Chicago Tribune Editorial

$$ down the drain

March 24, 2010

It's good that taxpayers here enjoy dumping billions of dollars into redundant or unneeded local governments: Illinois has 7,000 of them, far more than any other state. Many are creations of state government, which means lawmakers could snuff them out and remove some of the tax burden that falls on Illinoisans. This page has written often about the need to sunset or consolidate smaller units of government to save money, yes, but also to increase transparency.

State legislators can give this overdue mission a kick-start by converting the DuPage Water Commission, which purchases and pipes Lake Michigan to two dozen county communities, into a county department. Consider:

In 2007, the DuPage Water Commission rebated $40 million to the municipalities it serves and embarked on an ambitious — and costly — capital improvement plan.

That level of spending was high, but it seemed that the commission could afford the outlays. It had an enviable $109 million in reserve funds.

There was just one problem. Former financial administrator Max Richter had overstated the size of the reserve fund by, gulp, $40 million. Why didn't anyone catch the accounting error? Richter operated with almost no oversight.

General Manager Robert Martin, who resigned in mid-March with a six-month severance valued at $90,000, was too busy "putting out fires," according to a recent audit of the commission, to watch over Richter.

Commissioners Allan Poole, who discovered a $15 million accounting error by Richter in 2006, and Liz Chaplin, a County Board appointee, tried to raise an alarm numerous times about the opacity of the commission's finances. But Poole and Chaplin were ignored on a board cleaved by a rivalry between municipal appointees and county appointees.

So the commission blithely decided to spend money that, we know today, it didn't have. Big problem. Guess what comes next:

Water rates now are set to rise 21 percent in May. The commission took out a $30 million loan in December. And it may have to borrow an additional $40 million to pay for the infrastructure upgrades it can no longer afford.

In other words, DuPage taxpayers are stuck with the ripple effects. "There's not accountability. There's not transparency. It's just not appropriate in this day and age," says State Sen. Dan Cronin, R-Elmhurst.

Cronin, the Republican candidate for DuPage County Board chairman in the November election, recently introduced a bill in Springfield to convert the Water Commission into a county department.

That's a smart idea. Folding the commission would cut costs and bring greater accountability and oversight.

Laurence Msall, president of the Civic Federation of Chicago, says doing away with an independent DuPage Water Commission is long overdue: "What might have made sense when they were first establishing which municipalities would have access to Lake Michigan water — the model that was used to start up the commission — is no longer the most efficient method for operating this government function."