SPRINGFIELD — Do Cook County Assessor Joe Berrios and President John F. Kennedy have anything in common? The Cook County Democratic Party chairman thinks they do.
After a Sun-Times report on the 13+ Berrios family members who are on the public payroll and earning more than $1.05 million per year (plus benefits and pension), the Chicago boss compared himself Wednesday to JFK employing his brother Robert as Attorney General.
Berrios has refused to answer questions about the revelations. Instead he played the race card and issued a statement saying, “Family members working in government isn’t new in Chicago or any other large city in the United States. You are picking on the Puerto Rican kid from Cabrini-Green who’s sitting alone at the lunch table while all the Irish kids sit together, laughing and grateful he’s there.”
The Cook County ethics board called for him to fire three family members who are on his staff and fined him $10,000 for violating the county’s anti-nepotism ban by hiring two of them — his son and sister — as soon as he became assessor in 2010.
Berrios has ignored the ethics board ruling, and an outside lawyer has been appointed to represent him in the case at taxpayers’ expsense. He argues that the ethics ordinance doesn’t apply to him or to other elected county officials beside members of the Cook County Board. ...More HERE
