The ways Home Rule power can be used to improve our quality of life in Rockford are limited only by our willingness to fend for ourselves and our own creativity.
There are four major ways that Home Rule power can be used to improve Rockford's quality of life: improving education; lowering crime rates; enhanced economic development and more flexible taxing authority.
Education
Home Rule can help us solve our poor educational performance. Our educational attainment level is below the state average in almost every respect. This is a major roadblock to economic progress. Companies refuse to relocate here because our schools are substandard and our students fail to achieve to the level of competing communities. Ask yourself; if you were choosing a town to locate a business and you knew the success of your business would depend on attracting talent to that town, would you choose a city with poor school district performance? To attract and retain the best and brightest workers to this city, we need to improve our educational system.
Rockford School District 205 leads the state in truancy rates at 9.6%. By comparison, our county peers average 2.7%. And for every percentage point of truancy, we lose $1 million in state educational funding. We're currently losing up to $6 million due to truancy alone. As it stands now, state law allows up to 18 days of absence before a student is declared truant and action can be taken against the parents. The long term cost of truancy is of course even greater since truancy leads to drop out status and/or a poor educational level for individual young people of our community who are then impaired for life in their ability to attain success in a highly competitive business world and contribute positively to our society. Under Home Rule, we can create an ordinance to hold the parents and students responsible resulting in less truancy. This is an absolutely critical problem that Home Rule opponents refuse to even discuss.
Crime, Blight and Absentee Landlords
We have led the state's crime rate for the nine out of the last ten years. Rockford's abandoned properties attract crime in the form of drug houses, arson, and other crimes to people and property. This also is a major obstacle to attracting jobs, businesses, and new residents to Rockford.
Under state law, it takes at least two busts in a year before police can take action against a property where illegal drug sales are occurring. With Home Rule, we could enact an ordinance with sharper teeth. Prostitution in the guise of so-called massage parlors could be legislated against with Home Rule much more efficiently. Few Rockford residents realize that Rockford actually has a reputation in metropolitan Chicago and elsewhere as a great place to go for paid sex. The sex trade is a blight on our community and needs to be eradicated.
Given our experience enacting a graffiti ordinance in Rockford, we shudder to think how long it would take to attack issues like sex for sale. It took 3 years to get a graffiti ordinance passed in Springfield. With Home Rule, the City Council could have voted on such legislation in a matter of weeks.
Under Home Rule, we could craft local programs addressing blighted, abandoned properties and absentee landlords. These programs could involve streamlining the demolition of abandoned property but could also include creation of incentives and assistance to rehabilitate preoperties and bring them back to status as good housing stock. This will help preserve our neighborhoods, protect our city from blight and arson, and create a better quality of life for Rockford residents.
Currently we lack the ability to license our landlords. Under Home Rule, landlords could be licensed and educational programs instituted. Also tenants could be held accountable for damage to the properties they rent These initiatives would improve the quality of rentals for owners and renters alike, and the housing quality in Rockford in general.
Economic Development
High crime and low educational attainment have proven to be obstacles to our city's revival. Companies that are looking for a midwestern location frequently disqualify Rockford simply because we've had the highest crime in Illinois nine out of the last ten years and poor educational indicators. Home Rule can help us overcome these problems.
Furthermore, without Home Rule, our city council cannot quickly and easily create flexible incentive packages to bring good paying jobs and next generation businesses to Rockford that the Home Rule cities we compete with can. To bring passenger rail to and from Chicago, we'll need the flexibility to acquire property outside city limits. We cannot do that without Home Rule. Our high property tax rate is also an economic development deterrent. With Home Rule, we can lessen our dependence on property taxes by creating a mix of revenues that shift some of the burden to non-residents. Home Rule communities on average derive 10-20% of their revenue from property taxes, as opposed to 25-30% in non-Home Rule communities. Without Home Rule our City government is handicapped in its ability to craft a community technology strategy. We need to develop high spped computer infrastructure but this involves ownership of property and easements outside the city limits which is not allowed for in a non-Home Rule City.
More Flexible, Equitable Taxation
Growth must be paid for through some means. We proved this when we voted out Home Rule in 1983, thinking we could lower our property taxes. But then, in six referenda, we voted our property taxes back up to the Home Rule rate to pay for city services.
What Home Rule allows its 167 communities in Illinois to do is shift a fair amount of the burden currently paid solely through our property taxes to non-residents. Think about all the people who don't live here, but come to Rockford, use our public works like our roads and our water, and even, on occasion, involve our police and fire departments, but don't contribute anything to the city's upkeep. Opponents don't want to be taxed for these things, but they also don't hesitate to complain when public services falter for lack of funds, which they caused in 1983 when we got rid of Home Rule. At least with Home Rule, we have a solution.
Opponents also neglect to mention that Home Rule communities depend less on property taxes, and that non-Home Rule communities tax rate rises faster than Home Rule communities do. This is what our own history, the Office of the Illinois Comptroller's, and three other scholarly studies tell us. For more information, read the section on Home Rule and Taxation in the More Information section.