The Chicago Charter Convention reassembled last week at its own
initiative to renew its attempt to prepare a city charter that the
Legislature will adopt and the people will accept at the polls. Its
first laborious effort was so ruthlessly made over by the contending
party factions in the Legislature two years ago that the measure suited
no one. Many members of the convention repudiated it and the people
overwhelmingly rejected it at the polls. To conserve their hard and
fundamental work, the convention ventured to reassemble last autumn and
appointed a committee to revise its own bill in the light of its fate
at the capitol and the polls. In so doing the amendments made by the
Legislature have been carefully considered and most of them eliminated.
The measure thus nearly restored to its original form has been changed
to conform to suggestions prompted by the criticisms and discussions
through which the bill and act passed. This revision is now to come
before the convention which faces many interesting and strenuously
contested issues. Among them are the limiting of the city's bonded
indebtedness to four per cent, the assumption by the city of ten per
cent more of the cost of public improvements, municipal suffrage for
women, stringent provisions against corrupt practices, the retention
of the party circle on the ballot, the local regulation of the liquor
traffic and the Sunday closing of saloons, the centralizing of school
management, and the consolidation of four park boards.
Preliminary to all these issues the question is to be decided whether
the convention will supersede itself by proposing to the Legislature
either to authorize the election of a new charter commission by the
people, or to call a constitutional convention. These proposals are
not likely to interfere with the procedure of the present convention
to complete its own charter bill. Notwithstanding the fierce factional
fight that now absorbs the energies of the Legislature so that it has
not yet attempted to attend to public business, one of the prominent
members of the House of Representatives assured the convention that
if it agreed upon a measure and rallied to its support the public
sentiment of Chicago, it would be enacted and referred to the
referendum vote of the people.