Veto fix needed to override Cook king

Chicago Tribune

October 1, 2006

By Eric Zorn

The next president of the Cook County Board, whether it's Democrat Todd Stroger or Republican Tony Peraica, will inherit an unusual power enjoyed by Cook County Board presidents since the 1870s.

If he decides to veto a law passed by the 17-member board, a daunting four-fifths supermajority, 14 votes, is required to override that veto.

A two-thirds majority to override (66 percent) is standard in American legislative bodies great and small. Three-fifths (60 percent) is also common. Even a simple majority sometimes prevails, depending on the rules.

Four-fifths (80 percent) is very rare. Because the number of commissioners cannot be divided into fifths, Cook County's requirement is mathematically a touch higher than that, at 82 percent.

If the president also serves as a commissioner, as John Stroger did, the practical percentage increases still further, to 88 percent, or 14 out of the remaining 16 votes.

"It's completely absurd," said Commissioner Larry Suffredin, who has studied the history of the requirement. "It turns the president into a monarch."

And it's obsolete.

When the requirement was written into the Illinois Constitution, Cook County had 15 commissioners: 10 elected at large in the city and 5 elected at large in the suburbs. By requiring a four-fifths override vote, lawmakers intended to assure that city commissioners alone would not have override power; at least one suburban commissioner had to agree.

In 1973, when a sixth suburban commissioner was added, the four-fifths requirement stayed, even though a two-thirds requirement would have served the original purpose. The requirement also survived the board's 1994 expansion to 17 commissioners in single-member districts, some of which include both city and suburban communities.

Reform-minded Commissioner Michael Quigley proposed dropping the override requirement to three-fifths in his 2003 report, "Reinventing Cook County." But members of the General Assembly in Springfield, the only lawmakers with the power to make a change, failed to act.

Now's their chance. We've suffered too long with the ill effects of kinglike rule in Cook County, and this interregnum is the perfect time to strip power from the office without seeming to target any one particular officeholder.

Copyright 2006, Chicago Tribune Company

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