Any proposal to create an elected Chicago school board must include a “safeguard” to ensure that at least some members of the board have children in the school system — otherwise, Mayor Lori Lightfoot won’t get behind the plan, the mayor’s top lobbyist said Monday.

A provision to “guarantee representation from parents” on a potential elected board is “absolutely critical for any bill to move forward,” Chicago Deputy Mayor for Intergovernmental Affairs Manny Perez told The Daily Line. He and Cook County Director of External Affairs John Roberson joined the latest episode of the CloutCast to discuss the respective legislative agendas Lightfoot and county board President Toni Preckwinkle will pursue in Springfield this year.

Lightfoot “wants to make sure parents have a voice and a seat at the table,” Perez said. “Many of these parents are not going to be able to finance and wage a campaign to get elected to a seat on the board, so certainly we have to build in some safeguards to make sure the people who are receiving the educational services are represented on the board.”

Lightfoot supported changing state law to create an elected school board during her 2019 mayoral campaign but has balked at the most recent version of the bill (SB0153), whose proposed 21-member board she has called “unwieldy.” Thanks in part to her lobbying efforts, the bill did not come to a vote during the General Assembly’s lame duck session.

The mayor did suffer several legislative defeats in Springfield last month, including the passage of a bill to boost firefighters’ pension benefits that Lightfoot opposed because it will put Chicago taxpayers on the hook for tens of millions of dollars in additional costs.

Lightfoot called on state lawmakers in her 2021 budget address to help assuage Chicago’s pension crisis, saying that “we still need real pension reform.”

When asked what kind of pension changes state lawmakers should consider, Perez said there “isn’t going to be an easy solution to fixing the pension crisis.”

“But the mayor has been very clear that something needs to happen, and that she is a willing partner…to state leaders and labor leaders,” Perez said. “We need to work together to tackle this issue.”

Perez also pointed to a law state legislators passed in 2019 to expand legalized gambling, plus a follow-up bill that tweaked casino taxing formulas, as one of Lightfoot’s “early signature achievements” to help shore up the city’s police and fire pension funds.

Related: Chicago casino bill pulls through

“That was huge,” Perez said. “That was something that had never been done in decades of Chicago mayors trying to get that accomplished.”

Meanwhile, a proposed state law allowing the city to levy a graduated tax on real estate sales — once at the top of Lightfoot’s legislative agenda — has since taken a back seat, Perez said.

At the time Lightfoot proposed the bill in 2019, “the commercial real estate market was booming, and the increases in revenue we were anticipating would have been driven by the sale of commercial real estate,” Perez said. “In this pandemic we've seen the commercial market take a hit.”

Related: Lightfoot rejects push to include homeless funding in real estate transfer tax plan

The mayor’s lobbying team hasn’t taken the real estate transfer tax “off the list completely, but it makes it challenging to try to get something passed that will not generate the revenue we anticipate,” Perez said.

Preckwinkle to push ‘design-build’ bill, Kaegi’s data modernization bill

Roberson is also still fine-tuning the list of proposals he and his five-member lobbying team will be advocating in Springfield on behalf of county board President Toni Preckwinkle. High on his agenda will be seeking more funding for the financially precarious Cook County Forest Preserve District and making marriage licenses more gender-inclusive, he told The Daily Line.

County lobbyists successfully pushed state legislators last year to allocate about $26.7 million to the forest preserve district, but it was “not enough” for the district to fully catch up on its estimated $41 million in deferred maintenance, Roberson said.

Forest Preserves District Supt. Arnold Randall also warned county commissioners during budget hearings last year that the district’s pension fund is on track to be depleted in 20 years if county leaders do not come up with new revenue.

Related: Forest Preserves budget limits short-term pain but lets long-term woes fester, leaders say

One way Springfield could help the district stay afloat is by passing a “design-build authorization bill” that would allow the district to contract with the same company for multiple stages of construction projects, Roberson said.

Carl Vogel, a spokesperson for the forest preserve district, wrote in a statement Monday that most local units of government are allowed to “hire one firm under a single contract to be responsible of a unified flow of work from initial concept through completion,” but conservation districts and forest preserve districts are not.

Legislators introduced “identical” bills in the State House and Senate last year to change that, and the bills were “progressing well until the pandemic affected the legislative session,” Vogel wrote.

Roberson said the change in law will help reduce construction costs for the district “because having the person who designs it then be responsible for building it means there’s one seamless construction management program…And once they give us a design-build number for future capital projects, they’re going to have to stick to that number.”

Roberson added that county officials could ask state lawmakers to expand the forest preserve district’s authority to issue new bonds for capital spending, but finding support for such a program is easier said than done.

“All those things are on the table, but they have to be looked at in the context of where we can get support for those things,” Roberson said. “People have said they love the forest preserves…but loving it and giving it additional capital funding given all the other competing initiatives around the state” is a different story, he said.

Separately, Roberson said his team will lobby on behalf of Cook County Clerk Karen Yarbrough for a bill that would allow couples to write “spouse” on their marriage licenses instead of “husband” or “wife.”

They will also help push county Assessor Fritz Kaegi’s “data modernization” bill, which would require most commercial property owners to disclose income information to the assessor’s office. The bill overwhelmingly passed the State Senate in 2019 but never came to a vote in the House.

“We’re working with the assessor on that, and we’re proud to do so, because it’s good for Cook County,” Roberson said, adding that Kaegi and Preckwinkle talk on a “regular basis” about the need to “modernize and reform the tax assessment system.”

Related: Kaegi to unveil revised commercial property tax assessment data bill as opponents dig in

However, Roberson was cooler on the prospects of a bill proposed last year by county Treasurer Maria Pappas that would delay the county’s Annual Tax Sale by four months.

“There are a lot of bills and a lot of ideas out there, and you’ve got to figure out how to influence legislators to support it,” Roberson said. “So it’s not that policies and bills like [Pappas’ proposal] are bad, it’s just that we’ve got to figure out where the constituencies are that are going to be willing to support that.”

Related: Pappas calls on state lawmakers to extend ‘grace period’ for delinquent taxes

Finally, Roberson said his team will be looking for ways for the state to support CountyCare, the Medicaid program run by Cook County Health, as well as ways to support implementation of the criminal justice omnibus bill that passed last month with Preckwinkle’s support. Gov. JB Pritzker has indicated he will sign the bill.

Provisions of the approved bill include eliminating cash bail, codifying arrestee rights and requiring police to wear body cameras — all policies Preckwinkle and other county leaders have been “talking about for a number of years,” Roberson said.

“Now we’ve got to take a look at…how we put those policies and initiatives in place that focus on law enforcement serving our communities, and not policing them,” he said. “We've got to continue to work in collaboration with law enforcement to help them understand every Black man is not a threat.”