Through the eyes of freshman Rep. Zickus

Rep. Anne Zickus

In November Anne Zickus accomplished something that no other candidate for the Illinois House of Representatives could pull off. She upset an incumbent who had not switched parties. Among the 110 incumbents seeking reelection there were only two casualties: Democrat John O'Connell whom Zickus bested and Democrat-turned-Republican Sam Panayotovich. By winning her contest, Zickus avenged a 283-vote 1986 loss to O'Connell in the 47th House District that straddles the Chicago/Cook County border and includes 14 precincts in Chicago.

For new lawmakers like Zickus their first session is a learning experience: "I spent the session just absorbing and learning as much as I could." The Palos Hills Republican learned that being a lawmaker is even more time-consuming than she had imagined. She learned that Republican bills often get sidetracked while similar Democratic measures move forward. She learned that the Republican minority has little to say in how the House is run. And she learned that on most issues partisan politics plays no role.

Zickus began her term with the 1988 campaign in mind. Surrounded by family and with 100 supporters bused down from the district looking on, Zickus stood in the House in January and took her oath of office. It was an exciting moment. But she says she also felt the responsibility of her new position: "When you go through a campaign and you're looking at winning an election and you finally do. . . . Now you know that it's up to you now to do the right thing."

The first thing a new lawmaker has to do right is figure out what's going on, an effort that meant many nights of work at home. Zickus, 50, owner of a realty company and a former alderman in Palos Hills, had thought that she would take care of legislative business during the week and return home weekends to take care of her customers. She soon learned differently: "I realized in a hurry that when we're in session, I don't think about real estate."

Zickus says that her lawmaker's job is to reflect the wishes of her constituents. Those voters are not apt to want a lot of new laws, and Zickus says she obliges them. She sponsored or co-sponsored 50 bills this spring, not a huge number but more than many legislators. "I am also a big believer that we have too much legislation. . . . The few bills that I did carry were those that I thought would be a help to some of the needs of my constituents," Zickus says. She does not recall one bill on which she was the lead sponsor which would have made October 1 Recycling Day, a commemorative school holiday.

The first bill that Zickus got passed, H.B. 2662, would allow judges to assess legal costs against a party who used assigned counsel in a child support case if the party could afford it. Zickus, who got the idea from talking to staff and other legislators, said that the idea had been tried elsewhere with some success: "This is another way to have some people accept some responsibility."

Her most exciting bill was the Junk Fax Act that would have prohibited sending unsolicited advertising or press releases via electronic transmission as facsimiles. Zickus was lead sponsor on that with four Democrats. She said that after the Democrats expressed interest in the idea, she approached them about becoming cosponsors: "I like being able to work with people on the other side of the aisle to have bipartisan legislation."

Zickus says the Democrat cosponsors helped her get the bill out of the House, but its passage also required some help from Republican leadership when the bill got stuck in interim study. She is not sure why it happened but after talks between Republican and Democratic leadership, she recalls, "One day I was told they were going to release it." Her bill eventually passed the House with 81 votes, but she watched as it died in a Senate committee. The provisions were successfully amended to another bill that won approval in the last week of the session.

Others of her bills fared poorly. She had one of the numerous "pocket pager" bills that sought to fight drug selling in schools by banning pocket pagers, which suppliers use to keep in contact with student runners. Her bill would have made unauthorized possession of the pagers a misdemeanor for a first-time offense and a felony for subsequent violations. Zickus says that by imposing criminal penalties, her bill would have been more than a slap on the wrist: "I felt it would have gone a lot further in doing the job that we wanted a pager bill to do. Unfortunately it ended up in interim study. . . . The Democrat bills were the ones that ended up going through."

Zickus got a real lesson on the power of the Democrat majority on May 17, when Speaker Michael J. Madigan (D-30, Chicago) introduced and passed his income tax

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increase. Zickus arrived on the House floor that morning to receive a packet of information and to be told the Republicans were going to recess to discuss the plan and then return to vote on it. "I was in shock. I really couldn't believe that things could happen that fast."

Her vote against the Madigan tax plan was an easy one for Zickus, who says that the loudest messages that she gets from her district are "no new taxes" and "more money for schools," apparently conflicting messages. She opposed all tax increases, although some educators from her district had pressed her for more money. She says that after the session she got no criticism for her votes because the schools got their money anyway.

Zickus's answer to the dilemma of greater spending for education without a tax increase was the Priority One Plan of House Republican lawmakers. That plan would have earmarked 63 percent of state income tax collections for education, with elementary and secondary education to get two-thirds and higher education one-third. Initially the plan would have produced $192 million more for education than Gov. James R. Thompson had proposed in his budget and $536 million more than education had received in the 1989 fiscal year. By receiving a guaranteed percentage of income tax receipts, education would enjoy independence from the usual appropriations that soar and plummet with the state's fiscal health. Republicans, however, never got their plan before the House. They wanted to amend it to a vehicle bill but fell six votes short of the 60 they needed to discharge that vehicle from committee.

The failed House GOP plan would have perfectly matched Zickus's needs for more money for schools without a tax increase. "There was some predictability and stability and there was no tax increase," she says, "but it sort of got put on the back burner with all the talk on Madigan's tax plan and the governor's tax increases."

Like many of her suburban Republican counterparts Zickus claims that the current method of divvying up school aid is unfair to her district, where citizens pay more in taxes than they get back. Zickus says she wishes that the school aid formula had been rewritten this session but realizes that some issues take a long time to resolve. She has not yet had time, she says, to absorb the formula rewrite proposal pushed by Sen. John W. Maitland Jr. (R-44, Bloomington). His plan would cap property tax rates and require the state to make up the difference for schools that lose money. For schools that rely on relatively high property tax values per student, the plan could mean cuts in spending; for taxpayers in the same districts, it could mean substantial property tax relief. For state taxpayers it would be they who would have to come up with another $300 million.

Although Zickus wants the state to do more for education, in most areas she thinks that state government does too much. She believes that the tax increase to help out Chicago was unwise: "I don't think it's everybody in the state's responsibility to bail out the city of Chicago." And she believes that government should not be telling businesses that they must provide health insurance or must allow workers time off for family responsibilities. She believes that tying the state minimum wage to the federal level was unwise. "In the long run it's counterproductive," she says, "when business starts hurting and people become unemployed and there's a bigger burden on government."

Among the accomplishments of the 86th General Assembly Zickus cites some examples of restraint. She voted against banning the sale or possession of assault rifles, an issue that she characterizes as gun control and which she said her constituents overwhelmingly oppose. She believes the taxpayer bill of rights with the protections it offers for individuals and the ombudsman it placces in the Department of Revenue will benefit Illinoisans. She supported reinstituting the double personal income tax exemption to the blind and elderly. And she was for the retirement savings plan, pilot programs to combat abuse of senior citizens, and electronic monitoring as an alternative to jail.

But it is not really lawmaking from which Zickus takes the greatest satisfaction. What she most enjoy is her service to constituents: things like helping get a senior citizen into a nursing home and helping cut through red tape to provide medical services to a young girl injured in an automobile accident.

Although she does not always agree with the end product, Zickus believes in the legislative process. Generally, she feels that the changes made between first reading and final passage of a bill improved it. She hopes each bill ends up as "something that's better for all the people in the state and not just for the legislator who introduced it or for a specific district."

Her belief in the process was sorely tested on June 30, when conference committee reports began pouring out of the house. She said the final hours of the spring session flew by without the breaks and pauses that others had told her would happen. The very speed caused problems for Zickus on June 30: "Trying to read as much as you can before you vote on it, the day just seemed to go by awfully fast." She experienced a little deja vu, as measures she thought had been put to rest surfaced again in the conference committee reports. A self-described stickler for detail, Zickus was thorough: "I didn't want to make any mistakes in the way I was voting, and it's sort of difficult sometimes when you've got all these stacks on your desk and you're looking through them when they're having a roll call already."

Much of action in the closing hours of the spring session ran counter to Zickus's wishes. Lawmakers hiked income, gasoline and cigarette taxes, with Zickus voting against them all. "I think we did a lot of bad things to the people of Illinois," she says, but she's a believer in representative government. "At least I had a chance to represent what the people of my district were saying, and they had someone there saying 'no' or 'yes' to the bills that came up," Zickus says. That may be as much as a freshman in the minority party can ever do.

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