Illinois’ New Governor Cleans House

Six weeks before Republican George Ryan left the Illinois governor’s office, he gave his trusted, longtime spokesman Dave Urbanek a job overseeing a small state agency. The day after the new governor, a Democrat, took over, Urbanek arrived at work to find a pink slip on his desk.

The same day, Jan. 14, Gov. Rod Blagojevich fired 34 other state workers Ryan had appointed to choice posts in the final months of his administration, many of them friends, supporters and friends of friends. Earlier this week, Blagojevich fired 28 more.

His housecleaning is designed, in part, to convince voters he can reform the crony politics that have defined Illinois government, and largely defined Ryan before he became known to the world for clearing death row.

Blagojevich has ousted people such as Urbanek, for a short time the head of the obscure Illinois Building Commission, as well as the new manager of county fairs and horse racing and the manager of consumer education and information.

Cleaning up state government with mass firings is proving tricky. Powerful members of Blagojevich’s own party are beginning to grumble because they haven’t been consulted and because some of their own have been ousted. Many of the recently fired, meanwhile, are visiting their attorneys.

If the point of the purge is to restore integrity to the capital, Springfield -- and aid a projected $4.8-billion budget deficit, as Blagojevich also has said -- the moves have the feel of political payback for many.

“We get six or seven different reasons for being fired,” said Urbanek, a Ryan spokesman for seven years, dating to when Ryan was secretary of state, and before that a reporter. “One minute, it’s that we’re not qualified. The next, it’s because of budget cuts. The only thing that appears certain is they’re going down the list and firing people who worked for or knew the previous governor.”

As head of the Building Commission, Urbanek was to earn $99,000 a year helping small business owners navigate the maze of state regulatory bodies overseeing construction. “It was an information job,” Urbanek said. “I was absolutely qualified for my job.”

Blagojevich’s spokesman, Billy Weinberg, said a number of factors prompted the firings, but one above all others. “The most important thing is the message it sends: It’s a new era in Illinois, time to bring responsibility to state government and restore some faith in our leaders.”

Last year, Ryan’s administration engineered an alteration to a law governing political appointees. The change reduced the probationary period for most four-year appointees -- during which they can be fired without cause -- from six months to 30 days.

Then, in the waning months of his single term, Ryan appointed several hundred political allies and others to state jobs, a move with plenty of precedent but one nonetheless decried by then-candidate Blagojevich, newspaper columnists and others as over-the-top patronage even by Illinois standards.

Some of the people to whom Ryan gave jobs left appointments to secure new four-year posts.

A few quit their jobs for a short period and came back to the same job, which gave them a new four-year term.

Many of the appointments promoted longtime civil servants to higher-paying jobs. Others went to prominent Ryan aides.

“Every individual we find who is unqualified for his or her job, every one of these individuals who is not essential to the function of state government, every one of these individuals who does not share my commitment to changing business as usual in state government will be terminated,” Blagojevich said in announcing the first round of firings.

Blagojevich this week also blocked a fellow Democrat from assuming a $99,414-a-year post that was to begin in March. Former state Sen. William Shaw was slated to take over as head of the Small Business Utility Advocate, which helps companies negotiate for state contracts.

Shaw served two decades in the state General Assembly before losing his Senate seat in November. He is not certain, he said, just what Blagojevich is trying to achieve.

“To the victors go the spoils, especially in Illinois politics,” Shaw said. “That’s the problem -- I’m not a Republican, I’m a Democrat. This certainly leaves a lot of things to be explained.”

Blagojevich said he was not seeking to keep Shaw from the job, only that the position was not crucial in a time of financial crisis. He has declined to comment specifically on most other cases.

In the midst of the firings came a revelation from Ryan’s files that only added to the intrigue: a list of hundreds of requests to Ryan for jobs, most made when he served as secretary of state from 1991 to 1998. Federal prosecutors unveiled the list this week at the racketeering trial of Scott Fawell, Ryan’s onetime top aide who, along with Ryan’s gubernatorial campaign committee, is accused of using public employees and taxpayer funds to help Ryan and others in political races.

How or even if the list ever led to patronage jobs is unclear, and many of those listed as having “sponsored” a friend or relative for a job -- including journalists, lobbyists and politicians -- have denied any wrongdoing.

The list, and the circumstances surrounding its courtroom unveiling, has strengthened the perception that patronage was a part of politics under Ryan and other governors.

Fawell also is out of a job that Ryan had given him in 1999. He was on paid leave during the trial from his $195,000-a-year post as head of Chicago’s Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority until Blagojevich ousted him.

“The story that Blagojevich gives is that these were overpaid, do-nothing lackeys and cronies,” said Springfield attorney Bruce Stratton, who has taken calls from more than a dozen dismissed workers. “That might be true in some cases, but it certainly is not true of all these people. People feel they’ve been fired from jobs they were qualified to hold and defamed on top of it.”