Campaign for 99th District seat in full swing
Tony DelGiorno, the sole Democrat to defeat a Republican for a seat on the Sangamon County board in 2012, is hoping history will repeat itself this fall as he faces Rep. Sara Wojcicki Jimenez in the 99 th House district.
No Democrat has held the seat since 1992, when Vickie Moseley, who’d never before run for office, shocked experts by defeating a sitting Sangamon County sheriff despite a huge financial disadvantage. She won the seat, in a district crafted by Republicans, after redistricting forced incumbent Democrat Mike Curran into a different district, where he held a seat until 1994, when he stepped down after a dozen years in the General Assembly to run for mayor of Springfield.
“There’s a history of Democrats being able to piece this together and hold a seat for awhile,” DelGiorno says. “This is probably the first real race for this seat we’ve seen in nearly 20 years.”
The seat came open when Raymond Poe, who defeated Moseley in 1994 and won election thereafter, resigned last year to become director of the state Department of Agriculture. Jimenez, a former television journalist who was working as chief of staff for Diana Rauner, Gov. Bruce Rauner’s wife, was appointed to the seat by Sangamon County Republicans with the governor’s blessing.
The candidates agree that the state budget is the top issue.
“I think we’re in crisis in our state,” Jimenez says. “The number one priority of people – this happens to be my priority, too – is getting a balanced budget. … Number two is figuring out how to work together.”
DelGiorno, a lawyer, says the governor is an issue in the race. As Rauner’s preferred candidate, Jimenez will have more money, he says, and the key to victory will be hard work. He points to last spring’s Republican primary that pitted Bryce Benton, a state trooper backed by Rauner, against incumbent state Sen. Sam McCann, who held on to his 50 th District seat despite the governor’s backing.
DelGiorno criticizes Jimenez for voting against budget bills and a measure that would have required binding arbitration in contract negotiations between the state and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which represents more than 35,000 state workers. Rauner, he says, should use his line-item authority to amend budgets instead of simply vetoing them and forcing an impasse.
“All Rep. Jimenez has done is continue to enable that behavior (by Rauner) with her votes,” DelGiorno charges. “She’s not into governing. … This is an opportunity to tell Rauner, ‘Enough is enough.’” DelGiorno says the state could solve its fiscal woes by passing a graduated income tax, which would require a constitutional amendment. If that were done, he says, the state would not have to extend the sales tax to services or start taxing retirement income, which is now fully exempt from income taxes.
Jimenez says balancing the state budget will require a mix of cuts, additional revenue and reforms, particularly in the state procurement system, which she says should be streamlined to make it easier to obtain goods and services. She is calling on the House and Senate to convene at least one day a month until a budget is passed, a proposal that her opponent dismisses as a gimmick. Jimenez says that meeting once a month is better than not meeting at all.
“There’s an absolute zero percent chance that we can move the ball forward to pass appropriations for a full year or reform or anything else that folks want to talk about if we’re not in session,” Jimenez says. “We can work in a bipartisan way. We can come together on some of these issues.”
As an example of bipartisan legislation, Jimenez cites a six-month stopgap budget and school funding bill approved in June as well as funding for higher education approved last spring.
Jimenez rejects any suggestion that she is beholden to Rauner. She points out that she pushed to reopen the Illinois State Museum, which reopened this summer after Rauner closed it nearly a year ago, and also voted for an automatic voter registration bill that the governor vetoed.
“It can be a little insulting when people try to characterize me that way,” Jimenez says. “People would describe me as a strong personality who would really go to all ends to do the right thing. There have been several instances where the governor and I have not agreed.”
While Rauner has taken a wait-and-see approach, Jimenez has called on auditor general Frank Mautino to answer questions about his campaign spending and says that he should step down until a federal criminal probe is complete.
“I just thought, given the nature of the job, I felt that he should, until we can get through this investigation and all that, he should probably step aside,” Jimenez says.
DelGiorno, however, says Mautino should not be forced to leave his post.
“Being an attorney, it’s always been hammered into me and anyone else who believes in the Constitution that you’re innocent until proven guilty,” DelGiorno said. “I would prefer that we allow the investigation to play itself out.”
As a member of the minority party on the Republican-dominated county board, DelGiorno says that it’s tough to push things through, but he says that his “no” vote on the county budget in 2013 helped instill more transparency in the budgeting process. He had complained that board members received the proposed budget two days before the final vote, which was not sufficient time to review the document.
DelGiorno calls Rauner a “corporatist” who would fire all state workers if he could, which isn’t the right way to run a state. At the same time, he distances himself from Chicago Democrats. Moderate Republicans, he says, could prove key in the race.
“It’s good and fine to support a Democrat in this race because I’m not going to be the firebrand liberal that a lot of Democrats are caricatured as being,” DelGiorno said.
Contact Bruce Rushton at [email protected].
