Lake Effect News

By LORRAINE SWANSON

Editor

There’s a stiff sea breeze blowing across the Land of Lincoln from an auditorium at Loyola University off the shore of Lake Michigan on a day when former-Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s balls suddenly receded up into his underpants.

About a hundred, average, everyday folks from across the Chicago region gathered last Tuesday at the Quinlan Life Sciences Building in Rogers Park for the first of two Citizen Watchdog training sessions hosted by the Better Government Association.

You’ve seen them: those pesky dissident neighbors who sit in the back of the room at village board meetings, the local school council, or the community town hall, asking the hard questions that make local politicians and other muckety-mucks squirm.

Harnessing the room’s energy was Andy Shaw, the former ABC-7 political reporter and now executive director of the BGA, the gold standard for honest government. Standing in front of the projected images of Gov. George Ryan and Blago, Illinois’s poster boys for political corruption, Shaw and the BGA injected some new hope into the room for changing the status quo.

“It’s thrilling to see a room full of people who realize that we’re never going to change the system unless we do it together,” Shaw said.

The mission is simple: equip citizens with the tools of investigative journalism and send them out to be the eyes and ears of the BGA and start eliminating the corruption tax. The second goal is a little more complex, restore faith in government.

Meeting the digital realities of the 21^st Century, the BGA is working to build a web site that will serve as a good government town hall and hopefully engage citizens in telling their own stories about local corruption in an effort to help them advocate for themselves.

Shaw and the BGA are convinced that if local aldermen, village trustees, county board commissioners and all the way up to the mayor’s and governor’s offices start receiving 5,000 phones, 5,000 e-mails and 5,000 Facebook messages, they may back off from squandering taxpayers’ money on some inside deal.

“We’re not going to turn you into Woodward and Bernstein, that’s not the idea,” Shaw said. “But if we give you a few tools and some ability to tell stories and work with us … [on] whatever you’re interested in, if we send you out there with the ability to look at an agenda and look at a budget and listen to a debate and have your ears perk up with something that doesn’t pass the smell test … you can write about and we’ll help you get on our website or give us tips that we can investigate and follow.”

“I submit to you,” Shaw continued, “the only way we’re going to change this is if we put the heat on 24/7 and the only way we can put the heat on 24/7 is if we’re in this together.”

Citizen watchdogs in training got some pointers in the Illinois Open Meetings Act and filing freedom of information act or FOIA requests from Bob Herguth, a former transportation reporter for the Chicago and now the acting director investigations for the BGA.

Herguth emphasized the importance of attending governmental meetings, telling audience members to start with their neighborhood CAPS and local school council meetings.

Relaying a story of a missed CTA board meeting, during which a member tried to pass a measure that would guarantee him a fat, early retirement pension, Herguth said when citizens don’t go to meetings, that’s when the shenanigans usually happens.

All government and municipal meetings involving the spending of public tax dollars are required by state law to be open.

“You can go the meeting,” Herguth said. “They just can’t close the doors and say you can’t come in. You have a right to go in and witness proceedings, and you have a right to know about meetings in advance. Meetings can’t be held at the last minute or in secret at some bar up the street.”

Already audience members were offering tips to the BGA. David Jenkins, who runs a citizens advocacy website that tracks the doings of Cook County government, claimed that average Joes were often shut out of board meetings because the chamber was stacked to capacity with Cook County employees.

 “There will be so many Cook County employees at board meetings that citizens aren’t about to go in because they are told it’s over capacity,” Jenkins said. “In my opinion, these employees should probably be doing something more productive like what they are paid to do. Any way we can call them out on this or get our way into that meeting because as a citizen, it seems awfully unfair.”

After being told by Shaw that the BGA could work with Jenkins on investigating the Cook County Board’s alleged violations of the Open Meetings Act, Jenkins responded, “I got video.”

Citizens watchdogs-in-training also got hear from a whistleblower, Tammy Raynor, an Illinois Secretary of State employee who noticed improprieties taking place at the state driver vehicle license facility where she worked under Ryan’s watch when he was the Secretary of State. Raynor blew the whistle that eventually launched the Operation Safe Road investigation.

Raynor stepped forward after six children were killed in a fiery car accident resulting from a trucker who paid a bribe in order to get his commercial driver’s license when he did not meet state requirements.

“Tammy had the nerve and the courage and civic responsibility to realize she had to tell the story,” Shaw said. “She told the Willis attorney and Channel 7 and when the story broke all hell broke loose.”

The second BGA Citizen Watchdog training session is scheduled for 7 p.m. Tuesday, July 27, at Loyola University’s Quinlan Life Sciences Building at 1060 W. Sheridan Road.  The second session is expected to review filing freedom of information act requests and journalistic standards, such as avoiding libel, in greater detail. Those interested in going to the second session need not have attended the first.

Shaw promised that the citizen watchdog training sessions in Rogers Park are the first of many being planned for around the Chicago region and statewide.

“It’s a work in progress,” he said. “This is an ongoing dialogue.”