Relax. Put down that shovel. There’s no need to keep burying your assets in the back yard.
They’ve gone home for now, the Illinois General Assembly. They sneaked out of Springfield late Tuesday, after they stuck the smokers and stiffed the school kids.
If you live in Chicago, though, you’re not out of the woods. The infamous City Council has one more session to go before taking its summer recess, so city dwellers can’t sound the “all-clear” until Aug. 4.
Then again, the way our legislators and alderpersons have behaved this summer, none of us may be in the clear long. Last week those two legislative halls seemed to be playing a game of Can You Top This?
I’m not sure who won, but I don’t think it was us. Here’s a selective list of last week’s legislative accomplishments:
– Apparently inspired by Gov. Jim Edgar’s State of the State pledge to favor “kids over concrete,” the General Assembly proceeded to authorize $2.5 billion worth of tollway extensions for what’s left of rural northeastern Illinois. They say the new roads will pay for themselves, which is more than they can say for the suburban sprawl the roads will bring to northern Will and western Lake Counties. Is that another Kmart up ahead at the Grayslake exit?
– Back in Chicago, the City Council passed an ordinance requiring high-rise owners to file an official report to City Hall any time a person is stuck in an elevator more than 15 minutes. Shouldn’t that depend on whom you’re stuck with?
– After stiffing the Chicago Public Schools and scaling back a cost-of-living increase for welfare families to a miserly $10 a month, the General Assembly voted $20 million to renovate the state fairgrounds, including $808,000 for an improved swine pavilion. Who said legislators don’t have priorities?
– The City Council passed an ordinance slapping a $50 fine on kids caught in the act of cleaning windshields at stoplights in return for spare change. I don’t get it. If a kid has 50 bucks, what’s he doing washing windshields?
– Though it did nothing about long-promised property-tax reform, the General Assembly did vote to let suburbanites vent their spleen in an advisory (read “meaningless”) referendum next year on property-tax caps. Then the Republicans created a new tax-supported office of suburban schools superintendent, acting less than a year after killing a similar Democrat-controlled office they said was a patronage swamp. So this is tax reform?
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– Fearing he didn’t have the votes, Mayor Daley withdrew from council consideration a proposed ordinance requiring grocers to take a city-sponsored course in racial sensitivity. What’s next, ethics for lawyers?
– Back in Springfield, our law-and-order legislators stiffened legal penalties for carjacking, child abandonment, torture murder and sweepstakes fraud. They even made it a crime to help a pain-wracked person commit suicide. Then they approved early release for thousands of convicts because there is no room in Illinois’ overcrowded prisons for the people who broke laws already on the books. Anybody for making stupidity a crime?
And so it goes, every year about this time.
You could get suicidal watching the legislature and council do their summer-stock follies. And if you do, don’t look to me for help. Starting this year, you’re on your own.
Equal time
Two weeks ago this column mourned the imminent demise of INFAC, a collaboration between the Defense Department and Midwest manufacturers to develop better ways of making precision mechanical gears.
The program, based at the Illinois Institute of Technology Research Institute, was about to lose its federal funding because of rules changes ordered by Congress for the awarding of grants to public-private partnerships.
Lo and behold, the White House has informed the research institute and the Illinois congressional delegation that INFAC’s funding will be renewed and that the program does, indeed, embody Bill Clinton’s ideas about government cooperation with the private sector on technology transfer and training.
Credit some last-minute pleading by research institute execs Sid Firstman and Jed Jackson, and Joe Arvin, my friend the gear man, who heads INFAC’s private industry council. They prevailed on Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun and Reps. Dan Rostenkowski and Bobby Rush to plead with the White House one more time-and it worked.
Now, who said anything bad about legislators?