Top staff at the Illinois Tollway were left without clear direction on Tuesday after the agency’s board of directors made no decisions on an internal power struggle that has split the Tollway and left two high-ranking agency officials out of a job.
Members of the Tollway’s Board requested a special meeting after agency Executive Director José Alvarez asked them to referee a split between him and Board Chair and CEO Will Evans, who recently moved to consolidate more power in an agency reorganization.
The Tollway’s in-house drama threatens to slow or derail massive ongoing and future plans for road projects in its massive $14 billion multi-year Move Illinois infrastructure plan and drag Gov. JB Pritzker into the mire in an agency whose reputation he’d hoped to give a fresh start when he cleaned house at the beginning of his term.
Read more: Shakeup at Tollway consolidates more power to part-time chair, leaves pair of top officials behind
After a marathon five-hour executive session the board held behind closed doors at the Tollway’s headquarters on Tuesday — the first in-person meeting the board has convened since the pandemic began — board members were short on details about how they would proceed.
Board member Karen McConnaughay, a former GOP state senator from St. Charles, told NPR Illinois after Tuesday’s meeting that the board “did a lot of investigating” during the hours board members spent behind closed doors.
“[The Board] is going to be continuing its due diligence to address a number of issues that have been raised,” McConnaughay said. “And so there’s really nothing more to report until we’ve had an opportunity to complete that.”
Reorganization
Board members last month approved giving Evans the authority to restructure the Tollway’s executive staff, though it’s unclear how many understood they were voting for a new agency hierarchy that would leave Evans, who earns just over $36,000 annually as part-time chair, with more direct reports and management oversight than before.
After the restructuring, Alvarez, who earns $223,200 annually as executive director, is no longer in charge of top Tollway staff like the agency’s chief financial officer, who now directly reports to Evans. Alvarez also now has an additional layer of management between him and the Tollway’s top staff that used to report directly to him as the agency’s chief operating officer is Alvarez’s only direct report after the restructuring.
Evans on Tuesday refuted any characterization that his role as chair is now bigger than it was before restructuring.
“I’ve been involved with all my staff at the Tollway since I’ve been here,” Evans told NPR Illinois in a brief interview after the board meeting, quickly pointing to the Tollway’s bond rating upgrade from Moody’s Investors Service this week.
Tollway spokesman Dan Rozek on Monday had characterized some of the changes in the agency’s organizational chart — like having the Tollway’s CFO report directly to Evans — as codifying what had already been an informal arrangement.
“My role has not changed,” Evans said Tuesday. “That’s the confusion in all of this that the role of the chair has been changed. I haven’t changed the role of the chair. My job is to supervise all the functions of the Tollway and that’s what I’ve done for all the time I’ve been here.”
The chairman’s role at the Tollway was expanded during former Gov. Bruce Rauner’s administration, but Gov. JB Pritzker began his term in office cleaning house at the agency. The newly minted governor signed legislation to dissolve the old Tollway Board and codifying new ethics standards for the agency that’s seen its share of scandals dating back decades. The governor appointed a new Board of Directors to oversee the Tollway, including Evans.
Two months later, Alvarez was hired as executive director. Both were “strongly endorsed” by former Commonwealth Edison lobbyist John Hooker, according to reporting from the Sun-Times. Hooker last year was indicted for his alleged role in a bribery scheme attempting to curry favor with former House Speaker Mike Madigan, though he and many other influential lobbyists — including another former ComEd lobbyist he faces indictment alongside — recommended many hires to Pritzker as he set up a team after getting elected.
But tensions between Evans and Alvarez have grown since they began working together, finally spilling over into the boardroom recent weeks, first with a vote on reorganizing the agency and then Tuesday’s special meeting called by board members frustrated by having been asked to mediate the power struggle between the two men.
Evans stepped aside from the chair’s traditional role running the board meeting while the body was in its marathon five-hour executive session the board held behind closed doors at the Tollway’s headquarters on Tuesday — the first in-person meeting the board has staged since the pandemic began. Instead, another board member acted as chair during the meeting. But Alvarez, who is normally present during executive session, was not in the board room.
Neither McConnaughay nor Evans could say whether that internal investigatory mission would include bringing in third parties like outside counsel to help, but McConnaughay did say the board wants to settle the matter “sooner rather than later,” so long as the board members feel they’ve done “a thorough job of looking at everything that’s been raised.”
Terminated top staff
In the next few days after the reorganization, two of Alvarez’s former direct reports, Chief Administrative Officer Kimberly Ross and Chief Procurement Compliance Officer Dee Brookens separated from the Tollway. Rozek declined to confirm the pair were terminated from their jobs, but said they no longer work for the agency.
But in a letter sent to Pritzker over the weekend, State Rep. Kam Buckner (D-Chicago) wrote “to express [his] outrage” at the pair’s firing. Buckner, the chair of the Illinois House Black Caucus, said Ross and Brookens were removed from their positions in a manner that was both “unacceptable and unprecedented,” and alleged their firings were “an attempt to embarrass them and damage their professional reputations” — especially as Black women.
Buckner’s letter claims Ross and Brookens were notified of their firings not by Tollway officials, but by the Illinois State Police when authorities contacted them so they could collect Tollway property from their homes.
“Despite their significant contributions to the Tollway, these women were treated like criminals,” Buckner wrote. “I am told they still have not been given the dignity of a formal notification from the Tollway of their terminations nor did the Tollway’s Executive Director, Jose Alvarez, authorize or approve their terminations. These actions were authorized and directed solely by the Tollway’s Chairman/CEO and without prior communication with the Executive Director.”
Buckner told NPR Illinois that lawmakers should be involved in next steps for the Tollway in order to make sure the agency continues to move away from “political scandals of the past,” but noted that “vesting so much power in a part time board chair isn’t common at all.”
“There are fiduciary, administrative and contractual issues that need to be addressed with this functional redistribution of power and as the Black Caucus continues to advocate for diversity and inclusion in our state agencies and departments, my questions about the two women who seem to have been casualties of this reorganization are extremely important to our body,” Buckner said of his letter.
Buckner asked that Ross and Brookens’ terminations be rescinded and said it was “shameful” they were fired in the first place.
The Tollway declined to comment on the content of Buckner’s letter. Multiple requests for comment to Pritzker’s office were not answered.
Evans emphasized multiple times that the board doesn’t “discuss any personnel matters” publicly, and when asked about Buckner’s letter, Evans told NPR Illinois he hadn’t seen it.
“I don’t know anything about that,” Evans said. “I haven’t seen his letter. I’m totally unaware of it.”
Alvarez had recruited Brookens and Ross from the Chicago Housing Authority, where he also worked for five years prior to being tapped to run the Tollway. Brookens hired seven other former CHA colleagues to the Tollway, too, raising eyebrows after the Daily Herald reported on the trend last year. As the Tollway’s chief administrative officer, Ross earned $186,500 last year, while Brookens earned $192,000 last year as chief procurement compliance officer.
Brookens had been dinged — though not by name — by the state’s overarching Chief Procurement Officer last summer in a pair of reports finding the Tollway had acted illegally in not properly notifying two construction companies on separate projects that their bids were not adequate. Though both companies were the lowest bidders on the projects, neither met the Tollway’s so-called disadvantaged business enterprise utilization goals for the projects.
But the companies weren’t notified of their bids’ shortcomings, causing them to miss out on the opportunity to fix the bids for reconsideration for major construction on certain stretches of I-294, as well as road construction around Chicago Police Department's Canine Training Center in Des Plaines.
In both cases, Chief Procurement Officer for General Services Ellen Daley said she did not think the Tollway was acting in bad faith, but still determined the agency’s actions disadvantaged the bidders and “undermined the objectives and integrity of the procurement process,” according to copies of the reports obtained by NPR Illinois. Additionally, the companies’ protests to the contract award process delayed the projects’ start dates.
The Tollway, however, defended against the conclusions in Daley’s report in a hearing in front of the Senate Transportation Committee last summer, with a top Tollway attorney calling her opinion that the Tollway acted illegally was “unfair,” according to reporting from the Daily Herald.
Correction: A previous version of this story stated the Tollway was a party to the state's $45 billion infrastructure program Rebuild Illinois. It has a separate ongoing capital projects plan called Move Illinois.
