FOR A LONG TIME now we have had the uneasy feeling that if state government is going to survive in this country, it will be due to the federal courts. This began in 1962 with Baker v. Carr, in which the Supreme Court held that the courts could hear suits brought by qualified voters to challenge apportionments of state legislatures that failed to provide equal protection of the laws for all voters. Next came the widespread application of the "one man - one vote" doctrine to state legislatures all over the nation and then to congressional districts and to county boards. This is now history.
A few years ago, a federal judge in Chicago was apparently on the verge of ordering the state to reimburse depositors who had suffered losses in a state-chartered savings and loan association, on the grounds that the state had been negligent in supervising the operation of the association. Subsequently he was presented with additional legal arguments and changed his mind. The mere fact that consideration was given to such a step gave state legal officials the horrors. Later the General Assembly, in Public Act 78-714 appropriated $12.5 million to reimburse the depositors. But this was a political, not legal, decision.
But a federal court acted again — and rather decisively — with respect to a state agency in early August. This was the district court in Northern Illinois (Chicago) acting on a class action suit filed last March; the court told the Illinois Bureau of Employment Security to straighten up and do its job or the court would appoint a management consulting firm, at state expense, to reorganize the bureau. The bureau had fallen as much as six months behind in the payment of unemployment compensation checks. The situation was one which had provoked a good deal of handwringing in Springfield with newspaper editorial comment and an inquiry by the legislature's Commission on Intergovernmental Cooperation chaired by a strong labor spokesman in the House, Rep. Jack Hill (D., Aurora). But, nothing seemed to happen until the court spoke.
Within less than a month, the state hired a topflight management consulting firm, Arthur Andersen & Co., and by early September, the director of the Department of Labor announced a crash program to get the checks out on schedule — 14 days after the first week of eligibility. The agency adopted an affidavit system to verify claims and was to open two new offices in Chicago and hire 200 new/ employees in addition to almost 1,400 hired since the first of the year. Added phones were to be ordered if necessary to handle incoming calls. Thus, a situation which had been recognized since the first of the year was reversed by court action in less than a month.
Reforms do happen in Illinois, but many of them seem to come about at a snail's pace. Take the example of the five-year motor vehicle license plates recently proposed by Secretary of State Michael J. Hewlett. A majority of leading states have used multiyear plates for at least a decade, and members of the General Assembly have been unsuccessfully introducing bills to inaugurate such a system for at least that long. The reasons for a multiyear plate system have been obvious: a savings in the cost of the plate and in mailing it out, and the convenience for the vehicle owner to attach a decal rather than the nuisance of attaching new plates in the coldest part of the year. But bureaucrats from the secretary of state's office opposed these bills in committee with tedious, time-worn arguments: the system would lose revenue for the state, it would make law enforcement more difficult, and it probably couldn't be done in so large a state.
Last April Hewlett appointed a task force to look into the matter after his staff apparently had opposed such a proposal in the legislature (House Bill 321) introduced by Rep. Ronald E. Griesheimer, a rather bold young man from Waukegan who, after completing one term in the House, had this rather unoriginal idea for improving the automobile registration system. (The bill was recommended do not pass in the House Committee on Motor Vehicles and tabled.)
Howlett's task force reported at the end of the summer, and he endorsed its recommendation for a five-year motor vehicle plate made out of aluminum. This would cost $6.6 million more the first year (the yearly plates are made of less expensive steel) but over the five years it was estimated $21 million would be saved. The task force looked at the experience of other states and concluded the system would not lose revenue. They also found that law enforcement authorities welcomed the system. The only catch is that Illinois can't have the system until 1978 (even after the legislature acts — if it permits itself to act in 1976, a session to be limited to budget matters). The plates for 1976 are already on hand, and the plates for 1977 have been ordered.
As we say, reform moves at a snail's pace.
The prime example of that is the glacierlike progress toward adoption of the metric system. In 1875, the United States and 17 other nations by treaty adopted the metric convention as a world standard. Now, a century later, the Illinois Department of Transportation announced in September the award of the first statewide contract for signs along interstate highways to show distances in kilometers as well as miles. A total of 24 signs are to be erected. At that rate, the job ought to be completed by the turn of the century/W.L.D.
346/Illinois Issues/November 1975