|
County Clout Cars
Cook County residents Paying for Cars for Insiders
CHICAGO ILLINOIS - On June 24th, 2008 the Better Government Association and Fox News Channel 32 revealed how Cook County Board President Todd Stroger’s administration had no idea how many cars the County owns or who is driving them. Despite the fact that the County’s Code of Ordinances requires it to make an annual report detailing the inventory of vehicles and who drives them, no such formal report had been done since 2005.
Nevertheless, the County did provide informal, incomplete listings of vehicles, their assigned drivers and those allowed to take the vehicles for overnight use. Those authorized for overnight use get to commute to and from work on the taxpayer’s dime.
A review of the lists by the BGA and Fox News shows that many take home vehicles are given to County workers with connections to various elected officials from Cook County and Chicago. Other vehicles are assigned to workers without any apparent need to take them home.
“Right now residents of Cook County suffer from the highest sales tax rate in the nation due to the County’s recent hike in the sales tax. We were told a sales tax hike was necessary because there was no fat left to cut in the County’s budget. The assignment of take home vehicles as a perk to connected insiders or simply as a continuation of wasteful spending practices of the past shows there was in fact some fat left. Apparently the Stroger administration felt it was easier to force the taxpayers to provide more revenue than tighten the belt for the insiders and their friends” said Jay Stewart, Executive Director of the BGA.
Among the connected employees who have received take home vehicles are August Olivo, brother of 13th Ward Alderman Frank Olivo, Dr. Stephen Martin, brother in law to County Board President Todd Stroger and Byron Steele, brother of Commissioner Robert Steele. One of the most inexplicable assignments was to Bennie Thompson, the head of the Cook County Law Library.
“With gas prices skyrocketing and the private sector taking aggressive steps to control spending in these troubled economic times you would hope that the County would drop is lackadaisical attitude towards spending and try to run a more efficient government” said Stewart, “With regular citizens scrambling to deal with the increasing cost of their commute, it is a shame that the County feels no need to trim its fleet of vehicles and who gets to take them home.”
###
This investigation was conducted jointly with Fox-Chicago News and researched by BGA Chief Investigator
Dan Sprehe, Executive Director Jay Stewart, and staff, including Lindsay Lewis, Derek Bagley, and Matthew Hays.
| 
