Anger at ComEd Short Circuits Gun Lobby

Public anger at Commonwealth Edison arising from the severe storms on June 21 and 30 thwarted efforts by backers of conceal-carry gun legislation to dominate state Rep. Karen May’s (D-Highland Park) town hall meeting Saturday. 

A few days before the meeting was held at the Highland Park police station, a member of May’s staff received a copy of an e-mail circulated by a conceal-carry advocacy group encouraging its members to go to the meeting early to occupy all the seats. The group was targeting her opposition to conceal-carry legislation. 

Illinois is the only holdout in the country that still bans individuals from carrying concealed weapons. 

When May advertised the meeting to her constituents, she let them know she invited ComEd representatives — five executives were present — to answer questions and deal with individual concerns. Of the more than 100 people in the room, most had concerns about their electric service.

Though the gun legislation dominated the early part of the question-and-answer period, as soon as Jane Mordini of Highland Park told the group about her longstanding issues with electric service, interest in a firearms debate subsided.

An ongoing problem

 “I’ve lived in this home in Highland Park for 14 years and it’s an ongoing problem,” Mordini said. “This year I’ve been without power on 17 different occasions. It’s the whole block; it goes out all the time.” 

Not only was Mordini unhappy with the outages, she expressed frustration with the treatment she received on the telephone from the company’s customer service representatives. 

“My problem is you can’t get kind, compassionate or considerate communications from ComEd,” Mordini said. “There’s no compassion for the fact my children with asthma can’t breathe.” 

Before ComEd vice president for external affairs, Michael Guerra, could respond, Michael McCann of Highland Park expressed the attitude of many in the room when he scolded the utility. 

“It is sad when we have to get our legislator involved to get any action out of ComEd,” McCann said. 

Guerra offered to personally give Mordini his phone number and agreed to go to her home after the meeting to make a personal inspection. 

“Seventeen outages seems way off the charts, and we have to get it fixed,” Guerra said. “We do look at reliability across the system but that does not address your pocket reliability issue. If you’re below the system's norm, we need to be looking at it.” 

Sharon Sanders of Northbrook offered an idea to fix the problems for Mordini, McCann and the others. She would use some of the $14 million Exelon CEO John Rowe earns in a year to fix it. Exelon is the parent company of ComEd. 

“Fourteen million dollars seems like an awful lot. I would take $10 million and work on the grid with that,” Sanders said. 

Guerra explained ComEd is regulated by the Illinois Commerce Commission and its rates are subject to scrutiny.

“That’s the parent company, the competitive side of the business,” he said of Exelon. “We don’t pass that salary on to ratepayers.” 

'Outrageous' compensation

May was astounded at the amount of compensation for Rowe. She sees salaries going to the CEO and others like him as one of the reasons for the decline of the American middle class. 

“It’s outrageous. It’s obscene,” May said. “It’s the reason for the growing gap between rich and poor in our country. It is leading to the disappearance of the middle class.” 

After the meeting, Sanders and Mordini expressed pessimism any concrete action would take place.

“No,” Mordini told Patch when asked if she thought her long-running problems would be solved. “But I’m glad they will be taking a look.” 

Guerra vowed the problems of Mordini and others would be resolved. He was on his way to Mordini’s home after the meeting and promised to use the tools at his disposal to reduce the outages. 

“We’ll sit down with the reliability engineer and see what has to be done in the area,” Guerra said. “Our actions will show we are serious."

Concealed carry vote defended 

Before the discussion swung to utility issues, a number of people who would like to carry handguns criticized May for her vote against legislation that would allow the practice in Illinois. 

“You are a thoughtful representative but at the same time it is an oxymoron that you would deny the citizens the right to defend themselves,” said Jim Mazerowski of Oak Brook. “It takes minutes to get a response [from the police] but a violent act takes seconds.” 

May responded not only was she opposed to people carrying concealed firearms, she indicated it was the overwhelming opinion of people in her 58^th Legislative District. 

“They tell me my district does not support conceal carry,” May said of her constituents, noting that 80 percent were against such legislation. 

May then talked about the day in 1988 when Laurie Dann walked into schools in Highland Park, Glencoe and Winnetka murdering a fifth grader before taking her own life. 

“I believe in gun safety. It goes back to when Laurie Dann, who was a mentally ill young woman, took a gun and went on a shooting spree in park districts, camps and local schools,” May said. 

Mazerowski interrupted May to opine if one of the teacher’s at Hubbard Woods Elementary School had a gun on May 20, 1988, Nicholas Corwin would be alive today.

Phyllis McMillan of Northbrook responded before May had a chance: “I was there when Laurie Dann came in to that school and a teacher in that building having a gun could have done nothing.

She added that Dann "was so ill, it’s a tragedy that there isn’t something that can be done to keep people like this from buying guns."