Preventable public corruption charges rock Dixon again

Corruption charges have rocked the city of Dixon once in the last year, but now a second scandal caused by a lack of online transparency has reared its ugly head.

Brian Costin
Director of Government Reform

Corruption charges have rocked the city of Dixon once in the last year, but now a second scandal caused by a lack of online transparency has reared its ugly head.

Dixon last made headlines when former Comptroller Rita Crundwell was convicted and sentenced to almost 20 years in prison for embezzling more than $53 million in taxpayer dollars.

Now Public Works Director Shawn Ortgiesen is under investigation for misusing a city-issued credit card.

From the Sauk Valley News:

“Public Works Director and City Engineer Shawn Ortgiesen has been placed on administrative leave with pay during an investigation of his use of city-issued credit cards, city officials said in a news release this afternoon.”

Allegedly, Ortgiesen charged $13,521.14 in personal expenses to a city-issued credit card over a time period from April 2007 to last month.

How could another public corruption case in Dixon go undetected for so long, especially after Dixon suffered through one of the worst public corruption scandals in Illinois history?

The answer may lie in Dixon’s continued lack of online transparency.

Shortly after the Rita Crundwell story broke the Illinois Policy Institute conducted an audit of Dixon’s website. We found that the city’s shocking lack of online transparency made it vulnerable to corruption.

In April 2012, Dixon failed our transparency audit with a score of 16.7 out of a possible 100 points, according to our recommendations outlined in the 10-Point Transparency Checklist.

Since then we’ve been working with the city of Dixon to help them become more transparent to restore public trust and ensure that it was less likely for something like this to happen again. It was the stated goal of the city to fully comply with the Institute’s 10-Point Transparency Checklist by Nov. 1, 2012.

While city officials have made some improvements, Dixon is still not up to speed, especially in the individual expenditures category. We recommend local governments post all individual expenditures online, including check registers and credit card expenses, for the last five years.

The city of Dixon posts annual expenditures for the last five years, but has only posted online one month of individual expenditures.

It should be no surprise that Dixon’s latest corruption issue is directly related to spending hidden from public view.

Recently, state Rep. Tom Demmer, R-Dixon, talked about the importance of online transparency as a corruption-fighting tool.

“Online transparency adds a layer of security to help prevent public corruption,” he said. “When the information is online anyone can have access to it. Many citizens have expertise in different fields of study and can examine public information and help identify potential red flags, but only if the information is online for everyone to see.”

When the information is widely available for public consumption it adds a layer of security to benefit the public. It helps deter corruption.”

I couldn’t agree more.

If a $53 million public corruption case can’t convince the city of Dixon to comprehensively embrace online transparency standards, nothing ever will. Stronger statewide online transparency standards must be enacted.

All taxpayers deserve to know how their tax dollars are being spent by public officials, especially in Illinois. After all, our state is ranked as the third most corrupt in the country.

Fortunately, a bill introduced by state Rep. Jeanne Ives, R-Wheaton, would improve statewide online transparency standards for local governments.

House Bill 3312 would require all local governments with budgets of more than $1 million to create a searchable expenditure and revenue database, among many other online transparency improvements. If this bill was enacted local governments would be required by state law to publicly disclose the types of actions that were committed in two corruption scandals in Dixon and many other public corruption cases across Illinois.

The bill has bipartisan support and unanimously passed a House committee in February.

We encourage you to contact your state legislators and ask them to co-sponsor the bill.