residents have become desensitized to the political goings-on.
Much of what goes on in Illinois that is casually brushed aside “would cause a major revolution in other states,” she said.
At the same time, it is incidents like these that help fuel the throw-the-bums out mentality that drives movements like term limits for politicians.
Ronan’s less than discreet faux pas has gotten the attention of Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan of Chicago, one of the state’s more accomplished fundraisers. Madigan has said he believes either a new law or new House rule is needed to separate campaign contributions from the legislative process.
Several legislators moved quickly to file measures to prohibit the delivery of contributions to lawmakers on state property, as is the case with congressional campaign donations on federal property.
But even advocates admit that such a prohibition would only be a small cosmetic change.