Getting away from it all on your dime

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Chicago Sun-Times
By Steve Patterson, Staff Reporter
February 25, 2008

Hospital chief gets paid $391,000 but uses county car and county-paid gas to drive to his Michigan family home every weekend

Week after week, Cook County hospital chief Dr. Robert Simon painfully tells County Board members there's no waste and no frills in his bare-bones hospital operation.

It's the same argument used by his boss, County Board President Todd Stroger, in asking taxpayers to cough up more to fund county government.

Yet, on weekends, Simon uses taxpayer money to drive his county-issued car 320 miles, round-trip, to and from his family home.

It's the kind of perk few commissioners, or anyone else, knew about until the Chicago Sun-Times raised the issue this weekend.

The Ford Crown Victoria was parked, as it has been on several weekends, in the driveway at his spacious Richland, Mich., lakefront home.

Simon, who was making $391,550 when he was appointed to the job on an interim basis in December 2006, threatened to have a reporter arrested for trespassing and said questions about his use of a county vehicle would be answered by a spokesman.

In a statement issued later, Simon said, "There are occasions when I've driven my county-issued vehicle" to see his family, but he insisted he pays for the car's maintenance.

After the Sun-Times questioned his use, he said that he is now "in the process of reimbursing the county for any gas costs associated with my limited personal use of the vehicle."

'320 miles' worth of waste'

In a statement, Stroger defended Simon's work ethic and said he "does this for the love of the county and at the expense of his family," adding praise for Simon's willingness to reimburse taxpayers for gas use on personal business.
"The taxpayers and I expect no less," he said.

But as Stroger pushes for a vote today on his plan to raise the county's sales, parking and gasoline taxes, critics say Simon's lengthy weekend jaunts at taxpayer expense fly in the face of claims the county is operating as efficiently as it can.

"We always hear there's zero, zilch waste, and we've pinched every penny, so let us raise your taxes 300 percent," said Jay Stewart of the Better Government Association. "But it sounds like there's 320 miles' worth of waste going on every weekend that you could cut without impacting medical services.

"Before you go to taxpayers and ask them to do the hard thing and pay more, you darned well better demonstrate you've looked everywhere to cut," said Stewart.

Simon, who was the personal physician to the late former board President John Stroger and has long-standing ties to Stroger's political machine, has worked for the county since 1988.

When he was appointed to the top job, a county spokesman said Simon had plans to move soon to Cook County.
Simon stays in Chicago during the week, but he and his family continue to make their home north of Kalamazoo, Mich.

'What's that doing here?'

Commissioner Mike Quigley, who has pushed to improve the county's vehicle use policy, called Simon's car use "poor judgment" and said it backs his idea of putting GPS tracking devices -- or at least county logos -- on all non-law-enforcement vehicles.

"Then, if someone in the middle of Michigan sees a car with 'Cook County' on it, they might say, 'What's that doing here?'" Quigley said. "That might deter some of this."