Let's enforce good ethics at home

On October 30th, 2011, at the fundraiser that kicked off my 2012 re-election campaign, I spoke on the issue of ethics reform in DuPage County.  I mentioned specifically that there was a limit on campaign contributions to County Board Members and other elected officials, coming from companies that do business with the County.  I lamented that there was no ban on such contributions, and stressed that the Ethics Ordinance, as it stood then, did not go far enough.

This past Tuesday, the County Board voted 16-1 to adopt changes to its Ethics Ordinance that brought DuPage County into compliance with recently enacted State statutes on campaign contributions.  Campaign finance reform is a tricky field to discuss.  Many say it comes down to our most basic right as Americans: our right to free speech.  I believe our First Amendment rights are sacrosanct.  As an elected official, I will defend the individual's right to free speech until the day I die.  It's what I swore an oath to protect, and for which countless men and women have campaigned, fought, and died.  That's too much precious blood spilt to be subverted by a capricious law.

However, there then enters the idea of money as speech.  The consensus on my side of the aisle seems to be that a donation of money is not an inviolate expression of free speech, especially when that money comes from corporations, lobbyists, and PACs.  Money is a factor in our political process that absolutely must be regulated if we want to keep corruption out of government, and prevent any one citizen or group of citizens from having an undeserved excess of influence in matters of governance.  Government should not be for sale to the highest bidder.  After all, how can one citizen have "more" free speech than another citizen?  How can speech have a monetary value?  How can corporations be considered "people" under the law, such that their money is as immune from regulation as an individual's?

I was working with this mindset when I sat on the original Ad-Hoc Ethics Committee of the County Board in 2009; this is the committee that drafted the original Ethics Ordinance that the County Board adopted.  In those days we were operating in a vacuum when it came to State regulations on campaign contributions.  Therefore, we set out to create our own standards of conduct for County officials.  I and a few of the other Board Members wanted to ban contributions from any businesses on the County's payroll.  We didn't constitute a majority.  Instead, the ordinance that was approved merely limited donations from such businesses to $1000 in aggregate per year.  While I felt this didn't go far enough, I voted in favor of the ordinance as a whole because, frankly, it was better than nothing.

When the State passed its own ethics law, the lay of the land apparently changed.  DuPage County's Ethics Advisor contacted the Board about changes he felt needed to be made to our ordinance to make it effective under the new State law.  The Chairman of our Finance Committee created a sub-committee to review our current ordinance and propose such revisions.  I was proud to serve on this sub-committee.

DuPage County is not a home-rule unit of government.  Our residents don't want us to be, and I have always campaigned on the promise that I will not support any initiative to make us a home-rule government.  I have not changed my stance on this, and I'm duty-bound to represent my constituents' wishes on this matter.  However, one disadvantage to not being home-rule is that our original ethics ordinance could not be applied to people who are not County elected officials - that is to say, we could not regulate contributions being made to people running for County office.  In a way, our original ordinance created an uneven playing ground in elections, in that the incumbents had to follow rules that challengers did not.

I have always felt that incumbents have a natural advantage in every election, though, and statistics always bear this out.  If you ask any citizen what their biggest problem with politics and politicians today is, the odds are they will tell you something along the lines of, "The people who make the rules of the game make them to benefit themselves."  With this in mind, I had absolutely no problem enforcing regulations on myself and my colleagues that I could not enforce on someone outside the government.

Now, however, we have this State law which sets the following guidelines:  first, that no candidate can collect more than $5,300 from any individual during an election cycle - that could be two or four years, depending on your office; second, that no candidate can collect more than $10,500 from any corporation, labor organization, or association during an election cycle; and third, that no candidate can collect more than $52,600 from any other candidate or any PAC during an election cycle.  These limits took effect on July 1st, and they affect incumbents and challengers equally.  These revised levels are included in the revisions to DuPage's ethics ordinance.  I voted for these changes.

I didn't want to.  As I saw it, these changes were a step backwards from the levels we had set four years ago.  Now, in a four-year election cycle, an individual who receives money from County work can turn around and donate $1300 more than before to a candidate of their choosing - potentially, one of the very people who voted on the contract that gave them that job in the first place, in a maneuver called "pay for play."  It's criminal politics, and I hate it.  One of my colleagues asserted that pay for play has not and will not occur in DuPage County, because we have good people here, not like the way things are over in Cook County.  I don't subscribe to such regional factionalism, and I'm a DuPage County boy, born and raised.

Our own State's Attorney's Office presented their analysis of the situation to us.  Because DuPage County is not home rule, we have no authority to enforce our own limits on campaign contributions.  We have to abide by the State's limits as a matter of respecting the State Constitution and Dillon's Rule, which is a legal concept established by various examples of case law since shortly after the Civil War.  Dillon's Rule essentially asserts that local governments only have those powers expressly given to them by the States that create those governments.  Therefore, because the State of Illinois did not give us, DuPage County, the power to regulate our own elected officials' and candidates' campaign contributions, we cannot do so - not that we don't have to, but we simply cannot.  We could make all the contribution limits we like, but under State law, they would be impossible to enforce.

Do I trust the information given to me by the State's Attorney's Office?  I must.  These are people who are solely tasked with advising County government on legal matters.  If they give us incorrect advice, they're being negligent of their jobs.  So, above all the other attorneys and scholars who might have opinions on this matter, I felt obligated to treat the word of our State's Attorney's Office as indisputable fact.  And given that I prefer, as a legislator, to base my decisions on facts, I felt I simply had to vote the way I did, so as to respect my oath as a legislator and the legal supremacy of the State of Illinois.  I agreed with many of my colleagues that the State's Attorney's analysis should be tendered to the County Board in writing so that it would be on the record for our citizens.  But the motion to postpone our consideration of the new Ethics Ordinance until we received such a letter was defeated, 11-6.  Therefore, we had to vote on Tuesday.

However, I want to make something very clear.  During the proceedings of our Ethics Sub-Committee, and again at the Finance Committee, I stated my opinion that DuPage County should seek to acquire the power to regulate our own campaign contributions from the State.  Originally, I wanted this because the playing field was definitely uneven under the old ordinance.  I certainly didn't want to see a candidate for office in this County rise to success on a treasure chest full of taxpayer dollars.  I wanted us to be able to regulate unelected candidates just as effectively as we regulate ourselves.  And when the new State law took effect, I did not want to see our standards of conduct drop.  I wanted to instead seek the power to continue our standards of excellence here.  DuPage County has long prided itself as being a leader among local governments in standards of transparency, accountability, and ethics and  I did not want us to recede from that progressive enterprise.  Therefore I was gladdened when several of my colleagues from both parties spoke in favor of my idea.

I promise to begin work through our Legislative Committee to seek this new authority - and only this authority, without petitioning for home rule.  We cannot expect any possibility of action in the State General Assembly until their new regular session begins next January.  Once we acquire this authority, I will return to the Finance Committee with revisions to our Ethics Ordinance that will, at the very least, restore our original campaign contribution limits.  My hope, however, would be to end all possibility of pay for play entirely.

In any case, I have never and will never take any contribution from a company that does business with DuPage County.  That is an assurance you can have in writing.