Metra executive director Phil Pagano padded his salary by hundreds of thousands of dollars by awarding himself all sorts of unauthorized perks, a brazen money grab that went unnoticed for more than a decade. Blindsided by the scandal last spring, his bosses on the commuter rail’s board of directors blamed it on an overabundance of trust. State Sen. Susan Garrett, D-Lake Forest, called it what it was: a failure of oversight.
While the board hired consultants to ask the questions it should have been asking all along, Garrett had some questions of her own: Does Metra really need to spend millions on a Washington lobbying firm and if so, shouldn’t the contract be competitively bid? What’s up with all that overtime? What’s the rest of the Pagano story, and what is being done to prevent a repeat?
The answers — and sometimes the lack of them — convinced Garrett that an independent watchdog is needed to safeguard the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars that are funneled to Metra every year.
It was a good idea that eventually got better, though not without a fight. To make a long and exasperating story mercifully short, both houses of the General Assembly have now passed a bill that would give the state’s executive inspector general oversight of the region’s entire transit system — the CTA, Metra and Pace, and their umbrella agency, the Regional Transportation Authority.
Besides assigning the IG to guard against corruption and mismanagement, the bill would subject transit employees and directors to the state’s ethics act. Board members, who are appointed by more than a dozen local governments, could be removed by the governor for violations of that act.
So let’s hear it for Garrett, who stayed on message, and her colleagues, who listened and did the right thing. And someone get the governor a pen.
