Did Art Vandelay do sign work at College of DuPage?

Carla Burkhart must be a big fan of Seinfeld, and in particular George Costanza. Whenever George needed a resume boost to get a job or win a girl, he adopted the alter ego of Art Vandelay, architect. As George, I mean Art put it, "There is no higher calling than an architect."

 Carla Burkhart, and her company Herricane Graphics, are now under local and state scrutiny for possibly mis-representing herself as an architect to get no bid contracts from College of DuPage for mundane signage work. A 2012 contract worth a cool $107,000 was written an a boilerplate architectural contract; Herricane Graphics was listed on the first page as project architect, and the 25 page contract contained the word architect 324 times. Under state law architectural contracts are exempt from no bid contracts. Since 2011, Burkhart has enjoyed $630,000 in no bid work at COD, much of it tied to the now suspicious architectural contract. Why suspicious? Burkhart is not an architect. That's OK, says COD's new $250 per hour PR firm, Res Publica, because signage requires a "high degree of professional skill", which also qualifies for a no-bid exemption under state law. That didn't stop Governor's State University and the Illinois Tollway Authority from bidding out their contracts for mundane signage. They probably got a much better deal than COD since their bidding process surely weeded out all those Art Vandelay wannabes.