May 25--So far, Mayor Rahm Emanuel isn't having his security guards gas up the black SUV or preparing a private plane for takeoff for a quick trip to Springfield as lawmakers try to come up with a school funding plan in the final week of spring session.
There's a lot at stake. CPS is looking for hundreds of millions of dollars of state help to keep the district afloat as a huge teachers pension payment is due at the end of June. The mayor said Tuesday that there's more than one way to make the city's case.
"I've been personally in touch with them, in person, and there's a lot of ways, you can FaceTime people on cellphones, if you're worried about that personal touch, OK?" Emanuel said.
"I'm going to continue to be, not just on the phone but in person," he said. "This weekend I was meeting with legislators from the Chicago area."
As it stood Tuesday, an Emanuel trip to the Capitol this week seemed unlikely, said top administration officials who were not authorized to discuss the mayor's schedule publicly.
In recent weeks, Emanuel has fine-tuned his message on the issue, arguing that the state's school funding formula not only is detrimental to CPS but to downstate cities with a high number of poor students, such as Springfield and Quincy. A personal appearance by Emanuel to testify in Springfield could work counter to that message and put the spotlight on Chicago's needs instead of the mayor's argument that the formula itself is unfair to poor students. Republicans already are calling Emanuel's request for more state money a bailout.
For the mayor, deciding whether to insert himself into the delicate situation at a stalemated Capitol carries some risk. Though he could claim some measure of credit if a funding bill that helps CPS passes following an eleventh-hour visit, Emanuel could get stuck with an even bigger share of the political blame if he goes there and the legislature then doesn't act on education funding, or passes a bill that doesn't help Chicago the way he wants.
The mayor's record on in-person appeals to lawmakers is mixed. In May 2012 he made a much-ballyhooed speech to a House pension panel, calling for an overhaul of city government worker pensions and saying the "day of reckoning has arrived."
The General Assembly did not act on the plan Emanuel proposed at the time, and it would be another two years before they passed a different pension reform bill, which the Illinois Supreme Court ultimately threw out in March.
