Ms. Cacciapaglia's comments were originally delivered at the Home Rule rally at the University of Illinois' School of Medicine Auditorium on November 14th, 2005.
Community blight
The City of Rockford suffers from an epidemic of dilapidated, boarded up, abandoned properties littered throughout our neighborhoods.
Neighborhoods in which citizens live and raise their children. Neighborhoods in which those children walk to school and wait at bus stops.
Home Rule will allow Rockford to pass an ordinance prohibiting owners of vacant structures from allowing such properties to remain vacant and boarded up for extended periods of time.
With Home Rule will come the ability for building code hearing officers to issue harsher fines and require code violators' attendance at Crime Free Multi housing programs put on by the RCPD Community Services Unit. Because as members of this City's Police Department can tell you - and probably none better than Sgt. Michael Booker & the CSU - with boarded up, abandoned property comes crime.
No one in Springfield can understand what it's like to live in a neighborhood populated with such property. No one better than members of the City's neighborhood associations and the aldermen who represent them.
Which begs the question:
Why in the world would we wait for Springfield to tell us how to address these issues?
Absentee, negligent landlords
After doing my job for five plus years, I am convinced that the majority of rental property owners in our City consists of people interested in providing safe, quality housing to our citizens.
And I want to say that these men and women should be commended - the rental business can be exhausting and not all that lucrative.
But I do not believe that anyone in Springfield can fully appreciate the need for Rockford to implement tools to combat the other landlords: the few unscrupulous individuals who support themselves by taking advantage of renters and LITERALLY placing their lives in danger in the process.
The rental property owners who I have to prosecute over and over again for allowing our citizens to live in the most grievous, deplorable housing conditions.
We simply and urgently need stronger, more effective tools to shield our neighbors from these practices.
And Home Rule will give us those tools by allowing us to put in place a rental housing license system to aid in protecting all of us against these other landlords.
The system would require landlords to obtain a license prior to having the ability to lease property in our City, and the system will allow the City to implement a process to revoke the license.
How much longer will this community allow ourselves to sit back and wait for Springfield to give us the tools we all know we need?
Massage Parlors
Earlier this year, the City of Rockford legal department sought injunctions to close several of these "spas" in our City.
In my preparations for hearings on those cases, I interviewed several witnesses who were actually caught in the act at the spas. Of those men, only one was from this community.
The others drove here, from as far away as Chicago and Milwaukee, for the sole purpose of visiting one of these establishments.
Why Rockford?
Simple. Because they could. Because we have no real way to stop these places from opening in the first place.
There's a reason the owners of these establishments took up shop in our City – because it's ridiculously easy to do so. They came here, because they new our weakness – that we have no real tool to control or combat these places.
Because the state legislature had not given us the tools to proactively address these illegitimate businesses.
And what other City in Illinois could have understood as well as us the desperate need to battle them?
Home Rule is a tool that will allow more effective, proactive regulation of illegitimate business our City has become all too familiar with. Stricter regulations will lead to an increased confidence in citizens' perspective of responsible, legitimate businesses.
Conclusion
I've heard it described that a City without Home Rule is like a child who must seek guidance from her parents for what's best, and permission to get those things done.
The people of Rockford are capable of monitoring ourselves.
It's time for us to become independent of Springfield's one size fits all control, to become responsible for ourselves and stop turning to our guardians for help.
Rockford needs Home Rule. And we need it now.