GRANT OVERSIGHT FALLS ON QUINN
When Gov. Pat Quinn decided in 2010 to spread $55 million around to dozens of small community groups as part of an anti-violence campaign, he should have known that such grass-roots efforts are highly vulnerable to abuse and mismanagement and must be strictly regulated.
But the governor failed to do so, possibly because he rushed the program out too quickly to gain favor with voters just weeks before a close election. Worse yet, maybe he was just a bad manager.
Either way, Quinn has no alternative now but to accept responsibility for the failures of his Neighborhood Recovery Initiative, as revealed in recent weeks in the Chicago Sun-Times and in a scathing state audit released in February.
It is not enough for the governor to say he was unaware of the problems until shortly before he shut the program down in the summer of 2012. As columnist Mark Brown pointed out Wednesday, Republican legislators raised questions about the program in early 2011.
And it is not enough for Quinn, saying his eyes have been opened, to call now for tougher regulations on how state grants are administered. The governor, who grew up in Illinois, surely is aware of the
The governor, who grew up in Illinois, surely is aware of the state’s long history of government contract abuse.
state’s long history of government contract abuse. Just last week, a former police chief in Country Clubs Hills, Regina Evans, was sentenced to five years in prison for stealing more than $900,000 in state grant money.
Irregularities in Quinn’s Neighborhood Recovery Initiative provide a case study of why strict policing of grass-roots grant programs is essential. One West Side nonprofit group, Chicago Area Project, which was supposed to oversee other organizations that received money through the state program, hired a man convicted of financial crimes to help decide who gets state grants. Not a good idea.
That man, Benton Cook III, also founded and ran Dream Catchers Community Development Corp. — one of the small community groups CAP gave money to and supervised. It begins to look like Cook, while wearing one hat, gave money to himself, while wearing another hat. Not a good idea. CAP, citing Cook’s conflict of interest, terminated the deal and took back a portion of the $3,300 it had paid out.
And now it turns out that his wife, Cook County Circuit Court Clerk Dorothy Brown, had a position with the state agency that doled out the money to CAP and her husband, according to a Sun-Times story published on Friday. The Sun-Times reports that Brown was chair of a budget committee through which all anti-violence grants passed. In Sept. 2012, when Cook was still working for CAP, Brown’s committee approved a $5 million grant for the organization, half of which was to go to the anti-violence grant program.
Not a good idea. In fact, a really bad one.
It’s encouraging that the feds and the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office are looking into the Neighborhood Recovery Initiative grant program. On Tuesday, state Republican lawmakers also successfully pushed to give a state audit panel authority to subpoena witnesses to testify about the grant program. That last bit strikes us as unnecessary electionseason overkill.
Grass-roots campaigns are inevitably loose and messy affairs, but they can be effective in combating grassroots problems. And when one community group fails to meet reasonable standards of conduct and performance, they are really failing and hurting all such groups. It feeds the perception of skeptics that grassroots groups are inefficient and ineffective.
With violence problems as large and pernicious as the ones afflicting Chicago, there’s not a dollar nor a moment to waste. It’s clear Gov. Quinn didn’t do enough to prevent this from happening.