Aseries of real-estate deals adjacent to his home in Plano, Ill., yielded House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) almost $2 million last year and could provide more profit in the years to come.

The transactions between 2002 and 2005 in Kendall County, one of the nation’s fastest growing areas, raised questions from a new watchdog group, the Sunlight Foundation:

• Did Hastert’s $207 million earmark for construction of a proposed highway called the Prairie Parkway last year swell the values of his land?

One of Hastert’s two partners, his political godfather, Dallas Ingemunson, says they are just investors cashing in on an already booming suburban market.

• Should Hastert have revealed on his annual disclosure that some of his real estate was owned in a secret land trust named Little Rock Trust No. 225?

It takes a great deal of research of Kendall County records — or an interview with the obliging Ingemunson — to figure out that the transactions Hastert discloses on his 2005 statement have yielded the Speaker tremendous profit. (To defer capital-gains taxes, Hastert also purchased farmland in Wisconsin and another parcel near his home.)

Development in this area, west of Chicago, is a major local issue. Hastert has been unabashedly pro-growth, pushing the Prairie Parkway and an access road to O’Hare International Airport from the western suburbs.

The disclosure information required by lawmakers really amounts to just clues. Listing the name of the trust would have made it much easier for citizens who don’t have special training to search property records.

The House ethics manual says the point of disclosure is to “inform the public about the financial interests of government officials.”

“We’ve been extremely transparent,” Hastert spokesman Ron Bonjean told me.

I agree with Bonjean that holding land in secret land trusts is fairly common in Illinois. I just think the public should have been let in on the secret.

“The Speaker properly disclosed his purchase and sale of land,” Bonjean said. The land will be part of a 1,700-unit mixed-use development that is between three and five and a half miles from the proposed highway.

• How did these revelations come out?

The Sunlight Foundation advocates greater transparency by officials for the public to track the influence of money in politics. It just launched an ambitious website trying to give people research skills to take disclosure information and make some sense of it.

Foundation investigator Bill Allison — a former staffer at the Center for Public Integrity — posted a story last Wednesday about Hastert’s series of purchases and sales, timed to the day the 2005 congressional disclosures were publicly released. (For details and an electronic document listing the transactions, go to www.sunlightfoundation.com.)

The Sunlight research was quoted in Chicago papers the next day — the Sun-Times, Tribune and Beacon News, which circulates in Aurora, which is near Plano. The three papers, not Allison, came up with a calculation as to Hastert’s profit.

The Beacon News, investigating the impact of the Prairie Parkway, independently cracked the land trust and identified Hastert as a local real-estate player.

Sweet is the Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times. E-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it