Editorial: A picture of clout-based politics the state must renounce
The reassuring thing about the story of state Sen. Martin Sandoval's 2016 effort to pressure the Illinois tollway to award a contract to one of his campaign donors is that it failed.
The tollway board - and this, remember, the one whose members were all removed two years later amid concerns about questionable hiring and contracts - stood by its previous decisions on the contract. That resolve is welcome to contemplate, but the experience offers a grim picture of the brazen exercises of clout that dogs the reputation of Illinois politics, even as the government is trying to prove it deserves to oversee a vast overhaul of our systems of taxation and business regulation.
Sandoval's office was raided Sept. 24 by the FBI, which apparently is interested in the Chicago Democrat's dealings with certain highway and construction companies, lobbyists and the Illinois Department of Transportation. A story by Daily Herald senior transportation writer Marni Pyke this week described the September 2016 meeting at which Sandoval, who heads the Senate Transportation Committee, and a fellow lawmaker - Chicago Democratic state Rep. Luis Arroyo, who chairs the House Appropriations-Capital Committee - appear to have tried to apply some muscle to the tollway board on behalf of a company seeking a multimillion-dollar fencing contract.
Sandoval said he believed the board had been "bamboozled" by the complaints of another bidder and had wrongly revised its plans in a way that cost the company, which has given his campaign $12,750 over 17 years, a portion of the business.
"You made a mistake and that's fair. Fix it. Otherwise, maybe me and Rep. Arroyo will find a way to fix it ... later on," Sandoval told the board
The specifics of Sandoval's not-so-veiled threat are open to speculation, but its impropriety is abundantly clear. Even if, as Sandoval has claimed, he felt a "moral obligation" to support the minority-owned company, his actions present an unseemly picture of rank influence peddling. It is beyond the role of a lawmaker to petition a state board about a specific contract, says government watchdog Susan Garrett, chairwoman of the Center for Illinois Politics and a former Democratic state senator, and Sandoval's actions suggest an unabashed willingness to use his position and his power to thwart the will of an independent state panel.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker said last week that Sandoval should step down from his Senate Transportation Committee post until the FBI investigation is resolved. If Sandoval doesn't go willingly, Pritzker said, he should be removed.
Pritzker's comments involved the FBI probe generally and were not necessarily directed at the 2016 tollway board action. But a reflection on that meeting lends weight to his call. If state leaders are to demonstrate that they have the competence and ethics to manage the vast expansion of taxation and economic revision Democrats are overseeing, they must distance themselves from behaviors that suggest the opposite.