Former Harrisburg mayor Eric Gregg (March 2011-July 2013), who resigned his position to go on to make enemies at the governor’s office, has announced he’s seeking the office of mayor next year.
Eric Gregg
HARRISBURG – The old adage “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” has come round to haunt Harrisburg voters this election season…and plenty of them are hoping that what they’re seeing is actually a joke.
But it probably isn’t.
Given the instability of former Harrisburg mayor Eric Gregg, that factor of ‘instability’ is still giving many in the ’burg hope, but some of that began fading as soon as people started reporting that Gregg was openly telling folks he was going to run for mayor again in 2019 and was handing out campaign material.
Gregg was elected to the office in 2011, and basically did nothing for the next two years except drink, fall sick from it, and beg local politicians for a shot at his next step up the political ladder.
In May of 2012, when everyone was feeling sorry for him over his self-imposed “illness” and the fact that Harrisburg had been ransacked by a tornado (notwithstanding that it was very nearly 100 percent Gregg’s fault that the city almost missed out on getting assistance from the state and from FEMA), Gregg was able to get local bigwigs to twist the arms of state officials sufficiently to get him appointed to the Illinois Prisoner Review Board (PRB).
He went on from there to preside over an audit of city finances that showed inexplicable deficits that to this day aren’t fully explained, in both the emergency management/ESDA fund and the water/sewer fund, this in early 2013.
In the interim, his appointment was made official at the state level and, against state statute, Gregg began serving on the PRB while still holding office as mayor for four months until ongoing questions to the PRB from Disclosure prompted Gregg’s resignation from office of mayor in early July 2013.
In that time, it had also been discovered that Gregg had lied on his Statement of Economic Interest form for income, not in the year previous to his acceptance of the PRB job (2012), but the form he filled out in 2012 for consideration of the position, which covered the 2011 annual income. In that, he neglected to list income over which he was in litigation in Saline County with an electric aggregate company, said income being sought by his former business partner, Luann Walker…so it was rather indisputable that he had income that year, as it was tied up in a lawsuit, but he didn’t claim it.
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The state refused to pay attention to the fraudulent paperwork until Gregg filed for bankruptcy and, in 2015, appeared to have lied on his bankruptcy papers.
Then, with the threat of bankruptcy fraud looming on another one of their members (another had already had a similar situation occur), the state and governor Bruce Rauner decided to terminate Gregg’s employ with the PRB.
Gregg, as a true snowflake is inclined to do, fired back with a lawsuit, claiming the governor couldn’t fire him for the reasons he had (malfeasance, which was a nice way of saying “lied on paperwork”), and was seeking his $86,000-plus job with the state back.
Judge Todd Lambert determined that the governor didn’t have the legal right to fire Gregg, and the state immediately sought an appeal.
The matter was taken up in the Appellate Court in Mt. Vernon, who, in early September 2017, booted the case back to Saline County, advising in a split decision that they believed Judge Lambert had the ability to make the decision as to whether the governor was right in letting Gregg go.
Thus far, that file has not become available.
However, Gregg is going around telling members of the community that he’s “going to get a big settlement in July” and is going to start his campaigning for mayor in earnest after that.
The interesting part of this is that Gregg cannot hold the job on the PRB at the same time as holding the position of mayor. So if Gregg has some kind of inside track that allows him to know how Lambert’s going to decide, surely he also has the inside track to know that it’s got to be one or the other of the two jobs, but not both.
And the amusing aspect of that quandary is that if Gregg decides not to run for mayor and is re-seated on the PRB, his seat on the board is up for re-appointment in early 2019…and depending on who wins the gubernatorial race this year, that appointment might not happen.
Therefore, the push will likely be massive to get himself in office, since Gregg is all about the prestige, if not the money.
Given the distinct downturn Harrisburg and indeed all of Saline County has taken in the past couple of years, presiding over the town doesn’t carry as much prestige as it used to, however.
But if Harrisburg doesn’t vote carefully in upcoming elections, the downturn can - and will – get worse under certain circumstances…so city voters can now consider themselves warned.
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