From Where I Stand — Do I look like a guy with a plan? Do you know what I am? I am a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with it if I caught one. - The Joker, The Dark Knight
Complaining about politics is a time-honored American tradition. We gripe at bars, around holiday dinner tables, staring at our property tax bills, or banging away on social media sites. What is far more rare is when a policy maker stops dead in his or her tracks, turns to you, and asks, “Ok, smart guy, what do you want to do about it?” In that moment, a group like the ILCA must bridge the divide between problem identifier and problem solver. That is when we must decide if we are capable political advocates or mongrel dogs barking at passing cars. A few weeks ago on Facebook, I offered the opportunity for members to sound off about politics. This is a risky venture in today’s day and age, but I felt the informality and pseudo-anonymity of Facebook would provide the perfect venue for a gripe session. We started the post with an image of a large, angry emoji. We then asked ILCA members to air their grievances in a fashion that would’ve made Frank Costanza proud in this season of Festivus. I wanted our members to provide background into the political obstacles that make their businesses run less smoothly and profitably. This was intelligence gathering, plain and simple. As the bill filing deadline in Springfield looms closer, we wanted to determine if there were avenues the ILCA could get involved in on a proactive basis. ILCA plays a lot of defense each legislative session. This year will be no different with a new administration, fresh faces in the General Assembly, and a lot of old foes dusting off pieces of “good idea” legislation. The conversation on Facebook played out predictably. There were a few earnest posts, but most were general gripes about high personal, corporate, or property taxes. This is an area that ILCA has very little authority or power to enact change. Income and property taxes impact us all and ILCA struggles to find a nuanced argument that would show why landscape professionals are bearing some undue brunt. I will admit, I have done a lot of learning on the job when it comes to how the legislative process plays out down in Springfield. Our lobbyist Dave Manning has been with the ILCA for longer than I have held the job as Executive Director and has helped guide and teach me along the way. I am aided by a fantastic Regulatory and Legislative Committee made up of volunteers who vet the detailed bill summary that Dave provides. They take positions on over one hundred bills each legislative session. We are a patchwork of human resource professionals, lawyers, suppliers, and contactors from various green industry disciplines. More universally, we are concerned citizens who realize that if we don’t speak up, we go unheard, or worse, someone else speaks for us. The Regulatory and Legislative Committee has now spun off an entirely new Political Action Committee Subcommittee or the PAC Subcom. It is their job to raise funds for the PAC and to take the policy positions created by the R&L Committee forward to the actual men and women of the General Assembly. We target key officials on key committees who will most likely review legislation that session that will help or hurt us. All of this takes time and money and that is why the PAC Subcom has been so active these past 12 months beat-
ing the drum about contributions. Clearly, ILCA has the infrastructure in place to at least form a bulwark against the negative impact of state legislation. That bulwark involves a lot of talented individuals working together to either inform the General Assembly about issues that impact the members or inform our members about issues that flow backwards from the General Assembly. This is why the Board of Directors built a new objective into its strategic plan about doing a comprehensive review of existing state legislation to find practical areas where ILCA can have an impact. That is tougher than it sounds. Keep in mind, every year, the Illinois General Assembly proposes almost 9,000 pieces of new legislation and we have to keep tabs on every single bill that even tangentially brushes up against our industry. Further, there are hundreds of thousands of pages of statutes already passed by the General Assembly that form the basis of our state legal system. In addition, millions of additional pages of rules support and provide clarity to those laws. It’s a lot of reading, to put it lightly. It took me a long time of dealing with the State of Illinois and its agencies to shift my paradigm about state law. Like most citizens, I believed that the mere passage or existence of a law was enough to correct behavior. If we didn’t like how the world worked, or something or someone was being abused, passing a law would fix the situation. I am not sure why I felt this way when evidence to the contrary was all around me. We have laws about robbing banks and murder, but we still have bank robbers and murderers. In addition, I naively concluded that identifying law breakers to law enforcement agencies was enough to spur action. That too is not accurate. Many police and law enforcement agencies know of law breakers, but they may lack the resources, evidence, man power, or sheer will to do anything about it. One thing I have learned during 10+ years in dealing with state government, is that when Springfield finally gets you in their crosshairs, you are royally screwed. There is a reason for the expression, “You can’t fight city hall.” All of a sudden, all those laws and rules buried in the back of some dusty statute book are thrust into the limelight and their authority and punitive impact are devastating. If you approach lawmaking with the perspective that many will get away, but some will pay, it is easier to make peace with that likely outcome. Laws will not make a utopia, but their occasional harsh, quick, and cruel enforcement against bad actors helps avoid a dystopia. So that brings us back to our introductory quote by the Clown Prince of Crime - The Joker. The ILCA guided by our strategic plan and our legislative infrastructure is prepared to identify, review, and possibly take action on existing rules and laws that impact ILCA members, but what are those laws and which ones take priority. Some ideas in the hopper: The Turf Committee - In many states, lawn care is under siege. The ILCA must hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. To prepare, our Turf Committee performed a comprehensive review of the statute that governs lawn care and pesticide applicators and suggest no changes at this time. They identified a few areas of concern, but feel it is premature to work on a comprehensive lawn care bill because it would flush out opponents. Instead, they want to continue to build relationships at the Illinois Department of Agriculture and stay vigilant to any legislation that would erode preemption. The lesson here is pre-
Political Animals
The Landscape Contractor January 2019
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