The importance of two pieces of legislation one that would have given student trustees a binding vote on their respective boards while retaining campus elections, and one that would have allowed state workers to retain the pension packages that they were promised seems to have been overlooked by the Senate. Both of these bills should have been passed.

Instead, the Senate shot down the 1997 Pension Bill amendment, and it sentenced the student trustee bill to a longer shelf life in the Senate Executive Committee than necessary.

A pension bill revision would have been quite an accomplishment for hundreds of state workers who lobbied against the bill’s original shortcomings.

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The 1997 Pension Bill was intended to be a benefit to state employees and indeed, it seeks to help raise the state’s pension benefits from its embarrassing ranking of 49th in the nation. But a line in the bill threatened to rake some state employees over the coals. Workers with fewer than 20 years of state employment would be required to pay for 5 percent of their health care premiums in spite of an earlier promise of free health care.

At the behest of an impressive lobbying effort spearheaded by SIUC workers, Sen. Dave Luechtefeld, R-Okawville, subsequently sponsored an amendment to the bill that would have allowed promised workers to retain their health care benefits as part of their pension packages. This would have been a fair way to correct the state’s mistake. Unfortunately, the Illinois Senate could not muster the moxie needed to pass the bill out of the Senate. The amendment was defeated 28-10 in the face of strong opposition from northern legislators lacking a considerable number of state workers in their districts. Those legislators were handicapped because they could not understand the predicament their lower-level fellow state employees were facing.

And although the student trustee bill did not suffer the same fate, positive action on the bill has to wait for two things:1.) The Senate Executive Committee has to meet in the off-season between veto sessions, or 2.) The bill has to go back to the Rules Committee in the spring session and await approval.

House Bill 2364 would have given state students the voice they deserved on their Boards of Trustees the right way. Gov. Edgar sought to give students this right but he wanted a backup measure that would have allowed the state to ultimately choose each school’s student trustee. This was insult to students’ ability to make decisions, and quick action by the Senate in passing the bill may have allowed Edgar to see his mistake.

State workers may have another chance at getting their deserved health care through an impending collective bargaining suit. State students have to lobby for senators to hear their concerns. Now, both groups have to play a lengthy waiting game that already could have been finished.