Red Burchyett is getting his wheelchair and
his job back.
That’s good news for Burchyett, who was
laid off several weeks ago from his mechanic’s job at the
Illinois Department of Natural Resources. Ten years ago, the state
bought him a customized wheelchair that helped him do his job by
raising him to a standing position. When he was laid off, the state
told him he couldn’t take his wheelchair with him.
The Southern
Illinoisan of Carbondale published a
story about Burchyett at the time, but nothing happened. Last
Friday, the ChicagoTribune ran a piece about the incident, and by 8:30 that
very morning, Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s office had issued a
press release announcing that DNR had been ordered to give
Burchyett both his wheelchair and his old job.
I guess we know which newspaper the governor
reads.
I’m happy for Burchyett, but the
problems at DNR go far deeper than one man’s travails.
The director of DNR is former state Rep. Joel
Brunsvold, a truly good guy who has wanted to run the agency for as
long as I can remember. When Blagojevich was elected, Brunsvold
finally got his chance. But it hasn’t turned out the way
he’d hoped.
George Ryan’s early-retirement program
for state employees slashed DNR’s payroll to the bone, then
Blagojevich cut its spending even further in an attempt to help
balance the state budget.
Brunsvold was even ordered by the
governor’s office to fire one of his best friends after he
publicly complained about some of the cuts. And a longtime DNR
budget officer who was loyal to the agency was forced out and
replaced by someone handpicked by the governor’s budget
director. The result is that the governor’s office can now
raid DNR’s budget almost at will. In the past two years
alone, DNR’s employee headcount has been slashed from 2,300
to 1,700, with 87 laid off in January alone.
Why should you pay attention to any of this? After
all, they’re just state bureaucrats. Nobody wants to pay higher
taxes.
Here’s why. The Department of Natural
Resources manages state parks, wildlife areas, and open spaces.
Each generation is entrusted with maintaining and improving these
precious resources before passing them along — and
we’re not doing a very good job.
Many of the local and regional site managers
have been replaced with Democratic political hacks who have little
or no experience. Skilled, experienced managers might be able to
juggle things long enough to ride out the budgetary storm. The
hacks have neither the skill nor the experience to keep things on
an even keel. Sportsmen and conservationists throughout the state
are rightly concerned that we’re heading for an implosion.
Until the Tribune ran the story about Burchyett, the governor
had shown little interest in the agency, other than as a source of
cash for the rest of his ever-increasing budget and a source of
jobs for his political supporters.
Last year, he tried to purge the agency of
scientists and trained field researchers before the General
Assembly stopped him in his tracks.
The governor has yet to even visit a state
park, depending on the yes-men and women he’s surrounded
himself with to reassure him that everything is fine.
Until the Tribune took up Burchyett’s cause, the stock
response from the governor every time somebody complained about the
DNR cuts was to say, essentially, “I’ve got other
priorities.”
Bob Grosso knows about those
“priorities.” Grosso retired last year after 31 years
at DNR, the last several as the site superintendent of Illinois
Beach State Park. Grosso worked for Democrat Dan Walker when he was
first hired, and he voted for Blagojevich in 2002. But Grosso told
the Chicago Sun-Times in December that Blagojevich was “dismantling
the department” and replacing hardworking employees with
Democratic county party chairmen so that he could “build a
patronage army in Illinois.”
Unlike the governor, Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn is an
outdoors enthusiast who often visits state parks and wildlife
areas. Quinn wants to end a $25 million state subsidy to mostly
out-of-state companies that extract methane gas from landfills and
use that money to help preserve and improve the state’s parks
and areas along Illinois’ waterways.
It’s a good idea, and even if it’s
rejected by the Legislature (as has happened many times before), it
is a good start in the debate. Preserving our state’s natural
heritage requires a lot more than issuing a feel-good press release
about returning a man’s wheelchair.
This article appears in Feb 3-9, 2005.
