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GUEST ESSAY

Regional politics

THE STATE'S POWER PLAY ON MEIGS FIELD
REFLECTS CHICAGO'S DECLINING POLITICAL CAPITAL

by Chad Anderson. Julie Blair and Heather Landy

Meigs Field once was a sleepy lake- front airstrip used primarily by state officials commuting to and from Springfield. Few Chicagoans used the airport or gave it much thought. But that changed in September, when Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley announced he was closing Meigs and turning the 91- acre site into a $27 million park.

Suddenly, a tiny airport that had always been more quaint than useful was the centerpiece in a high-profile game of political chess. Gov. Jim Edgar went to court to block Daley's plan, and, when that failed, he took his case to the General Assembly, where the lame-duck Republican leadership swiftly approved a state takeover of the airport during the fall veto session.

With no compromise on the horizon, relations between the mayor and the governor hit an all-time low, leaving most of the rest of us wondering just how the stakes could be so high.

Partly, the stakes are personal: the natural friction, perhaps, between a volatile big-city mayor and a low-key downstate governor. Yet, it may be more useful to view the changing dynamic between city and state leaders in the context of recent political power shifts.

Just a few decades ago, the state never would have attempted such a move against Chicago. But, as voters have migrated from the Democratic city to the Republican suburbs, Edgar and his GOP allies have come to believe that they can, in fact, fight City Hall.

"The typical power arrangement in Illinois politics was that some deal was cut between the city and the rural areas, and the suburbs were left out," says Margaret Weir, a political analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. "Now that the suburban leaders have really come into their own, they seem to be playing a fairly vindictive game toward the city."

Vindictive or not, suburban leaders may finally have enough clout to set the state's agenda.

Since 1950, the number of eligible voters in suburban Cook County has nearly tripled, from 599,384 to 1,764,384, according to the 1990 census. The voting age population in the collar counties exploded more than threefold, from 443,546 to nearly 1,552,489.

In the same period, Chicago lost more than 20 percent of its voting age population. In fact, the city cast only 20.4 percent of the state's ballots in the November election, down from 30.7 percent in 1972, according to the State Board of Elections.

Chicago's political clout was further eroded in 1992, when Republicans redrew the state legislative map to extend safe Democratic districts from the city into the Republican suburbs.

Redistricting, combined with shifts in population, produced a 1994 landslide for the Republicans, who won control of all statewide offices and the General Assembly. And while Rep. Michael Madigan mobilized his fellow Democrats to recapture the House last fall, his two-seat majority will make it difficult to dominate the chamber as he did in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Using Margaret Weir's framework, the new political dynamic has Republican suburban leaders allying themselves with downstaters to achieve their ends. Political scientist James D. Nowlan suggests the city might want to do the same. Nowlan details the rise of wealth and power of the counties surrounding the city in his recent book, Illinois Politics and Government: The Expanding Metropolitan Frontier. The history of Illinois politics, he argues, is about just such shifting power alliances among the state's regions.

"Since the origin of Illinois," he writes, "political leaders have bargained for funding and benefits for their respective regions. In the 1830s, Abraham Lincoln and eight fellow legislators from the Springfield area ... worked as a bloc to move the state capital from Vandalia in southern Illinois to Springfield in rapidly growing central Illinois.

"The state's leaders have since distilled the bargaining process into a fine art of regional quid pro quo, taking in everything from school aid and transportation to state university campuses and construction of civic centers."

In short, the Statehouse has always been the arena for contending regional interests. And the battles have always focused on the distribution of financial resources, whether for social programs or bricks and mortar.

It's just that lately airports seem to bring out the worst in all sides.

Daley pulled the plug on his own proposal to build a third area airport at Lake Calumet on Chicago's Southeast

28 / January 1997 Illinois Issues

Side after the legislature balked at the idea. When Edgar and Republican leaders threatened to take over O'Hare International Airport in 1995, Daley headed them off by forming a bistate aviation authority with Gary, Ind.

"When the mayor entered into the Gary airport agreement, he basically said to Republicans in the state legislature, 'To heck with you,'" says Edgar spokesman Mike Lawrence.

Indeed, the battle over that third regional airport reflects yet another twist in the state's shifting demographics. As Democrats have moved to the suburbs, their priorities have changed. While Daley and Madigan argue that Peotone is too far from Chicago to handle air traffic for the city, south suburban leaders of both parties see jobs and economic development in Edgar's preference for the Peotone site.

State Rep. Mike Giglio, a south suburban Democrat who won his seat in November with Madigan's help, says his first responsibility is to his constituents.

"I was elected as a Democrat, and Mike Madigan and the Democratic Party all believe in the basic threads that hold the party together," Giglio says. "[But] my stance on the airport has remained the same since day one. They knew where I was coming from."

Freshman state Rep. George Scully Jr., another south suburban Democrat who supports the Peotone proposal, says he expects no backlash from the Democratic leadership. "I represent the people of the 80th District, and I don't think the leadership expects anything else from me," Scully says.

When lawmakers return to the Capitol this spring, the city's declining political capital could be revealed in other, more fundamental ways. When they're not preoccupied with airports, Illinois lawmakers are expected to address the issue of school funding. Currently, the city's schools receive about 40 percent of their funding from the state, compared to about 15 percent in the collar counties and more than half the budget in downstate districts, according to the Illinois State Board of Education. Yet, suburban legislators are likely to reject funding reforms that benefit Chicago schools without increasing aid to their own districts. "Any change without an infusion of new money will fail," says Patty Schuh, a spokeswoman for Senate President James "Pate" Philip, a Wood Dale Republican.

"Each legislator needs to protect the money coming into his or her district."

That position reveals another truism about Illinois' regionalism: Where possible, our elected officials practice the politics of addition, or at least the art of deal-making. But such horse trading rests on the relative political strengths of the contenders.

And some serious horse trading will be necessary for Chicago to get its fair share of the federal block grants Illinois will receive as part of the welfare reform measure passed by Congress in August. The state will have more authority than ever in deciding how to spend welfare money, giving Republicans another bit of leverage over their Chicago colleagues. Despite their airport tussles, Daley and Edgar have shown they can work together. It was, after all, Edgar and the Republican legislature who authorized the mayor to take over the city's public schools. Still, Meigs could turn out to be an early indicator of Chicago's changing fortunes. Some Republicans say that while Daley may win the battle of Meigs, he may ultimately lose the war for political preeminence in Illinois. "The votes are where the people are, and now the people are in the suburbs," says state Rep. Robert Churchill, a Lake County Republican. "The city of Chicago is the social and economic hub of Illinois, but I no longer believe it's the political hub." 

Since 1970, Illinois' overall population has remained relatively stable, though the number of eligible voters has increased. Chicago has lost both population and voting strength, while the suburbs, particularly in the counties surrounding the city, have gained considerably. Downstate now accounts for 40 percent of Illinois' eligible voters. Source: U.S. Census Bureau

Chad Anderson, Julie Blair and Heather Landy are graduate students at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.

Illinois Issues January 1997 / 29