Why, oh why, are we ruled by these goofs?
Saturday, Mar 5, 2005 - Posted by Rich Miller
Does anyone at the governor’s office ever read a statute book or the constitution before they come up with a new idea?
State Comptroller Dan Hynes has told the Blagojevich administration its plan to ask for upfront cash from vendors bidding on a three-year, multimillion-dollar office supply contract is illegal, and he will block payments if the deal goes through. […]
Government bodies typically award contracts based on the best price and value. But the Tribune this week disclosed the administration, in an effort to help plug the state’s budget hole, was asking bidders for the office supply deal to spice proposals with cash incentives as a condition for winning the bid. […]
Critics of the incentive plan maintained it would elevate costs to municipalities that buy goods off state contracts and bump smaller businesses out of the competiton. Such criticisms surfaced Friday at a meeting of a state purchasing oversight panel, where members complained the state purchasing agency had not been informing it of changes involving state contracting.
“Did any of us see any of this before it appeared in the Tribune?” asked Ed Bedore, a former Chicago budget director. “Every local government in the state of Illinois is going to pay more for their paper and their pencils and their pens because of this action, and it should be stopped immediately.”
I guess the answer to my question and to Bedore’s question is the same. “No.”
(Apologies to Brad DeLong for the headline.)
- Anonymous - Sunday, Mar 6, 05 @ 8:30 am:
Hynes, the press corps, and all the other impractical amateurs just don’t get it. Now that campaign help from contractors is under scrutiny and taboo it only makes practical sense to channel those assets to the state budget so that we can do more for education and health care for children. We now have an administration that is not selfish.
- Anonymous - Sunday, Mar 6, 05 @ 11:09 am:
Looking at the previous post, it looks like the Gov. has his people at it again.
- Anonymous - Sunday, Mar 6, 05 @ 1:22 pm:
Just out of curiosity, why is it that any time somebody says something positive about the Governor on this board, it’s immediately attacked as a plant by the Gov’s office? Nobody else gets the same kind of treatment. I know there are plenty of gov-haters on this site, but Blago is still polling over 50%, so theoretically there are at least a couple of people out there who like him and are capable of using the internet.
In this case, it’s particularly weird, because I took the first post to be sarcastic and an attack on the gov.
- Carl Nyberg - Sunday, Mar 6, 05 @ 1:30 pm:
Blago’s 50% approval comes from the general public.
If you were to poll people that follow politics in an obseessive way, Blago’s approval ratings would be much lower.
Since the people participating here follow politics obsessively, one presumes that most of the opinions on Blagojevich will range from neutral to extremely critical.
Blagojevich deserves to be defended on some policy decisions, but who would be across the board rah-rah Rod except someone that had a personal stake in it?
- Anonymous - Sunday, Mar 6, 05 @ 3:02 pm:
Anonymous 1:22 - Do you have recent polling data to back up that claim that he is “still polling over 50%”?
Just curious.
- Anonymous - Sunday, Mar 6, 05 @ 3:55 pm:
The first commenter certainly sounds very much like they’re on the Blagojevich payroll (or mocking a team blago response to this) more than any other pro-Blagojevich post I’ve seen on this blog:
“it only makes practical sense to channel those assets to the state budget so that we can do more for education and health care for children.”
Who is “we” in this post if not the Blagojevich administration spewing Blagojevich talking points?
But, while I didn’t read the post as sarcastic initially, after reading what the third poster said, the last line of “We now have an administration that is not selfish” is so over-the-top it does make me wonder if they’re being sarcastic.
- Anonymous - Sunday, Mar 6, 05 @ 4:59 pm:
“…..and bump smaller businesses out of the competiton.”
Laughable. The small businesses are already out of the competition, particularly in anything like software development (contractural services). And some of those small folks have got some pretty slick software out there that would certainly fill needs, but it’s not properly politically “blessed”, so as far as State government is concerned, they don’t even exist.
I saw an Internet based software product about 2 weeks ago that would work almost perfectly for something currently being handled (poorly) by the State of Illinois, but it has 2 serious problems:
First, it’s too cheap. The software company would probably only charge $150-$250k a year, and that’s too low by probably a factor of 10. After all, anything that costs less than $1.5 mil a year can’t possibly be worth it.
Secondly, these are software designers & developers. If you told them to make a $50k contribution to Rod, there’s no way in hell they’d do that. It’s not in their nature - they are not pol’s.
“….I-NEDSS is expected to be fully implemented in about four years at a cost of $10 million and will be able to collect information on all 77 state-mandated reportable diseases.“
Here’s the link:
http://www.idph.state.il.us/public/press05/2.9.05.htm
$10 mil for THAT!
Flat out unbelievable ripoff for what they got.
- Sen. Jeff Schoenberg - Sunday, Mar 6, 05 @ 8:09 pm:
Here’s some background on the actual law in question. In the late 1990s, major soft drink distributors (i.e., Coke and Pepsi)sought exclusive “pouring rights” to sell their products exclusively @ college athletic facilities @ Univ. of IL and several other schools. As it turns out, a condition of the contract required mandatory “contributions” to the school’s athletic foundation. Failure to pay the “contributions” would have resulted in a breach of contract.
I thought that requiring “contributions” smacked of “pay-to-play” regardless of how worthy these causes might have been, and I not only asked the university to re-do its “pouring rights” contract — I moved a bill to eliminate the linkage between required cash payments and the state contract.
While this became law in 1999, it was written broadly enough to preclude a front-loaded contract agreement similar to that which the state had in mind for office supplies.
My friend and colleague Rauschenberger reached too far calling this legalized bribery. But if the state wants to move forward on bids that frontload payments within the total cost of its purchase,the law will need to be adjusted to retain the basic principle prohibiting “play-to-play” while making such allowances — but only within the total cost of the state’s purchase, not in addition to it.
- Anonymous - Saturday, Mar 12, 05 @ 4:14 pm:
Look into Victor Reye’s lobbying.
Reyes is promising contracts at the Toll authority.