“There is some understanding by the public that competitive salaries are necessary to draw good people to government,” wrote the Chicago Sun-Times late last month, as the stories were unfolding, “but that doesn’t quite square” with Rauner’s talk of shared sacrifice to address the state’s fiscal problems.
“So then we should expect six-figure salaries to keep rolling in?,” asked the paper. “Or will they too be asked to share in the sacrifice?”
The imagery of patronage hires and inflated executive salaries looks especially bad when “they’re trying to sell people on the need for some dramatic cuts” in other areas of government, said David Yepsen, director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
“The optics of this look bad,” Yepsen said. Even if the higher pay for staff and the rest are justifiable, he said, “they have got to be sensitive to how this stuff looks.”
While none of the well-publicized controversies has proven debilitating to the new administration, there are already signs that they may have cut short the honeymoon that new governors generally enjoy from the voters.
A poll released last week by Chicago-based Ogden & Fry found Rauner with a 43 percent approval rating after one month in office. That’s a 9-point drop from another poll taken in mid-January, right after Rauner assumed office.
Read the entire story by clicking on the following: Rauner defends aides’ pay while ripping state salaries : News
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