* Apparently, Gov. Pat Quinn is dithering on purpose when it comes to state boards…

Nearly a quarter of the state’s more than 300 boards and commissions have been inactive in recent years, according to an audit released Thursday, and the Quinn administration said it is looking at how to eliminate ones that are no longer needed.

The inactive boards listed ranged from the Governor’s Council on Health and Physical Fitness to the Steel Development Board to the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Task Group, according to Auditor General William Holland’s examination. The findings were part of an overall audit that also found many of the boards and commissions violate open meetings laws and fail to do basics like keep attendance at meetings.

Quinn’s office is in favor of looking for ways to cut down the number of boards and commissions but still keep in place the essential ones, ranging from the Illinois Commerce Commission to the Illinois Liquor Control Board, said Quinn spokeswoman Brooke Anderson. The governor is seeking help from the legislature to move forward, Anderson said.

Quinn also has sought to merge to labor relations boards, one dealing with educational matters and another dealing with business and labor issues, Anderson said. Part of the reason some of the boards were inactive was because they’ve completed their duties, Holland said.

* But Will County Executive Larry Walsh blasted his fellow Democrat for dithering on a solution to the regional superintendents’ fiasco…

Walsh wrote, “… many of us are astonished that a resolution to this issue has not been reached given the important role these superintendents play in the Illinois public education system.”

Walsh pointed out that the State should not abdicate its responsibility to pay the superintendents when it is the state which mandates the positions exist to handle specific functions within the education system. Nor should the governor have eliminated the salaries with no prior conversations with local officials.

“School districts and local governments, of which the State of Illinois owes millions of dollars in aid to, also should not be expected to pick up the tab to pay superintendents for work mandated by the State of Illinois. If there was a feeling within your administration that local assistance was needed for Regional Offices of Education in these difficult times there should have been an upfront discussion, not a last-minute line-item veto of superintendent salaries.” […]

“We, however, cannot ask them or expect them to continue this work when the same level of responsibility, sense of community and principle is not being bestowed upon them for the work that they do. The severity of this situation calls for nothing short of an immediate resolution,” he wrote.

* Meanwhile, Rahm Emanuel finally released his inauguration contributors, months after he said he would…

Nearly half of the inaugural money raised came from money managers. Emanuel has longstanding ties to that industry, where he built his personal wealth as an investment banker prior to his 2002 run for Congress.

“I think what you will find is that the ratios of contributions pretty much match his campaign funds,” said Tom Bowen, the spokesman for the Emanuel campaign who put together the list.

Money managers also accounted for nearly $5 million of Emanuel’s nearly $15 million mayoral campaign fund.

* And the Sun-Times wants the prosecutorial dithering to end in the Drew Peterson case…

We believe it’s time to free Peterson from the Will County Jail, where he has been held without trial for two years and three months, and put him under less restrictive house arrest. To keep him in jail while prosecutors plod through yet another round of pretrial motions is to deny him his constitutional right to be free, in the words of the Eighth Amendment, of “cruel and unusual punishments.”

This is a sacred phrase in American jurisprudence, first to be found in the English Bill of Rights of 1689.

Peterson’s lawyers, in a motion filed with the Illinois Supreme Court on Tuesday, argue that their client should be freed altogether while awaiting trial, and we’re sympathetic to that view. Much of the evidence presented at a hearing 14 months ago that resulted in Peterson’s continued jailing was of the hearsay variety — what one person allegedly said to another person — and, as we have argued before, we doubt the constitutionality of such evidence.