Comptroller Dan Hynes today urged Gov. Rod Blagojevich to sign the ethics reform bill that has been on his desk for a month, and criticized him for accepting more than $300,000 in campaign contributions the first half of this year alone from holders of contracts worth at least $50,000.

"Last May, the House and Senate passed a measure that would put a serious clamp on pay-to-play politics in Illinois, and they did so by unanimous votes. The public wants this. The people they elected to represent them want this. It's time for the governor to end the stonewalling and sign this bill," said Hynes in an 18-city tour.

HB824 prohibits businesses with more than $50,000 in state contracts from making political donations to constitutional officers who award the contracts and candidates for those offices. The ban also applies to a company's owners, top officials and close family members. Under the ethics legislation sitting on his desk, the $314,214 in contributions given from January through June 2008 would be barred. The contractors who gave that money hold state contracts in the current fiscal year totaling $270 million.

Hynes took further issue with Governor Blagojevich's claim that he opposes HB824 and all other reform packages proposed in the past three years because they were not comprehensive enough. "The governor told us in 2005 that he was going to rock the system. So far, all he's done is use the system. If he truly believed in campaign finance reform, he'd have proposed his own package. And even without doing that, he could have voluntarily lived by the constraints of this legislation."

Cynthia Canary, Director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, also urged the governor to sign the bill. "There has been so much corruption involving the award of lucrative state contracts in exchange for campaign contributions that many business owners believe campaign contributions are a prerequisite to winning a contract to sell their products and services to state government. To restore public confidence in government and ensure our tax dollars are used wisely, Gov. Blagojevich should take steps to stamp out pay-to-play corruption by immediately signing HB 824."

Hynes, the original architect of the legislation in February 2005, instituted a more restrictive version of the ban in his own office more than three years ago and at his urging, all of the other constitutional officers, except for the Governor, instituted the ban as well.