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79 8. Finally, the Senate Presidency I realized that if Jane Byrne became mayor of Chicago, she was going to be looking for friends, and I was going to be one of them for sure. When I moved to Oak Park, Tom Hynes was in his first and only two-year term as Senate president. He wasn’t in the job very long before he decided to run for Cook County assessor in 1978. He wanted out of Springfield. Legislative cycles being what they are, it seemed that in 1977 and 1978 we dealt with some high-profile issues that had been around for a while and kept coming back. That’s the way it works. If you don’t get your idea passed one year, you can bring it back another year. I think people forget, when their issue fails in Springfield or Washington, that persistence over years can pay off on controversial issues. One such issue in this session was off-track betting (OTB), which had the strong support of Chicago mayor Michael Bilandic and Governor Thompson. Chicago really wanted the $21 million it would generate for the city. To make it politically and geographically more palatable, we added to the bill OTB sites for Decatur, Rockford, Peoria, Springfield, and East St. Louis. The House passed the bill after a hot debate on the floor. Thompson took a lot of blows for his early support of OTB because he had said during his campaign that he would oppose any new form of legalized gambling; he specifically said that he would oppose OTB run by municipalities.1 Thompson insisted that he had not changed his position, but the OTB opponents wore everyone down. By the time the bill reached the Senate, it didn’t have much of a chance, and we could not muster the votes for OTB. Not yet, anyway. Another issue we discussed again this session was branch banking. During the 1970s, branch banking, interstate banking, and regional banking were hot topics, with the big banks wanting branches and many community banks not wanting competition from the big national or state banks. finally, the senate presidency 80 I sponsored the bill for branch banking, which was limited. For example, Chicago banks would not be able to open branches outside of Cook County . Also, banks could open one branch per year in 1978 and 1979 and two annually after that. I thought it was a reasonable consumer issue, because we could identify 1,500 municipalities in the state without any banking facilities at all. I thought some of these communities would appreciate having a branch of a larger bank. But some of the downstate members would not support it, and a few of the members said they had conflicts of interest because of associations with hometown banks. Then there was Harold Washington, who voiced his opposition by saying that big banks would set up “collection houses” in African American neighborhoods in his district and then use the money to lend to people elsewhere. He thought it was bad for the blacks and the minority communities. Toward the end of the session, we were still five votes short in the Senate, so I had to let it go. This was also the first session that I tried to move the primary date from March to September. I believed this would reduce campaign expenditures and the amount of time that candidates would have to spend campaigning. It also would eliminate that long lag between March and the November general elections. In addition, having a September primary would give candidates an opportunity to circulate petitions and do some door-to-door canvassing while there was decent weather. I thought my arguments were compelling, but I believe it’s fair to say that a majority of the Democratic organization did not wish to move the primary. Their motives were not so noble. They thought they would be better protected from the independent candidates if the competition had to go out in the worst possible weather. This also meant, however, that our loyal precinct captains would have to trudge through the snow and ice to get signatures and spread the gospel about our candidates. I tried two or three times in different years to move the primary to September, but opponents would throw all kinds of arguments at me, like we’re interfering with the Jewish holidays in September or interfering with farmers taking the crops from the fields. Opponents also said the...

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