By Dave Dahl
SPRINGFIELD – The latest curve in the Pritzker administration’s path toward replacing Stateville and Logan prisons is this glitch: not enough lawmakers showed up to make a quorum Friday.
Thus, the Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability could not send the governor a recommendation – which would be non-binding, anyway.
State Sen. Dave Koehler (D-Peoria), a co-chair of COGFA, dismissed the attendance issue as a matter of people having outside lives, including one member welcoming a new grandchild. He expects the administration to move forward without an advisory recommendation from COGFA, which held hearings in Joliet Tuesday and Lincoln Thursday.
State Sen. Don DeWitte (R-St Charles) said this work should have been done while lawmakers were in session the first five months of the year. “Instead,” he said, “what we saw was another rushed process with an agency, the Department of Corrections, that has not, despite our asking, been able to provide any real detail regarding a plan.”
Koehler added that, done properly, “this becomes something that we can all get behind and that we can make Illinois kind of the model for what 21st Century corrections ought to be.”
But not even Koehler, the only Democrat attending Friday’s meeting, would jump aboard Pritzker’s agenda. “I support the concept of having new, state-of-the-art facilities,” Koehler said, “but I want to actually talk about a plan, and I want to offer to the department and to the administration that once a plan is developed, COGFA can become a very useful vehicle in disseminating that information, being transparent; we can put it on the web site.”
Dave Dahl can be reached at [email protected].
