LOBBYISTS CLEANING UP AT CITY HALL

• Contractors, suppliers and other companies use clout-heavy lobbyists to do business with City Hall. Surprisingly, at times, so does Mayor Daley.
• It's not exactly the same, says Langdon Neal, a Chicago lawyer with deep political ties whose Neal & Leroy law firm charged the mayor's Public Building Commission more than $400,000 last year to lobby City Hall for zoning changes and other land issues that needed to be dealt with to build schools, police stations, fire stations and libraries.
• The money for lobbying was a fraction of the $3.5 million that the Public Building Commission paid Neal and his law firm last year for legal services, which also included real estate appraisals and title searches. Since 2005, the commission -- which Daley controls but which technically is a government entity separate from city government -- has paid Neal and his firm a total of $12.8 million, records show.
• Neal is also a government official. He serves as chairman of the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners -- which, again, is a governmental body separate from the city -- at an annual salary of $91,223.

The rich get richer and we get to pay for it with taxes and fees. We take furlough days while the connected lobbyists take the money to the bank. The more you find out about city government the more you realize there are hundreds if not thousands of people like this getting filthy rich on the taxpayer dime. The troubling part about it is that people don't even see it as news anymore. We have come to expect it. The public is jaded by it and sees no avenue to change. With no one stepping up to run against Daley and the aldertheives, maybe they're right.