Aided by Gov. George Ryan, Illinois lawmakers have commandeered nearly $1.5 billion in just three years to bankroll a secretive, taxpayer-funded spending machine for pet projects that have benefited cronies, relatives, favored religious groups and private agencies the legislators help run.
With feeble oversight and few guidelines to rein them in, House and Senate members have passed out more than 7,500 pork-barrel grants over the period to virtually every ethnic, religious, political and racial voting bloc in the state.
A handful of grants are under investigation by state and federal officials. Many others raise questions about fairness, conflict of interest and separation of church and state.
In many cases, recipients have returned the favor by giving campaign cash to their legislative benefactors, sometimes within days of grants being awarded. Such contributions have come even from churches and other non-profit groups, which risk their tax-exempt status by making political donations.
Lost amid the orgy of check writing is any public discussion of the appropriate use of tax money. In a dramatic departure from past practice, lawmakers have voted themselves the power to pass out grants–sometimes totaling millions of dollars to a single group–without subjecting them to scrutiny by the public or their peers.
Legislators guard the perk so jealously they have refused to scale it back in the face of a mounting fiscal crisis that has forced cuts in health services for the poor and other state programs.
At a closed-door meeting last month, the normally poker-faced House Speaker Michael Madigan turned on Ryan in a fury when the governor suggested a freeze on some legislative pork spending as a remedy for social service cuts. “That’s my money,” Madigan snapped, according to several witnesses in the room. “You can’t touch it.”
But in a wide-ranging examination of what legislators refer to as “member initiatives,” the Tribune found that grants have financed everything from firetrucks to overseas field trips for the offspring of lawmakers.
Legislators have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a long-stalled project to build a museum honoring Italian-American sports figures, millions of dollars for a high school sports hall of fame Downstate, $10,000 for bocce ball courts, $30,000 to build a press box at a high school soccer field, and $75,000 for in-line skating equipment and a teen arcade at a suburban YMCA.
An additional $750,000 helped a South Side church avoid having to take out a mortgage, part of an $85,000 grant was used to teach West Side residents how to market wafers and communion cups at a church, and $25,000 paid for renovations and teacher salaries in a special-education program at a Jewish parochial school in Skokie.
One $10,000 grant for a McHenry County youth dance group was expended on “the purchase of 20 classical short tutus, 20 romantic long tutus and 3 muslin backdrops.” A $50,000 grant was earmarked for Oriental massage and herbal treatments for AIDS patients. A monument to the Irish potato famine got $10,000. The Chicago chapter of the Tuskegee Airmen received $50,000 in taxpayer funds, in part to improve their parade float.
House Minority Leader Lee Daniels (R-Elmhurst) funneled $4.6 million to a private school for the mentally and physically disabled that had cared for his daughter. House Speaker Michael Madigan (D-Chicago) earmarked a $750,000 grant for a group that escorts foreign dignitaries in Chicago. The attorney general’s office is investigating whether $200,000 of the money was redirected as a commission to a company run by a politically connected consultant.
Legislative leaders say the power to dispense grants at the discretion of lawmakers is an important tool to address needs in their districts.
“A legislator knows more about his district than any bureaucrat sitting down here [in Springfield] trying to decide what’s best for his district,” argued Senate Minority Leader Emil Jones (D-Chicago).
Indeed, most of the grants are indisputably worthy, though lawmakers often target money for programs and projects outside their districts. Money goes to buy ambulances, improve roads and assist homeless shelters and provide recreation for disadvantaged youths. At the same time, the state is replete with worthy causes, and time and again, the ones awarded legislative grants appear linked to people with political influence.
To be sure, pork-barrel spending is hardly an Illinois invention. Across the land, there is a grand tradition among politicians of using the public purse as a back-scratcher to please voters and get re-elected.
But Illinois took the practice to a new level after Ryan became governor in 1999. Until then, lawmakers usually had to get their pet projects listed in the state budget or at least tacked on to legislation as an amendment, giving the rest of the legislature–and the public–the opportunity to weigh in on the folly of any particular proposal before approval.
As a sweetener to win votes for his $12 billion Illinois FIRST infrastructure program, Ryan agreed to allow legislators to set aside a separate pot of money to be divvied up behind closed doors by Madigan, Daniels, Jones and Senate President James “Pate” Philip (R-Wood Dale).
The Four Tops, as the leaders are known in Springfield, then fill in the blanks on individual grants to satisfy both the whims of their members and the vagaries of political gamesmanship. Outsize shares of the money tend to go to incumbents with tough re-election battles, turning grants into de facto campaign contributions financed by taxpayers.
The amount made available to lawmakers that first year was $780 million, but it was reinforced by a $380 million installment the next year, and $300 million the year after that.
The total is more than three times what Jim Edgar, Ryan’s predecessor, authorized for discretionary grants by legislators in his last three years as governor.
Indeed, so much money has been injected into the pork pipeline that lawmakers have had trouble spending it all. About $500 million has yet to be released to fund grants, though that is likely to change as the November elections near.
Most of that unspent money comes from bond revenue and cannot be used to fill the gaping hole that has opened in the state budget amid the recession. But as much as $118 million of the money is in a form that could be tapped–more than enough to restore cuts in health-care service for the poor announced by Ryan in November as part of an austerity drive.
`Welfare for lawmakers’
Lawmakers have become accustomed to the grants and now view them as entitlements, observed Charles N. Wheeler III, a budget expert and professor of journalism at the University of Illinois at Springfield. “It’s like welfare for lawmakers,” Wheeler said.
Most of the grants fall under the aegis of the Department of Commerce and Community Affairs, which has been overwhelmed by the enormous mix of community-based social programs it is now charged with overseeing.
To manage the volume, the agency requires independent outside audits only of grants worth more than $100,000 to non-profit groups, although it does look at smaller grants on a less rigorous basis. It hired 17 new staffers to keep an eye on the explosion of grants, but they have averaged a caseload of at least 400 grants apiece.
Despite that burden, department officials say they are up to the task. Indeed, investigators say they have raised warning flags about some grants.
The Illinois attorney general is looking into how one charity spent $175,000 in job-training grants procured by several lawmakers for a former receptionist to Secretary of State Jesse White. State officials assert that Infinity Cultivation Center has no staff and no clients.
FBI agents have made inquiries about a $225,000 grant from Rep. Kurt Granberg (D-Carlyle) to a non-profit group that provides assistance to families of sexual assault victims. The money was used to buy a building in southern Illinois from a longtime Democratic county chairman. Granberg said he is “very confident” there has been no wrongdoing involving the grant and alleged the investigation was triggered by political enemies.
State regulators also are looking into what happened to a $37,000 grant from Rep. Wyvetter Younge (D-East St. Louis) to the village of Brooklyn that was supposed to go to repair two fire engines. One of the trucks was repossessed by a bank before any repairs could be made, but the money was spent anyway–though city officials are at a loss to say on what.
Officials also are investigating $90,000 in grants to Charisma, a non-profit organization in Chicago run by entrepreneur Leon Finney Jr., a former Chicago Housing Authority board member and longtime player in Democratic politics.
According to the Illinois attorney general’s office, Charisma has never filed required registration papers with regulators or disclosed how it spent the funds. Charisma is described in grant papers as a summer youth academy.
Finney has other problems with the state, which is garnishing his wages from Christ Apostolic Church, where he serves as president. Records show Finney owes about $41,000 for failing to pay sales taxes on a restaurant and catering business he once owned.
Finney was on vacation and could not be reached for comment.
The grants to Finney’s non-profit group were given by Rep. Lovana Jones (D-Chicago), who has collected $2,250 in recent years in campaign donations from an officer in Charisma who also is a member of Christ Apostolic’s board of directors.
Jones said campaign contributions had nothing to do with the grants. But she acknowledged two of her grandchildren have taken part in Charisma programs. “It’s a very popular program,” she said.
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The attorney general also is trying to recoup more than $200,000 of a $750,000 grant arranged by House Speaker Madigan for the International Visitors Center of Chicago. Officials said they believe backers of the center hired a firm run by Martin Walsh, former patronage chief for Cook County Sheriff Michael Sheahan, to help obtain the grant and promised to pay up to 30 percent as a commission. It is illegal in Illinois to collect commissions on funding gained by lobbying.
Massages, herbal treatments
In yet another inquiry, state investigators want to know why a North Side Chicago health organization went out of business less than eight months after receiving a $50,000 state grant.
Alternative Health Partners, which used acupuncture, massages and herbal treatment in the care of AIDS and cancer patients, closed after Uptown Bank seized all the cash in its accounts for failing to repay a bank loan, according to Richard Moran, president of the charity.
Grant sponsor Rep. Larry McKeon (D-Chicago) received $2,250 in campaign contributions from Michael Brickman, the former director of Alternative Health Partners. McKeon said there was no link between the contributions and the grant.
Both Moran and Brickman said they had not been contacted by state officials about returning the grant or any review.
Regulators also scrutinized a $200,000 grant to an African drum and dance ensemble in the Englewood neighborhood after raising questions about nepotism and double dipping. But commerce department officials said they recently determined that no state rules had been broken.
The grant, arranged by Rep. Monique Davis (D-Chicago), helped pay a salary of up to $20,000 to her son, Robert Davis, and a lesser stipend to two of her grandsons, said Nunulu Latham, artistic director for the SPIRITS ensemble, which teaches the art of African stilt dancing among other things.
In addition to his work for SPIRITS, Robert Davis works for the state’s Commission on Intergovernmental Cooperation. Another paid SPIRIT staff member is Oliver Gordon, who is a state tax collector.
State grants also have paid for trips to Gambia, Senegal, Cuba and Brazil for SPIRITS members and staff, including Rep. Davis’ son and grandsons, Latham said.
Rep. Davis defended the worthiness of her grant to SPIRITS, which she said keeps participants off drugs and teaches cultural experiences for “those little people who want to keep on the straight and narrow path.”
Davis said her son and other directors worked on SPIRITS for years without compensation before the grant money started flowing. “There’s nothing illegal or greedy,” she said.
Steve Brown, a spokesman for Madigan, acknowledged that some grants were under investigation but noted they represented a tiny fraction of the total value of legislative awards.
But James Nowlan, a former Republican lawmaker now working at a University of Illinois think tank, said it isn’t the amount that’s troubling, but the principle: Lawmakers shouldn’t be co-opting the prerogative of the executive branch to oversee spending.
“It isn’t the million dollars,” he said. “It’s what the million dollars say to the public because they simply extrapolate or expand that million dollars to mean it is just the tip of the iceberg.”
Even when no allegations of wrongdoing have been leveled, some awards raise questions of fairness.
In November, Ryan ordered the closure of the Illinois Center for Rehabilitation and Education on the city’s West Side as part of a package of budget-balancing austerity measures. The governor rescinded that decision last week, but not before mentally and physically handicapped residents of the facility endured weeks of anguish over their fate.
For two years before the crisis at the center, House Minority Leader Lee Daniels has directed grants totaling $4.6 million to the privately run Elim Christian School in Palos Heights for land acquisition and construction of residential facilities and a greenhouse. Elim provides services similar to the Illinois center’s to handicapped children and adults–and formerly counted Daniels’ daughter as a client.
Daniels is prominently featured on Elim’s Internet site, and an online donation pitch invites the viewer to “join Lee Daniels in supporting Elim.”
Daniels campaign fund, meanwhile, collected $11,000 from a pair of top Elim officials, development director Jack Strong and board president Heidi Huizenga. Records of the Illinois Board of Elections going back to 1994 indicate the pair had made no contributions to Daniels until about the time he authorized state assistance to Elim.
Daniels said his daughter, now 37, received services at Elim until she was 22. “There is nothing that I wouldn’t do to help faith-based organizations and the state tend to a mission of serving a developmental disability population,” Daniels said in explaining why he directed grants to Elim.
Daniels insisted there was no link between the grants and campaign gifts. He also said that giving tax money to facilities like Elim actually helped the state, which otherwise would have to care for patients now at private facilities.
Whatever the merits of Daniels’ argument, the appropriateness or fairness of the Elim grant was never aired in the General Assembly.
“In essence this stuff is done in secret,” said the University of Illinois’ Wheeler. “There’s absolutely no prioritization in terms of making sure statewide needs are met…. There’s no guarantee that those funds are spent on those projects that are most deserving in those areas that are most necessary on a statewide basis.”
Though legislators insist they are attuned to the needs of constituents, some agencies took no chances, hiring well-connected lobbyists to press the case for grants.
The law firm of Greenberg Traurig, which boasts former top aides to Ryan and Madigan on its roster, lists three lobbying clients–United Neighborhood Organization, Jobs for Youth and the SIDS Alliance–which collectively pulled down a hefty $2.1 million in grants.
Greenberg Traurig has donated more than $20,000 to state lawmakers and state political parties in recent years.
A spokeswoman for Jobs for Youth, a Chicago-based charity that helps find employment for needy children, said the group paid the lobbyists $9,000 last year. A spokesman for UNO said the law firm did pro bono work for it.
One of Greenberg Traurig’s lawyers is Brian Hynes, who also is a board member at the International Visitors Center, the project under investigation by the state attorney general.
Some agencies had built-in clout: a lawmaker on the board of directors.
State Sen. Dave Sullivan, for instance, sent a pair of grants totaling $75,000 to the Lattof YMCA in Des Plaines, where he is a member of the board.
The grants paid for in-line skating equipment and equipment for a “teen arcade/computer room.”
The Park Ridge Republican said spending tax money for skating equipment is appropriate because it helps young people. Sullivan also said he doesn’t like all the pork spending, but “you either help out your district or that money is spent elsewhere.”
While Y’s and other social service agencies are old hands at getting state grants, lawmakers greatly expanded giving to churches. Millions of dollars’ worth of pork grants have gone to groups with a clear religious affiliation, blurring the line between church and state.
Associated Talmud Torahs, a consortium of Jewish schools, received $25,000 courtesy of Sen. Ira Silverstein (D-Chicago), most of it to pay teachers for learning-disabled students. Silverstein said senators had no discussion about what kinds of religious-linked programs should be eligible for funding. “We didn’t have this [member initiative program] until a couple of years ago,” Silverstein said. “This is just something that came out of the blue.”
One of the more unusual projects funded by legislative grants involves Rev. Curtis Rodgers and his Chetwyn Rodgers Faith Memorial Church of God in Christ.
An affiliate of the West Side church has spent three grants totaling $85,000 authorized by Sen. Kimberly Lightford, Rep. Calvin Giles and former Rep. Coy Pugh, all Chicago Democrats.
In what likely is one of the more unusual projects that legislators have funded, Chetwyn used part of the grants to train people to develop a nationwide distributorship of communion cups and wafers.
The church buys the product–a sealed plastic chalice containing juice and bread–from a wholesaler, marks up the price, then sells it to other churches. “We train people how to distribute, how to do storage,” said church secretary Daphine Rodgers. “We have sought to get another [grant], but we haven’t heard.”
The commerce department has the grants under review because of bookkeeping problems. Curtis Rodgers said he was told by the agency that he needed to turn in his final report.
Another encroachment on the traditional church-state divide is visible in the campaign reports of several lawmakers who helped out religious institutions with public money.
Sen. Margaret Smith (D-Chicago) steered a $750,000 grant in August 1999 to St. Paul Community Development Ministries, an offshoot of St. Paul Church of God in Christ, to remodel a building for a church community center. Smith then received a $450 donation from the church, records show, and another $450 from Rev. Charles Ford, its pastor, and his wife.
Ford lauded Smith at a church banquet last summer for delivering statehouse bacon to St. Paul and saving it from having to mortgage the church. The banquet was videotaped and shown repeatedly on cable access television, giving Smith a free public-relations bounce.
Ford said Smith is an old friend who was instrumental in getting the Calumet Expressway renamed for his father, the late Bishop Louis Henry Ford. He said any connection between his campaign contributions and the delivery of the grant is “absolutely and totally wrong.”
`I’m trying to get into heaven’
Sen. Rickey Hendon (D-Chicago) directed a $25,000 grant to True Witness Church of God in Christ on North California Avenue and later collected $350 in campaign donations from the church.
Records show Hendon’s campaign fund also collected $700 in donations from Greater Progressive Baptist Church after delivering a $25,000 grant for assistance to welfare clients and the unemployed.
Hendon said he saw no problem with accepting money from churches, despite IRS rules. “Black churches have been at the forefront of the black political movement forever…,” he said. “I don’t see how you can separate the black church from politics.”
Nor, said Hendon, was there any quid pro quo to his grant-delivering methods. “You shake down a preacher, you go to hell,” Hendon said. “I’m trying to get into heaven. And it’s going to be hard for me to make it all the way.”
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Though the spiritual impact of giving grants is unknown, it is clear that lawmakers are willing to hand out tax money to groups that have had trouble following rules or staying on budget or on schedule.
Among these are:
– Tobacco Road Inc., which collected a $480,000 grant courtesy of Rep. Lovana Jones to help build and run the Lou Rawls 47th Street Theater and Cultural Center. The project has been hobbled by construction delays, vandalism and difficulty raising private funds, and it has even been criticized by its namesake Rawls, who last year suspended a planned $200,000 donation.
– Positive Anti-Crime Thrust Inc., the recipient of a $30,000 grant through Sen. Donne Trotter (D-Chicago), who jokingly calls himself “the Jimmy Dean of the South Side of Chicago,” referring to the pork sausage maker.
The Positive group is run by Howard Saffold, a former bodyguard to the late Chicago Mayor Harold Washington. In January 2000, the state attorney general canceled the group’s authority to function as a charity in Illinois because it had repeatedly failed to file tax returns. Saffold could not be reached for comment.
Trotter said he did not “personally check [Saffold’s] records…. What I did do was reward him–or award him–this contract.”
– Browder’s Maximum Security Transportation Inc., a non-registered charity that received a $40,000 grant from Hendon to transport seniors to clinics and grocery stores. The owner of the firm, Reginald Browder, is a precinct worker for Hendon and a one-time contractual employee of his Senate office.
Browder said that after the grant ran out, he parked a van he bought with the grant in a friend’s garage and never used it for personal use or to campaign for Hendon. But earlier this month, the van was parked outside Hendon’s district office and Browder was working inside.
– The National Italian-American Sports Hall of Fame Inc., which received $300,000 even though it is more than a year behind schedule and has had difficulty raising private funds. Slated for city-donated land on Taylor Street in the Little Italy neighborhood, the Italian Hall also has collected $2 million in state funds from Ryan’s Illinois FIRST.
The legislative grants came from Sen. James DeLeo and Reps. Ralph Capparelli and Shirley Jones, all Chicago Democrats; and Rep. Michael McAuliffe, a Chicago Republican. Only Jones represents the Taylor Street neighborhood.
Even more tax money is on the way, according to Rep. Angelo “Skip” Saviano (R-Elmwood Park), who also has been involved in steering state money the hall’s way. Saviano, whose father sat for 18 years on the board of the organization building the facility, said Ryan has committed an additional $1 million in Illinois FIRST money to what is billed as a $12 million project.
George Randazzo, the director of the hall, said the project deserves everything it gets because it will “generate revenue for the community.”
The hall is a good example of ethnic pork, the practice of giving money to support ethnic constituencies.
Another Italian group, Stone Park-based Casa Italia, received $350,000, including $77,000 for a band shell, $12,000 for locker rooms and $10,000 for bocce ball courts. The grants came from Saviano and DeLeo, who is a business partner with Anthony Fornelli, a Casa Italia official and former state and Chicago city official.
Sen. Walter Dudycz (R-Chicago) passed out more than $600,000 in tax money to five Ukrainian cultural groups, most of them outside his Northwest Side district. Dudycz also distributed a total of $35,000 to a Polish youth group and an Irish association for a monument to the Irish potato famine.
The largest chunk by far, $500,000, went in 2000 to the Ukrainian National Museum, on North Oakley Boulevard.
Dudycz’s campaign fund has collected $1,200 from three museum board members since 1998.
The son of Ukrainian immigrants, Dudycz said the museum grant is justified because Ukrainian achievements have been overlooked.
He said there is “absolutely not” any connection between the grants and contributions by museum board members.
Dudycz, who is retiring from the legislature after this year, said he will give any contributions from people connected to his pork grants to charity.