Will County Gazette

House GOP Floor Leader Mark Batinick wonders if and when real ethics reform will come to Springfield.

“I don’t know what it is going to take for the General Assembly to take this seriously,” Batinick said in a post to Facebook. “I’ve filed several bills that the majority party never lets move. It is seriously frustrating.”

Batinick isn’t alone in feeling less than satisfied about Springfield’s direction.

Legislative Inspector General (LIG) Carol Pope recently announced she is stepping down at least partly because she doesn’t sense there to be a true commitment to change.

“This last legislative session demonstrated true ethics reform is not a priority,” Pope noted in her resignation letter. “The LIG has no real power to effect change or shine a light on ethics violations; the position is essentially a paper tiger.”

A former prosecutor and judge, Pope was ushered into power in 2019 amid much fanfare, marking the first permanent inspector to be appointed in the post in four years. Her installation came at a time when Springfield was being rocked by the contents of an open letter circulated through the Illinois Capitol demanding an end to a culture of disrespectful treatment of women.

Pope, who plans to leave on Dec. 15, said she finds an ethics reform bill that now sits on Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s desk to be counterproductive “by requiring the filing of a complaint before the LIG can undertake an investigation.”

Senate Bill 539 would also prohibit the LIG from launching an investigation based solely on public allegations raised in the news media.

To have any chance of being effective, Pope said the position needs more independence, with the LIG having the power to issue subpoenas and reports without first being required to get the approval of the bipartisan Legislative Ethics Commission.

While Pope told The State Journal-Register she holds out hope the General Assembly will be able to find a quality replacement for her, she cautions “ I think it will be difficult to find someone of high integrity to take the job because of the limitations in the statute.”

With a recent University of Illinois at Chicago survey finding the state to be the second most corrupt in the country at an annual cost to taxpayers of more than $550 million, Batinick recently called for major change.

"There's an overarching yet constantly ignored need for change and reform in Illinois,” he said during a recent news conference. “We saw in November when voters overwhelmingly said stop trying to raise taxes to fix the problems the general assembly created. We see it every day when our friends, family, neighbors continue to leave Illinois for states with more opportunity and an honest government."

Batinick said a flood of reform bills have recently passed out of committee only to stall at some other point or time.

"Nothing contains the substantive reforms that we need to take and move the state forward,” he said. “Issues like pension and property tax reform which affect our constituents on a day-to-day basis. We need to take legislation addressing these issues up on the House floor to solve our state's largest problems."