According to NBC Chicago.com, 235 of Governor Quinn’s staff received pay raises averaging 11% this year.
Of the 235 who received a pay raise in 2010, 225 of them received more than a five percent pay hike. Those rewarded with a fatter check include a labor relations expert whose pay increase is more than $5,000, to the local tourism marketing manager who received more than a $10,000 pay hike.
“You have to pay people appropriately in order to get them and keep them,” Quinn said.
…
The pay raises range from $300 a year to $40,000 a year. The average raise for these non-union employees is 11 percent — that’s four times higher than private industry expectations.
NBC Chicago discovered the pay hikes through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Earlier this summer, AP uncovered pay raises given to 43 workers in the governor’s office.
In 2003, the state legislature gave the local government authority to take land for sewers along Curtis Road east of Brady’s property. A final vote to enact the law occurred Nov. 4, as Brady was securing options on the land he planned to develop. He voted for it.
Three years later, when the legislature re-authorized the sewer plans, well after Brady began acquiring the land, he again voted in favor of the measure. In 2007, Brady also voted for similar legislation allowing Champaign and other local governments to seize property to build their share of the interchange.
Although the actions would help move the interchange project along, and affect the value of his land, Brady did not recuse himself.
They couldn’t have dug this up before the primary, so maybe we’d have had half a chance of getting somebody to vote for this fall?
While the hoo-ha over State Sen. Bill Brady’s reluctance to disclose his tax returns is understandable — we are the transparency crowd here, after all — I also understand his reluctance under the circumstances. Additionally, the actual content of the returns don’t concern me much. We all are careful to pay only what we have to, right? If you have a problem with what he paid, or didn’t pay, your gripe is with the feds, really.
What we should be paying close attention to IMO is his legislative record, on its own merits and perhaps within the context of his businesses and donors as well. How about conflicts of interest?
Which reminds me: Check out the improved Illinois State Board of Elections website. The link is under the Good Government heading on the lower right of this page. Navigability is better, and we can now link to individual search result pages, like this.
IRVINE, Calif. – April 15, 2010 — RealtyTrac® (realtytrac.com), the leading online marketplace for foreclosure properties, today released its U.S. Foreclosure Market Report™ for Q1 2010, which shows that foreclosure filings — default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions — were reported on 932,234 properties in the first quarter, a 7 percent increase from the previous quarter and a 16 percent increase from the first quarter of 2009. One in every 138 U.S. housing units received a foreclosure filing during the quarter. Read the rest of this entry
I saw this in person and have not watched all of the video. For anyone who wants to hear exactly what AG Madigan said about the City of DeKalb withholding the names directly, it should be on here, maybe about twenty to twenty-five minutes into the video.
Leave it to Crook County to have a system of do nothings wasting more tax dollars. Besides road maintenance, townships are supposed to have programs that help the poor. In Crook County, however, it looks like the politicians help themselves: Read the rest of this entry
Prior to the collapse of nearly 85% of the failed banks this year, major public enforcement actions were handed down by the Federal Insurance Deposit Corporation (FDIC), the Office of the Currency Comptroller (OCC), or the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS). These actions are listed online and are eminently searchable in a variety of ways.
FDIC is an independent agency charged with maintaining stability in the U.S. banking system. Its enforcement search form is here.
OCC regulates all national banks and federal branches of foreign banks. It is a division of the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Click here for OCC enforcement actions.
OTS supervises savings associations and their holding companies. It is a division of the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Find its enforcement search function here.
Gov. Quinn signed Senate Bill 189, the upgrade to FOIA. The full text can be read at this link. It takes effect January 1, 2010. It seemed to take him a while to get around to signing it but I see that his office created a new Web site which is here: http://accountability.illinois.gov/.
This is very important legislation, important enough to throw a party. There should be a FOIA-writing party on the afternoon of January 1, 2010. Read the rest of this entry
The Good Jobs First study examines the quality and quantity of disclosure by official state websites on the many ways ARRA funding is flowing through state governments to communities, organizations and individuals. Looking at both spending programs and individual projects, it evaluates the general ARRA websites that all states have created as well as their website reporting specifically on ARRA highway projects. Based on ten different criteria, each state (and the District of Columbia) is graded twice on a scale of 0 to 100.
Six states score 50 or better for their main ARRA site: Maryland (80), Colorado (68), Washington (63), West Virginia (60), New York (53) and Pennsylvania (50). Thirteen states score 50 or better for their highway reporting, led by Maryland (75), Washington (73), Colorado (65) and Nebraska (60). The average score for the ARRA websites is 28, and for highway reporting 38.