Following her losing bid for state representative and the sudden death of state Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka, Lincolnshire resident Leslie Munger’s future plans changed in the span of 36 hours.
For the next two to four years, the former business executive turned “full-time volunteer” will take over the role of the Illinois comptroller.
Whatever the duration of her term, Munger said she wants to remove waste from the state budget.
“What better place to be, to try to fix the fiscal responsibility of our state?” she said Jan. 8, speaking from a long-scheduled family vacation in Florida, where she is in the midst of organizing her staff and settling her priorities. “That’s what I view as the role of the comptroller.”
On Sunday, Jan. 4, Gov.-elect Bruce Rauner appointed Munger to the position, which opened Dec. 10 when Topinka, freshly re-elected to a second term, died of a stroke.
Munger said she had only a day and a half to decide, but did not need that much time.
“It’s going to be a disruption to my family, I know, but I think it’s going to be one of the most important things I’ll ever have the opportunity to do,” she said.
Having spent the majority of her career at Proctor & Gamble, the only years the Joliet native and University of Illinois grad spent living outside Illinois were while working at its headquarters in Cincinnati. Managing the turnaround of hair care products took her on trips around the world and often took her away from her two growing boys, so she retired to Lincolnshire.
Years of volunteering, particularly at the Riverside Foundation’s Auxiliary, could not satisfy her business interest, though, and with one son in the working world and the other in college, Munger ran for state office last fall, losing to state Rep. Carol Sente.
After the election, with Rauner working to populate his staff, she put her name in for consideration.
“I honestly thought, when I did it, that I’d be participating on a committee,” Munger said.
On Jan. 3, as Munger and her husband, John, prepared for their trip, Rauner’s transition team called. Her resume had landed on his short list of comptroller candidates, and they needed to know her interest level.
This was quite a different job than representative. Besides covering the entire state instead of her neighborhood and dealing solely with finances instead of legislation, comptroller is a full-time gig that requires that the office-holder also hold a residence in Springfield.
Munger said she wanted in, and she received a call the next night from Rauner.
“It was extremely fast,” Munger said. “I feel honored, and humbled.”
Now Munger is putting her own staff together, figuring out her office hours in Springfield and Chicago’s Thompson Center and trying to settle on what she will target first.
The cessation of “reckless borrowing,” unfunded and underfunded mandates and interfund borrowing will all receive her attention at some point, she said.
She will be searching for the sources of bad-money arrangements, Munger said.
Her next campaign might be in 2018, but Munger expects the General Assembly to cut her term in half. Rather than allow political appointees to serve an entire term to elected office, a bill that passed both houses of the legislature on Thursday, Jan. 8, would require all appointees face a vote in the next general election — November 2016, in this case. The bill now heads to Gov. Pat Quinn.