* More like this, please…
Brian J. McPartlin quit as Illinois Tollway director last week. But he can’t start his new job with a politically connected engineering consulting firm quite yet.
Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan has asked the Illinois Ethics Commission to delay approving McPartlin’s request to join Chicago’s McDonough Associates, a firm that has done millions of dollars of work with the Tollway.
McPartlin, 42, had asked for a waiver of the “revolving door prohibition,” which requires state officials to wait a year before taking a job with a company they hired or regulated. An ethics law loophole allows the commission to grant these waivers. Only one request out of 14 has been denied since 2005. […]
The commission gave McPartlin until today to respond to the motion. After that, the commission can act on the motion. If it’s granted, the commission will set up time frames in which the attorney general can conduct fact-finding.
McPartlin says he won’t do any tollway-related work for a year, but could he have obtained this job had he not been the director for two years? Doubtful, at best.
* Attorney General Madigan aggressively fought attempts to change the horribly biased ballot language on the constitutional convention question. Then, when she lost the case, she sent a letter to the state Board of Elections claiming that the ruling applied to all counties…
An appellate court affirmed the ruling on Oct. 16, and on Wednesday, Oct. 22, Attorney General Lisa Madigan sent a letter to the State Board of Elections which concluded, “Because the opinion in this case is binding throughout Illinois, I expect each local election authority in the State to follow the mandate of the Appellate Court of Illinois.”
…But no follow-up action has yet been reported, even though there are at least some reported instances of counties refusing to comply. Perhaps she is reticent because one of those counties is in the Metro East, a Democratic primary voter haven.
AG Madigan has done a pretty good job on consumer issues, as have most of our attorneys general in the past 30 years or so, but she has been average, at best, in fighting political corruption and the old boy network.
Tons of those afore-mentioned revoving door waivers have been approved without a peep from Madigan.
* Related…
* Chicago torture victims face uphill legal battle: The state attorney general’s office hasn’t agreed to new trials for those claiming coerced confessions and the city opposes paying damages to alleged victims, they say.
* Attorney General stays out of zone fight