Introduction

How can you change the world? Change a law.

How can you change a law? Hire a lobbyist to help you.

Many people think of a lobbyist as a high-priced hired gun, peddling his or her influence for the highest bidder. I’m a different kind of lobbyist.

I only work for causes or clients that I agree with. I also prefer to work with clients that want to try to pass a bill that does something good, instead of trying to stop a bill from getting passed. I want to work on the side of the angels, and if you want to improve the lives of regular people, I’d like to help you do it.

My niche is in helping to change a good general idea (getting more people health insurance, cleaning up the environment, getting more voters) into concrete, bite-sized bills that are big enough to make a difference and small enough to earn support (extending health insurance coverage to recent college graduates for an additional year, requiring the state to purchase environmentally-preferable products if they are the same price as non-preferred products or extending the deadline to register to vote an extra 14 days) – and then finding the sponsors who will work to pass the bill.

If you want to make things better, email me. Even if you don’t hire me, I enjoy giving advice to people who are trying to change the world, one bill at a time.

Current Clients

Center for Voting and Democracy / Midwest Democracy Center

Midwest High Speed Rail Association

Unspam, LLC

Several pro bono issues

Education

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (B.A. in political science and economics).1997.

Featured classes: Independent Study in State Government with Sam Gove. Voting Rights with Dianne Pinderhughes.

University of Chicago Law School. 2000.

Featured classes: Legislative Process with Abner Mikva. Voting Rights with Barack Obama. Independent Study with Barack Obama.

Experience

I have been working with the Illinois General Assembly for almost a decade. My first trip to Springfield occurred in 1996 with student government leaders (and began my lobbying career on a high note as we met with Speaker Michael Madigan on securing a student vote for the University Board of Trustees). My first lobbying experience was in 8^th grade, when as class president of Washburne Junior High School in Winnetka, IL, I organized a letter-writing campaign from the elementary schools in the district on gun control. Several second-graders at Hubbard Woods Elementary School in the district had been shot by a mentally disturbed woman the year before, and we used the annual trip to D.C. to hand-deliver the letters, crayon pictures and posters to our federal representatives.

Legislation

Democracy

Making voter registration easier is a long-standing goal of mine. SB 2133, establishing a 14-day grace period to permit citizens to register to vote up until 14 days before the election instead of the current 28-day deadline, passed the House and the Senate during the 2004 November veto session and awaits the Governor’s signature. I drafted the original version and worked closely with Representative Robin Kelly and Senator James Meeks through the many different permutations of the legislation. See HB 3427 and HB 3812. A fact sheet on the legislation is here.

HB 138 is the first bill that I wrote and worked on that become law. The bill permits county boards to provide their voters with cumulative voting rights; that is, if more than one person is to be elected and a voter has more than one vote to cast, she may cast all her votes for one candidate, cumulatively. Representative Jack Franks introduced the legislation early in the 2003 session. We lost in committee on our first vote, but after reaching an agreement with the lobbyists for Metro Counties (an association of the Northeastern Illinois counties) to strip out a provision calling for a binding referendum, the bill came out of committee, through the House floor and through the Senate as well. Governor Blagojevich signed HB 138 into law in July of 2003.

Legislation to authorize municipalities to provide cumulative voting rights, HB 2544 (introduced by House Majority Leader Barbara Flynn Currie), was voted out of a House committee, as amended, but did not pass out of the House. Bills to allow school boards to provide for cumulative voting rights were also introduced in both chambers: SB 1371 (introduced by Senator Miguel Del Valle) and HB 4091 (introduced by Representative Paul Froehlich).

Instant runoff voting is another innovative reform that lets voters rank the candidates (1, 2, 3) on ballots. A number of bills were introduced in the 2003-2004 session, each one more tailored to a particular problem than the last, and I hope to pass something like this in 2005. The bills are HB 395 (Representative Mike Boland), HB 4011 (Representative Paul Froehlich), HB 4139 (Representative Frank Mautino).

Why can’t college students register to vote when they register for classes? That’s the idea behind HB 4141, the College Voter Registration Act, a bill I drafted for Representative Linda Chapa LaVia. Young people and first-time voters often do not realize they need to register to vote, and the government should make it as easy as possible for citizens to participate in elections. If we can move this bill in 2005, we can serve as a model for the rest of the nation to follow and raise voter turnout.

Prisoners can’t vote. But they are counted as residents of the prison where they are incarcerated, not of their home community. That’s not fair, because it takes power away from predominantly poor, minority and urban neighborhoods where many criminals are from and gives it to predominantly white, rural areas of the state where prisons are located. This representation rip-off is exacerbated by the bias in our criminal justice system against poor minorities. HB 7339, the Prisoner Census Adjustment Act, would fix the problem. I drafted this bill after reading about the issue at the PrisonersoftheCensus.org, and Deputy Majority Leader Arthur Turner introduced the legislation in October of 2004 to get a running start on the 2005 session.

Higher education

Wisconsin and Minnesota have an innovate partnership: citizens of either state may enroll in the public universities of the sister state at the in-state tuition rate. This effectively doubles the number of campuses available to college students in each state. Representative Jim Sacia and I are trying to set up a similar arrangement between Illinois and Wisconsin. Representative Sacia introduced HB 7289 that would set up an arrangement with Wisconsin along these lines.

Environment

Besides direct regulation of polluting industries, the State also can help the development of environmentally-beneficial products made from recycled content by buying them (which supports recycling instead of disposal, as more companies want to buy recycled materials to make them into new products that the State will purchase). With this idea in mind, I approached Representative Karen May with a draft bill. After a few rounds of negotiations with the Administration over the summer and fall, the bill became HB 5051, introduced by Representative Paul Froehlich and co-sponsored by Representative May. We discovered that there were some shortcomings in the bill, and Representative Froehlich convened a meeting of interested agency officials in his office that I helped to staff in order to come up with a solution. That group came up with the need for a Working Group of agency officials that could come up with appropriate language for regulations that would actually ensure the State’s purchasing power is used to help the environment. That resolution is HR 797 and it passed the House on June 1, 2004. The Working Group has apparently been meeting and should deliver language to the General Assembly before the 2005 session.

Another nice improvement would be to discourage driving, as every mile driven puts more pollution in the air. Automobile insurance encourages driving, however, as it is sold on a per-time basis, not on a per-mile-driven basis. The additional miles driven do not increase the cost of insurance, and those who chose to drive less do not see a reduction in their insurance. See At my request, Senator John Cullerton introduced SB 3385 to ensure that state law does not prohibit per-mile automobile insurance on the last regular day of session. Shortly thereafter, we discovered that state law probably already permits per-mile automobile insurance. To try to move this issue forward, we tried a bill that would require insurance companies to offer to local governments a per-mile plan for government automobiles. That’s SB 3388.

Consumer protection

I represent Unspam, LLC, a Chicago-based consulting firm that specializes in finding solutions to the deluge of unwanted electronic messages, especially those that are inappropriate for children. I worked with Representative Charles Jefferson on HB 4350, the Child Protection Registration Act, which would create a do-not-email list, similar to the do-not-call list, for children. We worked extensively with the Office of the Attorney General on a second draft of the legislation this session, and expect to make more progress in 2005 in implementing this program that can protect children in Illinois from receiving inappropriate email messages.

Passenger trains

I represent the Midwest High Speed Rail Association. My role is to work to secure better passenger rail service in Illinois, primarily through the State’s investment in additional Amtrak service. We began by working to build a consensus among the elected officials that represent Downstate districts along the Chicago-St. Louis line for additional funding to secure two more daily round-trips. Those Senators signed a joint letter to the Governor and the leaders in the Senate asking for additional funding. We then organized a legislative breakfast briefing in the last days of the May session for any interested legislator on the state of passenger rail service and steps to take in the future. During our conversation, the legislators proposed the next step: find out how much the State is currently paying on travel between Chicago and cities served by Amtrak, as air and auto travel is far more expensive than Amtrak, to see if we can save some money by having all State employees use Amtrak when possible. We could potentially invest those funds in purchasing additional round-trips on the line, which makes the service more convenient for everyone and begins a virtuous cycle of additional investment and additional usage in passenger rail. That resolution is HR 1039, and it passed the House in July of 2004.

Tax

The Illinois income tax is 3% with the first $2,000 earned exempted from taxation. This is a heavy burden on low- and middle-income earners, and it also leaves Illinois with the lowest income tax on millionaires in the Midwest. This is one major reason why we’re in the midst of a budget deficit. Representative Will Davis introduced HB 7294 that would raise the income tax rate to 4% while increasing the standard exemption to $12,000. He filed a fiscal note to find out that the bill would still bring in $1.1 billion to the state, and we hope to make this improvement law in the future.