The Todd squad - Appoints his cousin to $142,000-a-year job as chief financial officer while promoting CFO to new post with $70,000 raise

The Todd squad - Appoints his cousin to $142,000-a-year job as chief financial officer while promoting CFO to new post with $70,000 raise
February 7, 2007
BY STEVE PATTERSON Staff Reporter
Copyright by The Chicago Sun-Times


Cook County Board President Todd Stroger didn't conduct a nationwide search to fill the county's top financial post.

Instead, he tapped into his family tree.

These moves come as Stroger is proposing hundreds of millions of dollars in budget cuts that would slash police, prosecutors, health programs and nursing jobs.


'This is just obscene'
"This is stunning," said Sheilah Garland-Olaniran of the National Nurses Organizing Committee. "In the face of what he is doing to nurses, prosecutors, public defenders, sheriff's officers -- to do this is just obscene."
Stroger defended his promotion of Glaser -- the CFO for the past 12 years, who will make $225,000 a year in his new job -- saying he'll help lead a hospital system long mismanaged and drowning in debt.


'She has great credentials'
Asked whether Dunnings was the best person for the job "in all of Cook County, in all of Illinois, in all of the country," Stroger said yes. He touted her 1986 college grade-point average and master's degree from Northwestern, saying "if she was anybody else . . . you wouldn't ask me about it."
Dunnings has been the county's budget director and previously worked for the assessor's office.

"I don't care what her name is or what her bloodline is, she has great credentials," Stroger said at a news conference on the appointments.

But Commissioner Forrest Claypool, who ran unsuccessfully for board president in last year's Democratic primary, later called it "nepotism at its worst" and said Stroger's insistence on hiring friends and relatives adds to the county's reputation as "a fat, feather-bedded patronage den."

Dunnings insists she's qualified. "My mother told me a long time ago that Jesus walked our Earth, and he had critics," she said.

"I just happen to be his cousin," she added. "But that is not Donna Dunnings in totality."

Stroger also introduced his choice for comptroller, Joseph Fratto, who has spent 16 years running the Chicago Park District's pension fund.


Hires former boss
Fratto was finance chief for Ed Kelly's patronage-laden park district in the early 1990s. He was also Stroger's boss for a time at the park district and is the brother of investment banker Tony Fratto, who was comptroller under Mayor Jane Byrne and whose firm now does substantial city bond business.
As Stroger was asked about whether clout played a role in Fratto's hiring, Fratto shook his head and rolled his eyes. He declined a request to be interviewed.

spatterson@suntimes.com