Illinois toll roads: the insularity of authority

This is the first of two articles on the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority.

Daniel and Shirley Karas bought their four-bedroom ranch house alongside the Tri-State Tollway in 1959. Back then the road was just two lanes in each direction, and it was distant enough so that the Karases could live with it. Then one spring day in 1984 a team of surveyors showed up.

Karas says he telephoned the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority to ask what was going on, but he only "got the old run-around." So he went to the authority's offices in Oak Brook. Someone stopped him at the front door and assured him nothing would happen.

Months passed. Eventually workmen arrived with front-end loaders and began moving tons of earth. Karas went to the construction

Illinois Toll Roads of the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority
Plaza No./Name	Passenger car toll	5-axle truck toll	Plaza No./Name	Passenger car toll	5-axle truck toll	Plaza No./Name	Passenger car toll	5-axle truck toll
1. South Beloit	.40	1.25	27. Willow Road	.30	.90	53. Spring Road	.40	1.25
3. South Rockord	.15	.50	29. Toughy Avenue	.40	1.25	55. Midwest Road	.40	1.25
5. Belvidere	.40	1.25	31. O'Hare-West	.40	1.25	57. Naperville Road	.15	.50
7. Marengo-Hampshire	.40	1.25	32. O'Hare-East	.40	1.25	59. Farnsworth	.30	.90
9. Elgin	.40	1.25	33. Irving Park Road	.40	1.25	61. Aurora	.40	1.25
11. Route 31	.30	.90	35. Cermak Road	.40	1.25	63. Route 31	.30	.90
13. Route 25	.30	.90	37. Interstate 55	.15	.50	65. DeKalb-East	.40	1.25
15. Route 53	.15	.50	39. 83rd Street	.40	1.25	66. DeKalb-West (main)	.95	3.00
17. Devon Avenue	.40	1.25	41. 163rd Street	.40	1.25	67. DeKalb (ramp)	.55	1.75
19. River Road	.40	1.25	43. Westbound I-80	.30	.90	69. Dixon	.95	3.00
21. Waukegan	.40	1.25	45. Eastbound I-80	.30	.90	70. Dixon Eastbound	.30	.90
23. Half Day Road	.40	1.25	47. Halsted Street	.15	.50	71. Dixon Westbound	.70	2.25
25. Deerfield Road	.40	1.925	51. York Road	.40	1.25

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trailer, and the foreman told him the tollway was to be widened and the Roosevelt Road exit ramp extended. It was the first Karas knew what was up.

The tollway authority finally acknowledged the plans. But it still refused to condemn and purchase Karas's property, in unincorporated Proviso Township, at fair-market value. Instead it would build a concrete fortification wall along the property line to support the additional lane above and adjacent to the Karas property.

For two years the Karases endured the loud noise, jarring vibrations and thick dust of heavy construction. When the work was done they stood face-to-face with a 14-foot, gray concrete wall only seven feet from their house. The first winter after the construction ended, a tollway snowplow passed by and dumped a small iceberg over the wall and onto Karas's new Ford Escort. The roof caved in. Karas was furious, to say the least. The tollway paid for that damage. But his house, whose value Karas once estimated at $120,000, is today worth far less.

Karas, 53, says the tollway authority "had no consideration for us, no consideration for the whole block, for two blocks of people whose houses are within 50 feet of that wall." Even the efforts of state Sen. Judith Baar Topinka (R-22, Riverside) were futile. "They are very independent," says Karas of the toll authority. "They listen to nobody. You'd think a state senator would have a little pull. Nothing. They didn't even want to listen to her."

Topinka became so exasperated she made an appointment with Gov. James R. Thompson to complain about the authority's executive director, Thomas H. Morsch Jr., a Thompson protege who had previously served on the governor's economic development staff and as director of Citizens for Thompson, the governor's campaign fund. Topinka reportedly asked Thompson to fire Morsch. That was nearly two years ago. Morsch is still the tollway head, and Topinka is still perturbed.

Conflicts between individuals and the faceless bureaucracy of government are commonplace, of course, and the inferences to be drawn from them have obvious limits. But few agencies of Illinois government are so roundly criticized on grounds of insularity and unresponsiveness as is the tollway authority.

To his credit, Morsch has actually eased much of the animosity toward the tollway authority that his predecessor, Gayle M. Franzen, freely engendered. Legislators say Franzen, who left the agency in 1984, had managed to alienate so many people within and outside government that at one point he was jeopardizing support for the north-south DuPage County tollway. (Its approval came as leverage in a wide-ranging compromise late in the 1984 session.)

Much of the Franzen furor arose from his refusal to accept public hearings prior to the authority's approval of toll increases in 1983. He finally succumbed to hearings but only after insisting that they would have no effect on the authority's ultimate decision, whereupon one suburban newspaper scorned him as "Gayle Antoinette."

Morsch says he is determined to be more accessible and more responsive than Franzen, and notwithstanding occasional disputes like the conflict with the Karases, there is evidence he is. For instance, while plans for the DuPage County tollway were still on the drawing board, Morsch arranged for public hearings in each community that would be affected by the construction and presence of the new road, and he went out of his way to take comments elicited by the hearings into account as engineers finalized the plans. Morsch also negotiated the terms of a touchy compromise with the Morton Arboretum that enabled the project to go forward.

Even so, in the eyes of many the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority betrays a hubris of mythological proportions. Franzen went so far as to assert that the tollway authority was essentially private, properly beholden first to bondholders and beyond the reach of elected policymakers. That astonished legislators who noted the authority's creation by Illinois statute, its governance by a board whose members are appointed by the governor upon the consent of the Senate, its

But the air of insularity that critics bemoan derives not so much from its day-to-day management as from its comfortable autonomy and serviceability to the politically powerful

routine hiring of politically favored job applicants, and its statutory compliance with examinations by the Illinois auditor general.

Indeed, the auditor general, Robert G. Cronson, asserts that the tollway authority is no more responsive under Morsch than Franzen. "It isn't making any progress because its attitude hasn't changed." Cronson says. "It still thinks it isn't a public agency."

Morsch has heard it before. Reaching for the Illinois Revised Statutes, he recites the authority's statutory description as "an instrumentality and administrative agency" of the state of Illinois. "In laymen's terms, I would call that a quasi-public agency," he says. He acknowledges that the authority is subject to the Illinois Open Meetings Act and Illinois Open Records Act, but he insists the agency is under no obligation to comply with the state's 10 percent minority set-aside quotas on contracts.

Cronson's audits have long faulted the tollway authority for its inadequate controls over cash receipts, an admittedly considerable challenge (and, it follows, all the more important a task) for an entity that takes in as much as $748,000 a day, most of it in nickels, dimes and quarters. "They keep telling us they're going to get new machines, but so far they haven't got them," Cronson says.

In addition, the auditor has complained for years that the authority was failing to deposit its revenues in accordance with provisions of its indentures with bondholders. Chicago Tribune reporter Neil H. Mehler, who covers the tollway authority, dismissed that criticism as overwrought concern over which

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drawer is which, but Cronson insists it was critical because the authority was neglecting to apply enough revenue toward debt retirement. "The effect of that was threefold," says Cronson. "One, it put off retirement of the indebtedness and thus served to extend the life of the tollway authority. Two, it benefited tollway users at the expense of bondholders. Three, it paved the way for a political and public policy decision [as to elimination of the tolls] to be undercut by a back-door financial sleight-of-hand." Morsch declined to comment specifically on any of the auditor's findings.

Morsch, 33, has come along fast. After graduating from Beloit College with an English major in 1977, he used a friendship with Samuel K. Skinner, even then a confidante of Thompson's, to land one of the few paying jobs in the governor's reelection campaign. By the next year he was running Citizens for Thompson. A stint on Thompson's executive staff followed, and when Franzen complained about lousy pay and left the tollway authority, Morsch got the nod at the same salary ($56,000) that Franzen was getting.

Since then Morsch's pay has increased dramatically. With a new raise, he is making $80,442, for a cumulative boost of 43 percent in just four years. Chafing at a question about the salary, he insists his peers in other agencies are making more. Then he adds: "It's hard to keep people like me in a job like this. I have had a lot of better offers."

The extent to which Morsch is actually in charge of the tollway authority is a point of debate, however. Close observers say Marc A. Hillier, the chief engineer who is resigning to join a consulting firm that does business with the authority, has always enjoyed greater influence than Morsch with the board of directors. Arthur W. Philip of Oak Brook, a board member, calls Hillier "very competent, very professional,'' and says that Hillier's long, detailed presentations often consumed most of the board meetings. "We ask him questions that we don't ask Morsch," said Philip. In fact, Hillier has controlled 40 percent of the authority's budget and earned almost as much, $78,500, as Morsch. (Other top managers and their salaries include Malcolm E. Erickson, chief legal counsel, $78,500; John W. Kiep, manager of finance, $68,500; and Richard W. De Robertis, manager of administration and budget, $70,000.) But the air of insularity that critics bemoan derives not so much from its day-to-day management as from its comfortable autonomy and service ability to the politically powerful. Well-placed legislators have long appreciated the tollway system's cache of unskilled jobs. Of the authority's approximately 1,700 employees, between 700 and 750 are full-time or part-time toll collectors who, under a new contract, make anywhere from $7.80 to $10.85 an hour. Sources say all of those jobs, along with perhaps 300 of the other positions, are politically controlled. Senate Minority Leader James "Pate" Philip (R-23, Wood Dale), whose brother is board member Arthur Philip, is reputed to fill 200 to 250 of the toll-collecting jobs alone, and House Transportation Chairman Al Ronan, a Democrat from Chicago, is said to control between 150 and 200. In addition, the minority leader can be expected to have a voice in the hiring of the 100 toll collectors for the new DuPage County toll road.

Patronage wears white collars as well as blue. Each member of the authority's board of directors receives $15,000 a year for attending two meetings a month. The meetings average 90 minutes or so, and the pay works out to roughly $415 an hour. It's no surprise that, of the hundreds of appointments a governor makes, the seats on the tollway authority are coveted the most.

Politics is paramount. At present none of the board's 11 members has any prior expertise in highways or in transportation generally; aside from on-the-job experience as board members and perhaps a business acumen, the only credential that any of them brings is a relationship with the governor or a legislative leader. Examples abound: Kim Fox is Morsch's successor as director of Thompson's campaign fund. Myron F. Weil is the father of Daniel W. Weil, a close personal friend and former law partner of the governor. Robert P. Neal is chairman of the Lake County Republican Central Committee. Frank A. Gesualdo is an unpaid fundraiser for Thompson. Daniel R. Fusco is a law partner of Senate President Philip J. Rock (D-8, Oak Park).

Contracts are another form of political favoritism that endows the tollway authority with special power. Former U.S. Sen. Adlai E. Stevenson III tried in vain to turn the authority's so-called pin-stripe patronage to his own advantage in the 1982 and 1986 gubernatorial races. Though he didn't get very far, newspapers have regularly reported the authority's no-bid contracts with favored law firms, bond houses and engineering consultants. As long as the tollway authority is so autonomous —it receives no money from the General Assembly — it can pay tribute to friendship with impunity.

Astonishingly, the tollway authority has even managed to garner fair ink from doing favors for the favored few. In February 1987 it restructured bonds to save $17 million in interest, and newspapers around the state obligingly printed a press release trumpeting the savings. Scarcely anyone asked just who realized the savings. Not taxpayers; the authority gets no tax revenue. Not motorists; tolls had risen in 1983, and no one was talking (yet, anyway) of raising them again.

Who then? The tollway authority itself. Who else? "Their friends, that's who!" says Tribune reporter Mehler. Stevenson called the authority's web of contracts and patronage "the buddy system," and Mehler suggests it deserves more scrutiny than it gets. Last year Mehler's colleague, Tribune reporter Ray Gibson, disclosed that 22 of the 28 engineering firms that received no-bid contracts for work on the new DuPage County tollway had contributed to the Thompson campaign kitty. Furthermore, reported Gibson, several of them did so "just before the contracts were awarded or after the [tollway] board approved changes that boosted payments to the firms."

Even so, Mehler wonders whether Illinoisans are numb to such disclosures, and he isn't alone. "That's the real story," Mehler says with an air of resignation, "but it's hard to get at, and nobody seems to care anyway."□

Thomas J. Lee, formerly political editor and editorial-page columnist of the Daily Herald in suburban Chicago, is presently a graduate student in public policy at the University of Chicago.

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