The mayor has already admitted to some outlandish spending: $500,000 worth of rubber chickens, pens and backscratchers with his name on them, and putting 20 members of his family on the city’s payroll. Now, The Chicago Sun-Times is investigating as much as $120,000 at the Dog Stop, a hot dog stand operated by a city employee’s two children, which the city employee apparently has a financial stake in. Part of that $120,000 was a $26,000 park opening, catered by the hot dog stand.
If all that Mayor Larry Dominick took was $500,000 in rubber chickens and $120,000 in hot dogs, it might set a new bar for cheap corruption in the City. The last mayor was arrested for a $12 million insurance scam.
From the Huffington Post:
The Chicago Sun-Times has been keeping tabs on how Cicero town president Larry Dominick runs things in the Chicago suburb–and each investigation seems to be more bizarre than the next. The paper’s latest probe found that a Chicago hot dog stand has been well taken care of by Cicero’s taxpayers.
Dominick has already admitted to putting more than 20 family members on the town payroll, and tospending $500,000 on rubber chickens, pens and backscratchers with his name on them. Cicero officials defended the rubber chicken bill, saying they were promotional items for the town and that residents loved them. The Sun-Times, however, pointed out that Cicero didn’t bother with a bidding process for promotional items, instead doling out the contract to a business owned by a Cicero board member.
Read the full article here.