Davidsmeyer weighs in on Mautino resignation request

By Gary Scott on July 15, 2016 at 4:48pm

A group of state lawmakers are calling for Illinois Auditor General Frank Mautino to resign.

Mautino is under investigation over campaign spending.  The probe relates to more than 200-thousand dollars spent at a single gas station while he was a state representative.  State Rep Dwight Kay said yesterday that Illinois deserves an auditor general free from any financial investigations.

Jacksonville State Representative C.D. Davidsmeyer was on the state commission that selected Mautino last October. He offers his thoughts on the situation.

“I’m definitely disappointed. In politics, often you see ‘guilty until proven innocent,’ when we all know our system says ‘innocent until proven guilty.’ I don’t know what the case information is, what the evidence is, so for me to make that decision, it’s not my place,” says Davidsmeyer.

Davidsmeyer says he hasn’t gone through Mautino’s campaign expenditures with a “fine-toothed comb”, saying that’ll be up to the authorities. But, he says this about Mautino:

“My experience, in my first two years in office, was that Frank Mautino was not a partisan individual, he was actually somebody who worked across party line to make sure that we came to some type of agreement when he was working on legislation,” notes Davidsmeyer.

Mautino took over for William Holland after he retired at the end of this year. The call for him to resign altogether follows a letter that was signed by a group of state legislators asking him to at least step aside temporarily while he was being investigated.