Chicago Sun Times

April 11, 2010 Sunday
Final Edition

DuPage board flushes taxpayers' money

BYLINE: Carol Marin, The Chicago Sun-Times

SECTION: EDITORIALS; Carol Marin; Pg. A26

LENGTH: 630 words

Who says government isn't as riveting as reality TV?
Not me.
Not when I can attend a meeting of the DuPage County Water Commission, as I did Thursday night to see for myself how mismanagement, incompetence and a lack of concern for taxpayers' money plagues every corner of Illinois.
How exactly did this board of appointed officials and paid staff turn a $190 million surplus into a gaping $70 million budget hole in just a few years?
Debbie Fulks, a 58-year-old Glen Ellyn resident, has been crunching their numbers since 2007. "I was a mild-mannered actuary for years," Fulks told me last December.
But no longer. She has warned them repeatedly they are headed toward disaster.
Meaning, unlike the commission members, she actually understood their books and the crisis ahead.
Fulks and members of DuPage United, a coalition of civic groups and churches, say public officials simply wouldn't listen.
Here's the story in a nutshell:
The DuPage County Water Commission is an independent 13-member board. Six members are elected by area mayors. The chairman and the other six members are appointed by the chairman of the DuPage County Board, Bob Schillerstrom, with county board approval.
The commission's board answers to no one save the state Legislature. Its job is to transfer and sell water from Lake Michigan to 24 municipalities and unincorporated DuPage.
Their funding comes from the sale of the water plus a quarter-cent countywide sales tax. In no time flat, the commission -- forgive the pun -- was flush with cash.
So flush, after awhile, that it no longer needed the sales tax which, by the way, was paid by everyone in DuPage even though the commission served only some, not all, municipalities.
Nor did it need to sell water at below Chicago's market rate. But that allowed some mayors (not all of them did this) to quietly jack up the water rates to their towns, building a cushion in their budgets. A hidden tax, so when political opportunity rolled around, they could pull a magical property tax rebate out of their hat and say, "See what I've done for you?"
By 2003, the commission had a whopping $190 million in its piggy bank. It was just too tempting for politicians not to drain.
Schillerstrom got the General Assembly to approve siphoning off $75 million across five years to pay county bills.
The mayors said, "Wait a minute, where's ours?" and grabbed $40 million in rebates for their communities.
It wasn't illegal. Just shockingly shortsighted.
To make matters worse, the commission hired managers who didn't know how to manage.
And so, voila, today they are $70 million in the red.
On Thursday night, members of DuPage United showed up at the commission's board meeting in force.
And you could feel their rage as the board actually considered loading a $40,000 sweetener on an already hefty $123,000 severance package for the general manager they had hired but were now dumping for not doing his job.
How, asked resident Mary Hason, could they, while in financial crisis, be "overly generous with a severance package" with "an employee who helped you get there?"
"You don't listen to anyone. . . . Clearly don't know what your doing . . . but you will protect the status quo at all costs," said resident Martha Sobie. "Heaven help the taxpayer."
The board backed off, the first victory DuPage United can claim in three hard years of demanding fiscal sanity.
State Sen. Dan Cronin (R-Elmhurst) and Democrat Carole Cheney, an attorney, are running for DuPage County Board chairman.
Cronin has a bill in Springfield that would consolidate the DuPage Water Commission into the county government and reform the agency. Cheney argues Cronin's bill doesn't go far enough. It's a critical discussion.
But they'd better know their numbers.
Because Debbie Fulks and DuPage United already do.

LOAD-DATE: April 12, 2010

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

DOCUMENT-TYPE: Business; Column

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper


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