He makes $70,000 a year as one of nine elected commissioners of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, the billion-dollar, government sewage-treatment agency that he hopes to lead after its longtime president, Terry O’Brien, retires in December.
He has a $60,000-a-year public relations contract with the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority, the state agency that owns U.S. Cellular Field.
As a lobbyist, two of Alvarez’s clients — Globetrotters Engineering Corp. and St. Anthony Hospital — have agreed to pay him a combined $120,000 a year, according to documents Alvarez has filed with the city. Fourteen other clients — including operators of the city’s parking meters and red-light cameras — have paid him a total of $39,000.
In the late 1990s, Alvarez worked two summers at the Water Reclamation District and began attending Northwestern University. In 2000, he landed an unpaid internship in the Washington congressional office of then-U.S. Rep. Blagojevich, Mell’s son-in-law.
Alvarez got a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern in 2002. In early 2003, Mayor Daley’s campaign paid him $2,930 to run Daley’s Northwest Side field office, a campaign that ended with a landslide Daley victory over the Rev. Paul Jakes.
By that time, Blagojevich had been elected governor, and Alvarez went to work for the state as a deputy director of the Illinois Department of Employment Security — a job that Mell helped him get, according to a database that Blagojevich’s office kept.
Alvarez, who was 22 at the time, made $4,130 a month when he started with the state in May 2003. He got a 5 percent raise two months later, bringing his salary to $52,044 a year.
He left the state payroll in November 2005 to become outreach director for then-Sen. Obama, a job that paid him $60,472 annually, according to Legistorm, a website that tracks congressional spending. He left Obama’s staff in the fall of 2007 and started his lobbying and consulting business, which runs out of the Sauganash home where he lives with his wife and two kids.
Illinois Politics 