Chicago___________

By ED McMANUS

Primary forecast: it's snow again

CHICAGO'S Democratic machine always liked the idea of holding the mayoral primary in February. January and February are terrible months for campaigning, so any independent challenger would have a devil of a time getting around and lining up votes. On the other hand, it didn't really matter if the machine candidate was snowed in all winter. His patronage army would get the loyalists to the polls.

Then came 1979, and the strategy backfired. Jane Byrne toppled Michael Bilandic for the very reason that the city was just coming out of its worst winter and he had failed miserably to plow the streets. Had the election been held a couple of months later, when people weren't so concerned about snow, Bilandic may well have survived.

Now Byrne's term is coming to an end, and it is she who is being blamed for problems with snow plowing. A bad winter next year could seriously endanger her reelection chances.

The first two winters of Byrne's term were relatively mild, both in snowfall and in temperature, but this year the extremely cold weather kept the snow from melting, and it began to accumulate on side streets. On January 26, it was reported in the news media that the side streets were not being cleared because a city policy called for plowing them only after a snowfall of seven inches. And meanwhile, it was revealed, most of the 165 four-wheel drive, plow-equipped vehicles bought for $1.5 million late in 1979 to clear side streets were sitting idle. The city blamed it on the Teamsters Union. The union insists that only teamsters can drive the plows, and using teamsters employed by the various departments of city government would be too disruptive to those agencies, a spokesman said.

On February 1, the city decided to make use of the mini-plows, and the Department of Streets and Sanitation reported later in the day that 90 percent of the streets had been plowed. This statement turned out to be quite an exaggeration, and the mayor was confronted with that fact the following day.

"Weather is becoming a media event in Chicago," she bristled at a press conference. "We're trying to do the best we can. We've always had snow in Chicago. When I grew up, we played in it. We hitched our sleds to the backs of cars. We loved it. But since 1979, it's becoming kind of a feat — we're supposed to catch it as it's coming down. We try to do the best we can with the taxes we collect.

"It's a very big city."

Her reference to 1979, of course, was to the year she swept into office because this very same media put so much emphasis on the snow.

On February 8, a reporter asked one of her leading city council supporters, Alderman Fred Roti, about her 1979 promise to plow snow off the city's side streets. "That was campaign rhetoric," replied Roti. "To try and make her keep her promise is totally unfair."

(A spokesman for the mayor said later: "I don't know that she ever made such a promise with regard to side streets.")

On February 9 the mayor denounced the media again for "your silly frivolity about the snow." She accused reporters of "blowing up all of this business about side streets and snow."

"Please don't take up my time," she said. "There are major issues in the City of Chicago and they aren't snow. As mayor, I have far more important things to do than respond to this so-called media event."

She added that the news reports have hurt business in the city.

This is the lady who called Bilandic "The abominable snowman on the 5th floor of City Hall."

"The public," she said in January 1979, "has been treated to an almost unprecedented pack of lies. . aimeed at persuading Chicagoans to believe they are not snowed in and that if they are it's their own fault because they did not move their cars out of six feet of snow into a parking lot a mile away that had another six feet of snow."

I wrote in an earlier column that I thought Byrne stood a good chance of getting reelected, largely because many voters don't care much about complicated governmental issues. What they do care about is how she is directly meeting their needs — keeping the elevated trains running, keeping the wall clean, providing good fire and police protection. . .and plowing the snow. Byrne should have said: "There are major issues in the City of Chicago and one of them is snow."

The mayor may wish she could put off that election until July or August. August. □

38/April 1982/Illinois Issues