"My personal financial matters have no bearing on my ability to manage the work of the land bank.” After reading this I have one question, WHERE ARE THE FEDS?

not talking

BUMPED UP....WITH HIS PERSONAL FINANCES IN SUCH DISARRAY, HE IS UNQUALIFIED PER SE. HOW DID HE GET HIRED?

Cook County agency that’s under two reviews gave big bonuses to $225,750-a-year boss

The Cook County Land Bank Authority won’t show what Robert Rose Jr. did to merit the extra tens of thousands of dollars nor say why he got bigger bonuses than his contract calls for.

By Lauren FitzPatrick and Tim Novak Jun 12, 2020, 5:30am CDT

Robert Rose Jr., executive director of the Cook County Land Bank Authority, is slated to get a $45,000 bonus for a second straight year. Rich Hein / Sun-Times

A Cook County agency now under two separate reviews over insider dealings gave its $225,750-a-year executive director a $45,000 performance bonus last year — and plans to give him another for the same amount this year.

Since Robert Rose Jr. was hired in 2015 to run the Cook County Land Bank Authority, he has been paid more than $1.1 million — including $107,500 in bonuses, records show.


Rose was given those bonuses under the terms of employment contracts signed by Bridget Gainer, the elected Cook County Board member who, with Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, founded the land bank and chairs its board of directors.

The extra payouts were for meeting specific performance goals that Rose set for himself.

But Gainer and other land bank officials won’t provide documents to show what Rose did to merit the additional tens of thousands of dollars a year he’s been paid. Nor will they explain why they gave him bigger bonuses than his contract calls for.

The two reviews that the Land Bank now faces began after the Chicago Sun-Times reported in November that the agency had made a deal with Chester Wilson, chief of staff to Ald. Carrie Austin (34th), to take ownership of a dilapidated, tax-delinquent South Side building Wilson owned — and wipe out the more than $200,000 in back property taxes, penalties and interest that he failed to pay for 10 years.

The land bank then sold the building for $40,000 over to Lisa Livingston, a day care-center operator Wilson had recommended as a buyer. Livingston, who promised to rehab the property, also was a Wilson business partner — which Wilson didn’t disclose and land bank officials failed to discover.

Asked in November about the May 2018 transaction, Rose said the insider deal never should have been allowed and called it “an absolute aberration” for the land bank. But he said he wouldn’t move to void the sale because Livingston already had invested in rehabbing the building.

The Sun-Times’ report prompted Preckwinkle to order an audit of Rose’s agency and Patrick Blanchard, the county government’s inspector general, to investigate. Both reviews are continuing.

Rose faced another controversy when the Sun-Times reported in February that the land bank sold his assistant Natasha Cornog a house in Oak Lawn, rejecting a higher offer. Cornog took homestead property tax exemptions on that home and two others at the same time — only one is allowed — to get a total of more than $16,000 in tax breaks. Rose ended up firing Cornog, and the Cook County assessor’s office said it would ask her to repay $5,911.


RELATED
Cook County OK’d insider deal for Ald. Carrie Austin’s top aide
Cook County official fires aide he gave sweet deal on Oak Lawn home following Sun-Times questions
Ex-Mayor Richard M. Daley, son bankrolling lender profiting off Cook County land deals

Rose, 49, who lives in Flossmoor, has financial troubles himself.

He’s paid $175,000 a year in salary plus $50,750 to use toward health care and retirement because he isn’t a county employee but instead runs the land bank as an outside consultant. Which means, as his contract spells out, he’s responsible for paying state and federal taxes on his income.

But Rose owes more than $129,033 in state and federal income taxes, debts he racked up while working for the county, according to government records and filings from the two bankruptcies that Rose has filed.

In 2017, the Internal Revenue Service put two liens on him. For one of them, the IRS says he and his wife Misha Blackman owe $41,913 in taxes, penalties and interest from 2015 — his first year running the land bank. The other says Rose owes $3,812 in taxes from 2009.

According to federal court records in his ongoing bankruptcy case filed in 2017, which was his second bankruptcy filing in five years, the IRS says Rose owes $104,442 — primarily for 2015, 2016 and 2017.

Rose also owes $24,591 to the Illinois Department of Revenue for state income taxes that were due in 2016, 2017 and 2018, court records show.

The bankruptcy case shows Rose and his wife had a household income of $225,000, with a monthly mortgage payment of $3,900 on their five-bedroom, 8,200-square-foot south suburban home.

Rose had the deeds on the home notarized by Cornog, his aide at the time, and another land bank staffer, when he transferred ownership of the home first to a company he controlled and then to trusts owned by Rose and Blackman while his ex-wife was suing him to collect a six-figure divorce settlement.

Though Rose and Blackman are behind on their income taxes, they are up to date on their property taxes, paying $28,409 last year on their home.


RELATED
LETTER: How the Cook County Land Bank helps revitalize black and brown communities

Rose won’t talk about any of this. He declined interview requests, didn’t respond directly to questions and, in a written statement provided for him by his lawyer, said:

“I am proud of the tremendous work that I and my team have done at the Cook County Land Bank Authority. I have served as Chief Operating Officer of the Chicago Community Loan Fund, and I managed a $170 million loan fund portfolio as Director of Commercial Real Estate for Urban Partnership Bank. I worked on transactions totaling over $1 billion while at GE Capital, and I earned an MBA from Cornell University. My personal financial matters have no bearing on my ability to manage the work of the land bank.”

Cook County Commissioner Bridget Gainer, who chairs the Cook County Land Bank Authority. Ashlee Rezin Garcia / Sun-Times

Gainer brought Rose to the land bank and, according to a former board member, was a key figure in approving his bonuses. Asked about those payments and his financial troubles, Gainer says: “I want to draw the line between land bank performance and Rob Rose’s personal finances. Rob is a good man, he does good things.”

Gainer says the agency pays for itself with money from selling the homes it buys. In effect, Gainer says, that means taxpayers aren’t paying the salary or bonuses given to Rose to run the agency and oversee its staff of county employees, who work in the county building at 69 W. Washington St. in the Loop.

In a written statement, the land bank’s board that Gainer heads lauded Rose for recruiting a cadre of African American developers to rehabilitate and sell the properties it buys or seizes.

“These homes are now owned and occupied by families who desperately needed them and who are now stabilizing neighborhoods and generating property tax revenue,” the board says. “We support Rob Rose.”

With Gainer leading the way, the Cook County Board created the land bank in 2011 to buy or seize vacant or dilapidated homes and find individuals or developers to fix them up and flip them to new homeowners. It was given extraordinary powers — including being able to wipe out any unpaid real estate taxes to make the properties more attractive to buyers — to help revive economically distressed communities.

The land bank began acquiring properties in 2014 under its first executive director, who was in the job for about a year.

When Rose was hired as his replacement, Gainer says he was chosen over six other applicants who were interviewed.

Rose left the Chicago Community Loan Fund to take the job.

This was months after a judge threw out Rose’s first petition for bankruptcy protection, which he filed in 2012, after his ex-wife’s attorney complained that Rose had failed to disclose the salary of his current wife, who had filed her own bankruptcy case.

John Ostenburg, a former Park Forest mayor whose six-year term on the land bank’s board ended in December, says he didn’t know about Rose’s bankruptcy and presumed that the county had vetted Rose before he was hired. Whatever background checking was done “was never shared with me,” Ostenburg says.

He says he was unaware how much Rose was given in bonuses, saying his yearly performance evaluation was done by Gainer and a few others, not by the full board.

Under Rose’s initial, March 2015 contract, he was paid $175,000 in salary and was eligible for a bonus of up to 10%. A contract renewal in 2018 added $50,750 to cover health care and retirement benefits and doubled his possible yearly bonus to as much as 20% of the $225,000 guaranteed payout.

Rose’s first contract called for him to “develop and submit performance goals,” for which the board would assess how good of a job he was doing.

Subsequent contracts added that the bonuses would be “payable solely at the discretion of the board of directors based upon his meeting or exceeding certain mutually agreed upon goals and objectives as approved by the board of directors.”

Rose got a $17,500 bonus in 2016 — 10% of his pay. The bonus was accompanied by a letter signed by Gainer that said: “The board of directors has determined that Robert Rose exceeded agreed upon goals.”

In 2017, the land bank gave him a $25,000 bonus — about 14% of his salary. The following year, his bonus was $20,000 — about 11%. In 2019, the land bank gave him a bonus amounting to 20% of his salary and benefits — $45,000.

Asked for copies of Rose’s performance goals, the land bank’s board responded instead with a written statement.

“One of the subsequent goals set by the Board and achieved by Executive Director Rose was the financial independence of the Land Bank,” it said. “We attribute these achievements to a strong business model, excellent leadership and disciplined financial management.”