Today’s Chicago Tribune has an interesting and provocative op-ed by Kristen McQueary (who is on the paper’s editorial board), raising some good points about the conduct of new Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza.
Mendoza, a Democrat, won election last November over a Republican, Leslie Munger. She has since aggressively used the position to argue in favor of her own party, and against the Republicans.
McQueary asserts:
“… Since election night, she has blamed Rauner for all of state government's dysfunction. Mendoza takes aim through long, invective-filled news releases, biting television and radio interviews, commentaries submitted to area newspapers and wherever there's a podium and a microphone. Pull her string and away she goes. …”
However, in McQueary’s argument, there is a dog that didn’t bark.
McQueary claims that “… The Illinois Constitution assigns the comptroller two primary duties: take in the bills and pay them. …” From there, McQueary lists a series of examples how Mendoza has behaved more as a political operative than a dispassionate, impartial financial official.
Trouble is, taking in bills and paying them are far from the only duties assigned to the Comptroller. And those other duties are actually material to, and consistent with, McQueary’s argument.
The Comptroller doesn’t just pay the bills. The Comptroller is the principal financial reporting officer for the State as well. On March 7, Comptroller Mendoza issued the annual Comprehensive Annual Financial Report for the State of Illinois.
Also on March 7, Comptroller Mendoza issued a press release together with that report. It was titled “Comptroller Mendoza releases comprehensive overview of Illinois’ disastrous finances.” The press release included:
“Three years ago those bond rating agencies said the state was on the right track out of this mess. But they now universally point to Governor Rauner’s failure to propose a balanced budget – or to hold budget proposals hostage to passage of his various unrelated pet projects – as the main cause of Illinois’ downward financial spiral … it looks like Governor Rauner is trying to drive our State into bankruptcy,” she said.”
Putting aside valuable questions about the validity of Mendoza’s argument, it is worth noting this item could have played a prominent role in McQueary’s op-ed. And it didn’t even get mentioned.
Having a pronounced partisan as the lead financial reporting officer for the state may not be the best way to inspire trust, in a state that ranked at the bottom of the 50 states in trust in state government in a recent Gallup Poll.
But the fact that searching the Chicago Tribune website for “comprehensive annual financial report” finds no coverage of the results in that recently-released report doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, either.
Instead, that word search at the Tribune website gets you a lot of propaganda like this.