By the time former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Southern Illinois University President Glenn Poshard had completed their “listening tour” of the state, the $25 billion public works plan they were stumping for had grown to $31 billion, sprinkled with sweeteners to win the favor of reluctant lawmakers. But there aren’t a lot of lawmakers who were born yesterday, even in Springfield, which accounts for an unusual feature of the new-and-improved Illinois Works proposal: restrictions to keep Gov. Rod Blagojevich from getting his hands on the goodies.
Months of town hall meetings and legislative huddles convinced Poshard and Hastert that the capital plan’s biggest hurdle isn’t how big it should be or even how it should be financed. It’s trust. Blagojevich’s brazen habit of raiding state funds to pay for his own pet projects is a huge disincentive to lawmakers, who want to pass the money out themselves.
So Hastert and Poshard suggest including a “lockbox” provision prohibiting the governor from redirecting funds, and requiring Blagojevich to sign “memoranda of understanding,” promising to distribute the money fairly. Lawmakers immediately scoffed at those ideas, no doubt recalling all the other promises Blagojevich has made with his fingers crossed.
We agree that handcuffing the governor won’t get the job done, but not just because we know he’ll find a way to wriggle free. We remember what happened with the last capital plan, former Gov. George Ryan’s Illinois FIRST. To get that deal done, Ryan and lawmakers agreed to set up a $1.5 billion slush fund that ended up being spent on “essentials” such as parade floats, tutus, overseas field trips for lawmakers’ kids and all sorts of outrageous perks designed to help individual lawmakers get re-elected. What’s to stop that from happening again? That’s the $31 billion question.
There’s no doubt a capital bill is long overdue. The state hasn’t had one since Illinois FIRST expired in 2004. “We could have had a $60 billion bill, the needs are so great,” Poshard said. That means a lot of schools, roads, bridges and mass transit projects are going to have to wait for the next capital plan.
With all those unmet needs, it ought to be obvious that the state has no money to waste on tutus. Then again, it should have been obvious in 1999.
The Springfield folks are going to have to create trust. But not just trust between the governor and lawmakers. They have to gain the trust of the rest of Illinois.
That’s why we like the Metropolitan Planning Council’s plan to screen and rank capital projects before they are considered for state funding. If a project couldn’t show it fulfilled specific goals, such as relieving congestion or promoting safety, it wouldn’t qualify. This would provide a transparent and objective way to weed out the parade floats from the highway plans. The council wants to attach its proposal to whatever capital plan the legislature passes.
With a little more than a week until the General Assembly’s scheduled adjournment, the prospects for a capital bill this spring aren’t good, especially since the current proposal relies heavily on money from two iffy sources: a partial lease of the state lottery and a huge expansion of gambling. That fight will probably wait for the fall.
The Illinois Works plan unveiled by Hastert and Poshard confronts a bald truth: There won’t be a capital bill as long as the governor and lawmakers don’t trust each other. The Metropolitan Planning Council addresses a larger problem, which is that taxpayers don’t trust any of them.
