Rock Island Today

Retired Lieutenant Colonel and current Illinois House Rep. Dan Swanson (R-Alpha) is not accepting any excuses for the LaSalle Veterans' Home mismanagement which cost the lives of 36 veterans.

Swanson, like the rest of the House Republicans he was with during a May 18 press conference, urged accountability for the tragic aftermath of irresponsible management during the COVID-19 outbreak at the facility.

“Beyond the facility-level problems though which are frankly inexcusable, it’s clear to me the veterans homes were being managed remotely via Zoom and conference calls with insufficient follow-up protocols to ensure employees were actually following through on proper health protocols and not just saying they were,” he said. “This was a failure of the Pritzker administration to manage their employees and ensure compliance of his own Illinois executive order and CDC guidance.”

Swanson pointed out that people who investigated the Legionnaire's outbreak at the Quincy Veterans Home were the same people who have been seated at the Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs (IDVA).

“Specific lessons were learned in the response to that outbreak by the very people who ended up leading IDVA during this tragic outbreak of COVID,” he said. “They heard the same things I heard at Quincy. They knew how we could apply lessons learned for future outbreaks and in fact, they said the same thing we are saying now: how can we learn from mistakes here and prevent them in the future.”

Swanson, a former superintendent of the Henry County Veterans Assistance Commission, said that caring for the veterans is one of the most vital charges that leaders have in public service.

“Former director Chapa LaVia, Deputy Gov. Sol Flores and other members of Gov. Pritzker’s Administration only seemingly gave lip service to these issues and did not absorb the lessons learned from Quincy and previous audits in order to do their jobs protecting our hometown heroes,” he continued. “Their negligence in doing so led to dozens and dozens of deaths due to this failure to manage and failure to follow pandemic operating procedure throughout all of our Illinois veterans' homes. Each one of the hearings we've had, we've been able to peel back another more rotten layer to this management as we continue to ask questions important to the families of the hometown hero victims of this negligence. We must continue to ask who knew what and when in order to construct a full timeline of culpability for those involved.”

The report released by the Illinois Department of Human Services Inspector General confirmed that the lack of a COVID plan and failures in leadership contributed to the outbreak.