By JAMES KROHE JR. Springfield keeps commission government SPRINGFIELD voters had a chance to change the form of their city government on March 21 and they turned it down emphatically. A measure which would have abandoned the city's five-person commission in favor of an aldermanic council and a city manager failed by a vote of 14,285 votes to 4,592. Citizens for Representative Government (CRG), the group that spearheaded the reform effort, was a loose coalition of suburban liberals, black clergy and academics. But key elements of the traditional reform constituency, namely labor, business and the press, either stayed out of the fight or campaigned against the change. The measure lost in all parts of the city, carrying only five of 126 precincts. Even the partly black, mostly working-class east side, whose interests the CRG argued were being ignored under the at-large commission system, refused to endorse its alternative. Most observers agreed that the result was as much a vote of no-confidence in the proposed council-manager system as it was a vote of confidence in the commission. Indeed, many prominent Springfieldians, including the head of the Chamber of Commerce and a former mayor, favored a strong-mayor government. It was widely assumed that the strong-mayor alternative was not put on the ballot because its name would elicit unflattering comparisons with Chicago and its late mayor — which, ironically, is governed under the weak-mayor system — not because of any inherent weaknesses. It seems unlikely that the Springfield vote signifies a reversal of the post-war trend toward city manager government in Illinois. As one of the opponents of the change remarked on the day after the vote, "The people recognize that this is a unique city." Springfield is the only Illinois city over 50,000 still using the commission government (Aurora switched two years ago), a form of government the experts say isn't supposed to work in cities so large. Apparently the people of Springfield — who have lived under commission government for 67 years — don't agree.
JAMES KROHE JR. May 1978/ Illinois Issues /17
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