That’s a good question. By the weekend, Illinois will have a new Governor and the sideshow will largely end as Rod goes on to try and create a criminal defense that is likely to be as successful as his media trip.
Illinois is facing a far greater challenge though in a very uncertain situation. The budget is a nightmare, the entire executive branch is a disaster, and we have a chief executive coming in not known for management.
In one respect, even those who have been detractors of Pat Quinn are hoping and praying he can pull this off and lead the state through an incredibly turbulent time. Quinn has long been known for publicity seeking with events he even acknowledges were often stunts. He comes in with an incredible sense of needing to make his administration work. The state faces a crisis of confidence from it’s people and an economic crisis that is exacerbating a state budget that has been held together by gimmicks for years.
There is very little in Quinn’s background that suggests he is up to the task, but few would be up for this task and it comes down to can an individual rise to the occasion.
The last thing the state needs is governance by press conference and I think it’s safe to say Quinn even understands that. He’s been meeting with Speaker Madigan for about a year which is hard to believe in the first place, but a very encouraging sign. Also encouraging is his intention to live in the Governor’s Mansion. While not a substantive move, it certainly is a comforting notion after the last six years.
On the other hand, when discussing the Tollway signs and his intention to take them down, he talked about having an event with toll payers helping to take them down. That’s the kind of silly showmanship no one needs.
My fear is that Quinn will go for flash and press conferences with gimmicks to get attention and call out bad government. But the problem is that Illinois doesn’t need flash and press conferences. What Illinois needs is transparancy and the way to look for that is, for once, to look to DC where Obama is pushing for a series of tools to open up governmental information to citizens.
The first step is simple–ensure state level FOIA requests are honored. Blagojevich’s attempts to stiffle information were perhaps one of the worst features of his administration. It made it all the harder to track down corruption which is by design of the Blagojevich administration.
More than that though is to look to adopt informational technology tools to open up government and allow people to find the information that tells them how their tax dollars are spent. That means tools like the Comptroller’s database of vendors and camapign contributions is a good start.
The problem is that even in this area, Quinn and his recent hire of Jay Stewart suggest a strategy set for the 1970s and 1980s more than 2008. For example, most of the concern is over payroll and procurement. Important issues, but frankly the easy issues and issues that have limited impact on the average citizen. What’s hard? How do you find out the number of violations for a water pollution permit (NPDES)? There is federal data available, but the entire database is being reconstructed by the EPA and data is relatively slow to get there.
Why not have the IEPA simply put the information into a database and then have it available to the public in an online GIS set-up so people can search the information effectively. We have done this sort of thing with sex crime offenders, but finding the information from state government when it comes to pollution or nearly anything else, requires an FOIA.
That shouldn’t be the point. The point is to make the information available without having to go through some complicated process.
Or how do we improve payment to health care providers for state payments? Why not set up a secure web based application for claims submission with online tracking. While that won’t address the budget issues, it will shorten the bureaucratic delays.
Or even when the state has databases open to the public, why not integrate them as states have using Google’s technology. The problem with only focusing on the corruption issues trying to make government transparent is that it sells the technology short and doesn’t meet the needs of the average citizen on a daily basis.
The old line fight the machine types focus on corruption and that’s obviously a problem, but more to the point, the State of Illinois needs to make government work for its citizens to regain the trust of the people. That’ more than providing information about salaries or procurement, it’s about making informatino easily accessible across all state services to those who want access.
Pat Quinn is a big step up from Rod Blagojevich, but I am not seeing many signs that there will be systematic reformation of the way Illinois government interacts with its citizens and that is what is ultimately needed to repair Illinois politics.