Pat Quinn
Governor Pat Quinn is bragging that his office budget is down.
But reports are coming out that employees on other payrolls are working for the Governor’s Office.
The obvious question is whether the amount of resources being spent to support the governor is down or just hidden.
Back in the 1970’s Pat Quinn worked at the Department of Local Governmental Affairs. That was the department that handled property tax assessments at the time, so I visited it a fair amount. One day I asked where Quinn’s office was. I was ushered to the back of the building on the second floor. There was a desk, but no Pat Quinn.
I figured he was a ghost employee.
Working for the governor, wouldn’t you think?
I have one other bit of information.
When I was in Springfield while Walker was in office, I stayed at the Hotel Governor. It was a low-end hotel within a block of the Old State Capitol, next to the St. Nicholas, where Paul Powell’s boxes of money were found after he died in Michigan, in bedwith his mistress, I was told.
The hotel had legislators like Prescott Bloom, state senator from Peoria at whose first fund raiser I spoke, Lewis Caldwell, a black graduate of Northwestern University and certainly an independent-minded guy in the Illinois House. (Caldwell wrote “The Policy King,” which advocated making policy legal, to treat it like the insurance industry. We passed his bill in the house. Now we have daily lotteries, but have cut out the small entrepreneurs. Nobody is allowed to go door-to-door to sell the tickets, as policy salesmen used to in the black neighborhoods.)
In any event, I got to talking to a young man in the hallway one night and found out that he wrote speeches for Governor Walker.
And, who paid him?
The Illinois Department of Agriculture.
The Hotel Governor is now a parking lot but the practice I discovered there of hiding those working for the governor on another payroll apparently continues.
More about Walker and Quinn can be found in the articles below:
The Pat Quinn of the Dan Walker Days – Part 1 – Primary Campaign
The Pat Quinn of the Dan Walker Days – Part 2 – College Days
The Pat Quinn of the Dan Walker Days – Part 3 – General Election
The Pat Quinn of the Dan Walker Days – Part 4 – Quinn’s View of the 1972 Campaign
The Pat Quinn of the Dan Walker Days – Part 5 – What Quinn Thought of Walker’s Term
The Pat Quinn of the Dan Walker Days – Part 6 – Why Did Quinn Leave State Government?