In
the wake of the impeachment and corruption conviction of former Illinois Governor
Rod Blagojevich, the Illinois Legislature created a five member Procurement
Policy Board to review and advise state agencies about public contracts where
potential conflicts of interest could arise. Governor Quinn appoints one
member, and each of the legislative leaders in the Illinois House and Senate
appoints a member. Now, in another display of the rampant arrogance which has
recently rocked the administration of our state’s biggest and most important
public institution of higher learning, University of Illinois officials have
chosen to ignore the Board and its contract review process in connection with
awards of $4.67 million in design contracts for the $70 million renovation of
the school’s 120 year old and partially closed crumbling Natural History
Building. The design contracts in question were awarded to BLDD architects, a
firm partly owned by the husband of University of Illinois Associate Director
of Planning Jill Maxley, who also formerly worked at BLDD.
Despite
the obvious conflict of interest in the awards of these 2010 and 2011 design
contracts, the university administration refused to alert the Procurement
Review Board about the situation until March, 2012. And now, in the face of a
unanimous Review Board vote recommending that these contracts be voided for
conflict of interest, has announced its intention to go ahead with the conflict
laden contracts anyway. Ben Bagby, our state’s chief procurement officer for
higher education, has boldly asked the Procurement Review Board to waive the
obvious conflict of interest. According to Bagby, “You take a situation and you
learn from it. Hopefully these things won’t have reoccurrence so things can be
looked at early on and ahead of the game.”
Bagby
protests too much, as The Bard says. In the past two years the Procurement
Review Board has looked over 678 potential procurement conflicts of interest,
and stung the submitting agencies with recommendations that contracts be voided
only four times. Three of those recommendations involved University of Illinois
contracts with BLDD, including the Natural History Building situation. In the
case of the Natural History Building the University claims it put up a so
called “Chinese Wall” to keep Jill Maxley out of decisions involving her husband’s
firm, but Jill Maxley was still copied on e-mails discussing the project while
the BLDD proposal was pending, and Maxley delegated the selection process to her
subordinate Tony Battaglia, whose brother in law works for BLDD. Battaglia
himself also plays in a band with BLDD employees.
University
officials claim they “didn’t realize” they needed to send the conflicts of
interest to the Procurement Review Board. For a University boasting one of the
state’s premiere law schools, this sort of thinking is unimaginable. There must
be dozens of law faculty members who could have been consulted about the issue
for free. The winds of arrogance in Champaign blow the stench of corruption all
across our state.
