During his long career in Illinois politics, Burris has encountered many of the state’s most influential figures, some of them principled risk-takers and some corrupt rogues. And it’s been clear that Burris belongs to neither category. He is a conventional politician, one guided far more by cautious self-interest than by ideological passion. His self-regard may be greater than that of some of his peers; he is especially known for the words of self-celebration carved into the wall of a mausoleum that is waiting for him in a Chicago cemetery. (The structure bears the inscription “Trail Blazer” and lists such accomplishments as being the first African-American undergraduate at Southern Illinois University to be an exchange student at the University of Hamburg, in Germany.) “He was a figure of fun, because he was highly egocentric,” Alan Dobry, a former Democratic ward committeeman in Chicago, said of Burris’s years as a local politician. “When he was in office, he had two aides who went around with him, and they were generally referred to as the ‘Rolaids.’ ” According to the Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson, a longtime student of Chicago politics, Burris “was a soldier, part of the machine. He’s not a distinguished politician. He’s not a powerful political thinker.” Of course, this description hardly distinguishes Burris from many of his colleagues on Capitol Hill. In his very ordinariness, Burris may represent a triumph of sorts for the civil-rights movement, which was, at least in part, a struggle for black people to be seen as just like everybody else.
I think the traditional view of Burris as a perfect fit in as a Soviet style functionary has given Burris a free pass for far too long.
At a minimum, Roland Burris was an incompetent boob. Let’s look at how he left the Comptroller’s office (and some of the issues were never dealt with by Netsch either, but she was there for a couple years and then running for office. Roland ran the office for 12 years with Loleta Didrickson and then Hynes cleaning the damn place up.
Auditor General Holland has been busting the chops of inept electeds for years and here is a story on the state of the Comptroller’s office in 1997:
St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri)
May 31, 1997, Saturday, FIVE STAR LIFT EDITION
Correction Appended
Comptroller Seeks To Regain $ 8 Million In Cemetery Funds
The Illinois Comptroller’s Office is seeking to recover more than $ 8 million in misspent cemetery trust funds that it is supposed to monitor, a state audit said Friday.
The problem is that until recently the comptroller’s office didn’t have enough control over the funds, according to the report from Auditor General Bill Holland.
The comptroller is responsible for licensing cemetery operators and making sure they properly administer trust funds that people pay into for future maintenance of graves, crypts or other cemetery services.
“Prior to 1995, the Office’s Cemetery Care and Burial Trust Department placed little emphasis on the quality or accuracy of information provided by licensees,” the audit said. “As a result, several situations arose whe re, although annual reports had been filed as required, substantial sums of money were improperly diverted from trust funds.”
Comptroller Loleta Didrickson agreed with the audit’s findings and has been working to fix the deficiencies, according to the audit and a spokesman for Didrickson. Laws adopted last year at Didrickson’s urging give her office more power to oversee the trust funds.
Where does this become important in Roland’s political career?
As a lobbyist he has done several years of lobbying for those very cemetery owners (August 1996 Comptroller’s Newsletter):
When someone purchases a cemetery plot from a licensed private cemetery, a portion of that sale is required to
be placed in trust so that the care of that plot will be perpetually provided. There are similar trust requirements for funeral homes and other providers of pre-need service. The Comptroller has had the responsibility to regulate privately held funeral home, cemetery and burial trusts (excluding religious or fraternal) since 1972, but in those 23 years, only nine licenses have been revoked within an industry that’s grown from having trust funds of $2.8 million in 1978 to $667 mil- lion today, with projections that level will hit $1 billion in 1998.
An investigation of the cemetery and funeral industry conducted by the Comptroller’s Office revealed that some unscrupulous operators have raided cemetery care trust funds, removing monies intended to provide perpetual care for the cemetery and using those funds for unauthorized purposes.
In an attempt to protect the public from the greed and mismanagement of the few “bad apples” in the industry, the
Comptroller’s reform package estab lishes a two-tiered audit process that allows the Office to use private Certified
Public Accountants to more closely scrutinize those operations showing signs of financial difficulty. It also makes explicit the authority to conduct investigations in cases of suspected fraud, to file civil suits on behalf of consumers, and provides for the appointment of independent trustees to oversee the largest of trust funds (more than $500,000).
Add that to his close ties to the Blagojevich administration and the contracts he got from the state government during that time including soliciting a lobbyist close to Rod Blagojevich for state work.
The pattern or Roland Burris’ career is certainly not one of being a dynamic agent of change, but he’s far more connected to the trough of political favors and revolving doors than anyone was pointed out yet. Certainly his ego overshadows other parts of his life, but his efforts to cash in on his public service since leaving office and being cozy with those who can deliver jobs and money to him have been going for some time. He never effectively regulated an industry he oversaw during a period of explosive growth. If anything, his incompetence kept him from being more effective at wringing money out of those he sought contracts and favors from. His efforts to talk to the Blagojevich administration largely centered on finding jobs for family members or getting some work thrown his way.