Was at the Capitol all day yesterday and met with Rep. Phelps this morning. As strange as this may sound, we were very close to passing HB997 yesterday. Going into the debate we had 72+ votes.
Two things happened - we had several reps from the Chicago area ready to vote with us and then a senator from Chicago began circulating around the House floor just before the vote, taking notes on the debate and mentioning a bill coming out in the Senate in the next few weeks. Some of our Chicago votes then decided to wait and see what comes out of the Senate.
The other thing that happened is, due to a snafu with all the gazillion different drafts of 997, there were errors in the draft that came up for a vote. A few votes fell off because of that.
One thing we noticed throughout the Capitol is that there is no sense of urgency to pass a bill. We heard several times that "it's still early, plenty of time, we have until May 31st."
Our plan is to defeat any bad bill coming out of the Senate, fix the errors in 997, and come back for another vote. There is no discussion of any kind of carve out for Chicago or Cook Co.