With the 2004 election just around the corner, the ire of Illinois pols and pol watchers is zeroing in on U.S. senator Peter Fitzgerald. “A lot of us helped him win his election four years ago,” U.S. congressman Ray LaHood, a Republican, complained late last year to the Sun-Times. “And frankly, we haven’t heard from him since.” LaHood won’t challenge Fitzgerald for the Republican Senate nomination in March 2004, but he hopes someone else will.
Anyone who can offend or neutralize so many people has to be doing something right.
A year later Fitzgerald again raised Republican hackles when he criticized state government loans to politically connected downstaters William Cellini and Gary Fears for luxury hotels in Springfield and Collinsville. Republican governor Jim Thompson and Democratic state treasurer Jerome Cosentino had OK’d the loans in 1982 as part of the Illinois Insured Mortgage Pilot Program. Unlike most loans under this program, they weren’t promptly repaid. In 1990, just before Thompson and Cosentino left office, they “restructured” the loans, renegotiating the terms in what might be tactfully described as an unconventional way–among other things, they lowered the interest rate, gave the borrowers an extra 15 years to pay, and agreed to apply payments directly to the principal.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
No realistic observer thinks Topinka could have gotten the full $40 million, but some think she could have done better than $10 million. The borrowers obviously believe the settlement was a good deal, since they’ve invested seven years’ worth of attorneys’ fees in an effort to preserve it. So at this point, Fitzgerald’s skepticism about Thompson’s restructuring and Topinka’s settlement seems justified–at least from the point of view of the people back home.
“Hotelgate” turned out to be a classic Fitzgerald issue: it’s populist in spirit, it turns on mind-boggling technicalities, and it throws mud on powerful people who might otherwise have helped him move up.
“The mere fact that a project is located somewhere within the state of Illinois does not mean that it is inherently meritorious or necessarily worthy of support,” Fitzgerald wrote to Speaker Dennis Hastert, with more honesty, and more hauteur, than politicians usually allow themselves. Just in case anyone missed the point, Fitzgerald’s communications director told the newspaper Roll Call that the delegation’s missive was a “mega hog letter” embodying the kind of pork-barrel spending Fitzgerald had been elected to stop, not support.
Rarely has Fitzgerald prevailed in his crusades. His legislative successes have tended to be smaller, like his first freestanding bill to become law–a 2000 measure requiring that food stamps issued in electronic form (known as electronic benefit transfer accounts) be usable in more than one state, for the convenience of Illinois recipients who shop in neighboring states.
