Picture Republican Senate President James "Pate" Philip and Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan setting aside their partisan rivalry in the Statehouse just long enough to settle what promises to be the spring session's most divisive issue: drawing new legislative districts.
As a matter of fact, they did chat recently about the upcoming remap. They even agreed on how awful the process is. But that's where the goodwill seemed to end - along with any chances for a peaceful spring.
"The essence of the conversations was: 'Gee, it would be really nice if there would be an agreement.' Well, everybody agrees with that. Anybody who [was] around reapportionment in 1981 and 1991 doesn't want to go through it again," Madigan says. "It would be possible for Sen. Philip and I to reach an agreement. Is it probable? I don't know."
It doesn't take much reading between the lines to grasp the subtext. When the 92nd General Assembly is sworn in this month, rewriting the state's telecommunication regulations, sending more money to public schools, slowing the state's spending spree and cleaning up a series of laws struck down by the courts will all be on lawmakers' agendas. But in what is shaping up as one of the busier legislative sessions in recent memory, none of those subjects will matter more to the powerbrokers in the new legislature than the remap - and, none will be harder to resolve.
New legislative and congressional maps are drawn by the states once every 10 years to account for population changes. But mapmaking tracks the partisan shifts, too. The majority party, which controls the process, can get a leg-up in elections for another decade. Democrats, for example, drew a map in 1981 that kept them in charge of the legislature for the following five election cycles.
But partisan dominance in the legislature doesn't guarantee a favorable map. The state's chief executive has to sign off - and possibly the state's top justices. In 1991, for instance, after the Democrat-controlled General Assembly and former Republican Gov. Jim Edgar couldn't agree on a map, the process came down to which party drew its name from a fishbowl. As it happened. Republicans won that game of chance, and an ostensibly Democratic state Supreme Court, as well as the federal courts, upheld a Republican-drawn map. As a result, that party won the state Senate under Philip five successive times in the 1990s.
Choosing a map this year could be every bit as complicated.
Maria Valdez, senior litigator for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and a veteran observer of Illinois' decennial cartography, is already predicting this legislative map will end up in court. "Now, you have a slight majority on both sides [of the legislature]. What will it mean? It will mean the same thing as the last two redistrictings: You probably won't have agreement from the state legislature on a map. And what's happened the last 20 years is it's gone to court for remapping to occur," says Valdez, whose group will closely monitor the process to ensure that Hispanics and African Americans are fairly treated when legislative and congressional districts are drawn.
Valdez is not the only observer to predict a role for the courts in this remap. In fact, the Democrats like their chances in the state courts. They managed to pad their majority on the state Supreme Court with the fall election of Thomas Kilbride, giving them a 5-2 edge.
Redistricting will get underway as soon as lawmakers get their first look at U.S. Census data, perhaps as early as February. Final numbers must be sent to the states by April 1, but projections now available from the federal agency and from the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission offer a rough early roadmap.
The latest population estimates from each agency suggest that suburban Chicago is poised to become an even more powerful force in Illinois politics. The five collar counties outside Cook posted an overall growth rate of 22 percent since 1990, projections show. Three counties - DuPage, Lake and Will - likely will have each grown by more than 100,000 residents since the last census.
Should the collar counties add new legislative seats, such a change could come at the expense of Chicago, though the city is expected to show population growth as well. The final numbers are likely to show Chicago ending several decades of population decline with a growth of 1 percent. However, the rate of growth in the city likely was slower than in the suburbs and elsewhere in the state.
Areas beyond the metropolitan Chicago region appear to have grown collectively by 4 percent. Among downstate counties that are expected to show population increases are Kankakee, McLean, Sangamon and Winnebago. Counties with expected declines include Champaign, Macon, Peoria, Rock Island, St. Clair and Vermilion.
The data also reflects demographic changes in Illinois. The Hispanic population, for example, has grown since 1990, when that ethnic group represented about 8 percent of the state's population. Hispanics now are estimated to represent 11 percent of Illinois' population, the census shows. That growth, representing more than 300,000 people, could enable Hispanics to add to their numbers in the General Assembly, Valdez says.
But that's not a given. Legislative cartographers also must adhere to a string of federal court cases that offer seemingly unsettled views on how to account for minorities when the maps are drawn. On the one hand, the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 says minorities and nonminorities must receive equal treatment in the political process. Yet court rulings in the 1990s held that legislative districts cannot legally be drawn solely to ensure racial or ethnic representation.
"Redistricting will be done a lot differently this time than in the past few decades," Valdez says. "This time, legislatures can't redistrict primarily on the basis of race, which is odd because all of the census data comes out on the basis of race."
While the fight for new political boundaries will consume a major portion of the General Assembly's attention next spring, lawmakers also face several other equally complex and politically divisive issues. They will have to decide whether to rewrite the state's telecommunication regulations, a move that could affect the size of Illinoisans' telephone bills and the quality of their local phone service. They face a decision on how much should be spent to educate the state's elementary and secondary students. And, of course, they will need to work with Gov. George Ryan to craft a state budget for fiscal year 2002, a task they'll undertake amid rising concerns about Illinois' fiscal health.
Though Ryan won't deliver his budget to the General Assembly for another month, he already has signaled concern about rising Medicaid costs. That was a reason he gave for opposing a permanent repeal of the approximately $360 million per year state sales tax on motor fuel. Thus it appears likely the governor will be cautious about other tax breaks this spring.
Potential changes in the telecommunication law will draw the state's biggest political players to Springfield, though. At stake is the state's $3.6 billion local telephone market. Lobbyists for Ameritech, the dominant company in the local market, and the Citizens Utility Board, which represents consumers, as well as representatives of long-distance companies will line the rail in the Capitol rotunda as lawmakers consider overhauling a 15-year-old state law governing telecommunications that expires in June. The outcome could determine whether consumers gain more choices in local telephone service and how much they will pay. It also could determine whether Ameritech will be allowed to enter the long-distance market.
The timing of this debate is risky for Ameritech, which has faced charges of shoddy service in recent months as consumers waited weeks for basic phone repairs or new lines. Those problems prompted an unprecedented alliance among utility regulators in five Midwestern states, including Illinois, which called on the company to improve service. Illinois Attorney General Jim Ryan and Cook County State's Attorney Richard Devine also publicly chastised the company.
A lot is at stake for the utility giant, which wants to expand its reach into the long-distance market. Before Ameritech will be allowed to do that, though, the company will have to convince state and federal utility regulators that it has opened the local phone market to competition.
Until recently, Ameritech, which owns and maintains the telephone wiring that connects most homes, has been the only option for most residential users. But company officials argue competitors now are drawing business customers and that more than two dozen small, lesser-known companies now offer residential service.
To level the new playing field, those officials argue, the state will need to loosen regulation of the company's operations. In particular, they want the General Assembly to scale back the Illinois Commerce Commission's authority to limit charges other companies pay to use Ameritech's phone lines, which Ameritech considers artificially low. But such a move, CUB warns, could mean higher prices for consumers. Ameritech also wants the state to stop requiring it to provide service for anyone who asks, a standard that none of Ameritech's competitors face.
"What they'll do is come into Illinois, look for the most lucrative client there is and use all their resources at bringing that large customer into their fold. Meanwhile, they'll ignore residential customers in Chicago, Springfield or Carbondale because it's just not profitable," argues Eric Robinson, who now heads a coalition known as Connect Illinois, which Ameritech helped create to promote its case in the looming legislative battle.
But Ameritech's rivals argue against relaxing state utility regulations. AT&T, Sprint and MCI WorldCom want the commission to keep Ameritech in check until they gain a stronger footing in a local phone market still dominated by that company. In fact, they want the commission to have more latitude to impose fines on Ameritech for poor performance or for anti-competitive moves. They also have proposed going back to a complicated rate-setting formula abandoned by the commission that essentially capped Ameritech's profits.
"Nobody has a choice. You can't go anywhere else," says Gary Mack, who heads the Illinois Coalition for Competitive Telecommunications, of which AT&T is a member. "You can change long-distance carriers at will. But you can't, in 99 percent of cases in Illinois, change your local telephone service."
Ameritech, which is the most prolific campaign donor among utilities in Illinois, has a stable of prominent lobbyists on call for the spring legislative debate, including former Gov. James R. Thompson, who last fall helped the Chicago Bears line up legislative approval for a $587 million stadium. With its vast financial resources and Thompson's golden touch, Ameritech's clout at the bargaining table will be formidable despite its high-profile blunders in addressing service complaints.
But AT&T, MCI WorldCom and Sprint are multibillion dollar corporations, too, with plenty of resources to throw at the battle. They have employed half a dozen lobbyists among them, and these rivals outmaneuvered Ameritech in Michigan during a similar exercise in that state last year.
Meanwhile, Illinois' top utility watchdog is not holding its breath for consumer-friendly changes to the state's telecommunications law. "If I was a betting man now, despite efforts we'll make or others will make, I don't expect to see a major rewrite this year. But we'll see," says Martin Cohen, CUB'S executive director. "I'm not sure we have the critical mass to make sweeping changes, and we also have diametrically opposed powerful interests. That makes it hard to see how they can get reconciled. I don't think legislators are hearing from consumers back home demanding that the telecommunications act be rewritten."
Amid the expected clash of the utility titans, lawmakers will wrestle with how much money the state should send to local schools. There is no easy answer, though few expect a repeat of the epic education finance battle waged by Gov. Jim Edgar and the General Assembly in 1997. Edgar wanted lawmakers to boost the overall level of funding for schools by hiking state income taxes and lessening schools' reliance on property taxes. The aim was to reduce the gap between rich and poor school districts. Done in by his own party's fear of tax hikes, the popular Republican governor settled instead for a three-year funding plan aimed at boosting the base amount of funds the state allots per pupil. That so-called foundation level grew each of those three years and now rests at $4,425 per student. Poverty grants also were recalculated. These funding levels will freeze at this year's level without action by the new General Assembly.
That law also created a special advisory board to continue looking at the school funding issue. The panel is scheduled to release its first report to the General Assembly this month. That report is expected to outline a series of modest proposals: linking future hikes in the foundation level to the rate of inflation, for instance - a move that would cost $150 million if implemented this spring. Still, that expense could be relatively easy to swallow, given Gov. Ryan's commitment to spend 51 percent of all new revenues on education.
Lawmakers are likely to want to buy time on this issue, too. "I've not run into one person, including members of the General Assembly or executive branch, that said there will be anything earth shattering [this spring]," says Robert Leininger, the former state school superintendent who heads the advisory panel. "I'm not sure they want that."
Though any move this spring is likely to amount to little more than a Band-Aid on the widening gap between rich and poor school districts, the report could provide a springboard to a wider discussion later. The panel aims to continue its studies, perhaps recommending more ambitious approaches to school finance in 2002.
"As we've gone through various campaign cycles, I have yet to hear one lawmaker who said they didn't realize the need to do something about improving school funding," says Illinois Education Association President Anne Davis. "I'm hopeful that commitment is still there."
Any decision the General Assembly and Gov. Ryan make about school funding will have to work in concert with next year's state budget, which this year stands at a record $49 billion.
The go-go spending days of the Ryan Administration and the outgoing General Assembly appear to be nearing an end because of a slowing economy and growing Medicaid debts faced by the state. Ryan has denied the state is in a budget crunch, but Comptroller Daniel Hynes started delaying payments to state vendors because of looming cash-flow problems.
The newly seated 92nd General Assembly also is likely to have to digest some leftovers, measures passed during Ryan's first two years in office that were struck down by the courts. Among those is a cornerstone of Ryan's gubernatorial campaign and his battle against street crime: the 15-20-life law. Those convicted under the law would have their sentences increased if they used guns to commit their crimes. A Cook County judge ruled against the law in October, saying the wording was vague and could leave sentencing discretion to state prison officials rather than the state's judiciary, as the Illinois Constitution requires.
Lawmakers may also move to reimpose portions of an ethics and campaign finance law that a Will County judge ruled unconstitutional last year. Among its provisions were prohibitions on the personal use of campaign funds and requirements that campaign documents be filed electronically.
And there may be attempts to reimpose a controversial 1999 law designed to give liquor magnate William Wirtz unprecedented protections against wholesalers who might want to break distribution contracts, though Gov. Ryan has since signaled his opposition to it. Last Feburary, a federal judge ruled the law unconstitutional.
But the agenda before this General Assembly could be overshadowed by Ryan himself, who faces the possibility that he could grow weaker politically as the session progresses.
Undoubtedly, one of the year's biggest political stories will be the decision by the governor, with his historically low approval ratings, on whether to seek re-election. Many observers believe that decision already has been made for him. But others think it could hinge, at least in part, on the outcome of the corruption trial of a former top aide in the secretary of state's office, Dean Bauer. The former inspector general in Ryan's old office, whom the governor counts as a close friend, is set to go on trial this month in federal court in Chicago for allegedly suppressing politically embarrassing probes of wrongdoing under Ryan when he was secretary of state. A conviction in the Bauer case could further tatter Ryan's image, leaving him a lame-duck governor with limited ability to get things done in the legislature.
Regardless of how Ryan's future factors into the doings of the General Assembly this spring, top lawmakers will share an ironic kinship with the governor: They, too, will be fighting for their political survival in the coming months. Their futures will hinge on the remap, the chance at 10 years of political advantage over their opponents.
For the record, Philip agrees with Madigan's assessment about how great it would be if they could cast aside rivalries and simply resolve one of the spring's most volatile issues over a handshake. But Philip knows how difficult that would be. After all, there are apt to be 32 opinions among his Senate Republican colleagues on what new legislative districts ought to look like.
"There might be some compromise, I don't know. I wouldn't slam the door on it. But it's not easy. It's never easy because there are so many players. Try to satisfy 32 members. Try that on a daily basis," he says, punctuating his thoughts with a closing phrase he likes using even in the heat of July: "Merry Christmas."
Dave McKinney is Statehouse bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times.
A message
for state lawmakers
Illinoisans think the General Assembly has more influence than the governor, and they think lawmakers should use that influence to forge a consensus on state education policy.
This snapshot of the public's political perceptions and issue preferences was produced by the Survey Research Office, part of the Institute for Public Affairs at the University of Illinois at Springfield, over the course of the month leading up to the November election.
At the request of former University of Illinois at Chicago political science professor Thomas Carsey, surveyors telephoned a random sample of self-identified Illinois voters and asked them to rate the relative powers of the legislature and the governor and to rank which state issues they think are most important. UIS research office assistant director Sean O. Hogan, who oversaw the project, says the survey is reflective of the Illinois voting population.
Of 557 respondents, 56.4 percent think the legislature has more influence, while 29.6 percent think the governor does. Others offered no opinion on the question.
The issue rankings have a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percent, with 95 percent certainty.
- Education was rated important by 25.9 percent of the respondents. Surveyors didn't inquire about specific policy suggestions.
- Taxes, budgets and government finances were rated important by 10.3 percent of respondents.
- Only 9 percent rated crime, drugs and gangs important.
"If you're going to set your agenda," Hogan says, "I would put education at the top and government finances - taxes and government spending practices - right behind it. Strategically link the two, and you're addressing a larger audience still."
The Editors.
New faces, same legislative body
The 92nd General Assembly won't differ all that much from the legislature it's replacing. Politically, Republicans will retain a 32-27 majority in the Senate, while Democrats will hold on to their 62-56 House majority.
There will be 11 new faces in the Statehouse, the result of the defeat of six incumbents in the primary, outright retirements or decisions by incumbents to seek higher office. Also, women gained three seats over the 91st General Assembly. Yet, while this new legislature represents every corner of the state, it, like the old legislature, still doesn't fully resemble the collective face of Illinois' 12.2 million residents.
Among the group to be seated this month, whites and men are over-represented, while women and Hispanics are underrepresented, as compared to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau population estimates for Illinois.
Of the 177 House and Senate members, 148 - or 84 percent - will be white, whereas the most recent census estimates show 71 percent of the state's population to be white.
Hispanics will hold six seats, or 3 percent of the legislature, which is the same number of seats Hispanics have held since 1993. But that rapidly growing ethnic group represents an estimated 11 percent of the state's population.
There will be 23 black members, holding 13 percent of the General Assembly. African Americans account for 15 percent of the state's population, according to the most recent estimates.
There are no Asian-American lawmakers in the General Assembly, though Asian Americans make up 3 percent of the state's population.
And while women increased their ranks in the new General Assembly, now holding 45 seats, they represent only a quarter of the 177 members. Still, the count represents the second-highest number of female Illinois lawmakers in the past decade. In the 90th General Assembly, there were 46 women. The most recent census data has women outnumbering men , 51 percent to 49 percent throughout Illinois. But in the Statehouse, men dominate with 75 percent of the legislative seats.
Dave McKinney
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Meet the freshmen
Of the 11 lawmakers whose legislative careers will begin January 10, five come from Chicago's suburbs, three from the city and three from central and far southern Illinois. All of these new faces will appear in the House, while the only newcomer to the Senate has plenty of Statehouse seasoning. Larry Woolard, a Carterville Democrat and a five-term House member, succeeded appointed Sen. Ned Mitchell, a Democrat from Sesser.
The newcomers in the House have experience in farming, real estate and dentistry.
Here is a quick look, by region, at this year's freshman class.
The new suburban lawmakers
| 7th House District: Karen Yarbrough, a Maywood Democrat, will take over for Rep. Wanda Sharp, who lost in the primary. Yarbrough is a licensed real estate broker, runs an insurance agency and is former president of the Maywood Chamber of Commerce. |
| 29th House District: David E. Miller, a Calumet City Democrat, succeeds Rep. Willis Harris, whom Miller upset in the spring primary. He will be the only dentist in the General Assembly and is president-elect of the Dolton Chamber of Commerce. |
| 60th House District: Karen May, a Highland Park Democrat, serves on that north suburb's city council and takes the place of Democratic Rep. Lauren Beth Gash, who lost a bid for Congress. May operates a public relations and advertising agency. |
| 64th House District: Rosemary Kurtz, a Crystal Lake Republican, succeeds GOP Rep. Cal Skinner, whom she beat in the primary. Kurtz has served as Crystal Lake's treasurer since 1997 and is a former high school and college teacher. |
| 79th House District: Robert L. Ryan Jr., a Lansing Democrat, will fill the seat of retiring Rep. Michael Giglio. Ryan is a bank examiner with no prior experience in elected office. |
The new Chicago lawmakers
| 1st House District: Susana Mendoza, a Democratic ally of Mayor Daley, defeated Rep. Sonia Silva in the spring primary. She was coordinator of business outreach for the Chicago Department of Planning and Development. |
| 4th House District: Cynthia Soto, a Democrat, staged a stunning upset in the primary of Rep. Edgar Lopez, an ally of Gov. Ryan and Mayor Daley. Soto is a supervisor in the Cook County state's attorney's office of child support enforcement. |
| 10th House District: Annazette R. Collins, a Democrat, is a Chicago school board administrator who defeated Rep. Coy Pugh in the primary. Collins also has been employed by the Department of Children and Family Services and the Cook County probation department. |
The new downstate lawmakers
| 88th House District: Dan Brady, a Bloomington Republican, fills the seat of Rep. Bill Brady, who ran an unsuccessful bid for Congress. Dan Brady has been the McLean County coroner since 1992 and has been a funeral home operator. |
| 104th House District: Tom Berns, an Urbana Republican, succeeds Rep. Tim Johnson, who won election to Congress. Berns heads a civil engineering firm and has taught engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. |
| 117th House District: Gary F. Forby, a Benton Democrat, won election to the House seat vacated by Rep. Larry Woolard, who is moving to the state Senate. Forby, a former farmer, owns an excavating company and is a longtime union member. |
Dave McKinney
