A Former Freeport Mayor and Home Rule

This coming Tuesday the League of Women Voters of Freeport will host a community forum titled "Home Rule--Pro and Con", the presenter for the event will be former Freeport Mayor, Jim Gitz.  

First I must thank the LWV of Freeport for hosting these types of events.  There is no relevant media operating in the City of Freeport.  Without the LWV we would be left with political advertising as our only source of information on candidates for office and other important issues of public concern and choice.

Former Mayor Gitz's credentials alone assure he knows much about the vast powers home rule bestows upon local government.  Without the former mayor I would know far less about the home rule issue.  

Back in 2002 and 2003, during the Jim Gitz administration, I was attempting to inform the community about how City Hall was planning on using home rule.  At that time I was banned from the pages of the Journal-Standard and there was no social media.  However, the Rockford paper was owned by a different company and gave me the space to write about what the headline writer called abuse of home rule in Freeport in their Sunday edition.  Here is a picture of that article which was published on June 1, 2003.

Our former mayor then penned his own guest column which was published the following Sunday wherein he justified the use of home rule powers to get around state statues that were written to protect taxpayers.  This was the exact issue where I learned that the Bond Issued Notification Act is not binding upon home rule units (see previous post from July 20).  Following is Mayor Gitz's  column.

Of course the huge bond issue was approved by the City Council, probably on a single reading but I don't have 2003 meeting minutes at my finger tips.

The projects funded by this huge bond issue were never my intended point.  The process was.  There was no formal notice and no public hearing regarding this massive debt issuance against our collective credit much less a referendum which would be required if we lived any other municipality in Stephenson, Jo Daviess, Carroll, Ogle, Lee, and Whiteside Counties.

Whenever a municipality uses home rule as an end run around Illinois Statutes which require published notice and a public hearing prior to the adoption of ordinances which create general obligation debt, is plain and simple abuse of home rule powers.  And the the City of Freeport has done this regularly for the past 30-years, including in the past 90-days.

Let's also not forget the fact that with home rule it only requires eight city council members to increase our debt and tax burden exponentially and then they, as individuals, can simply move out of Freeport leaving the rest of us with the debt and taxes they thought necessary.  This has happened.  Long term debt and taxation issues deserve and need a much better public hearing if the public is to feel included and accountable for where we are as a community.

I will give any current or former city council member, or anyone else for that matter, who wishes to rebut my opinion, that skirting public disclosure statutes is an abuse of home rule power, all the space they need or want to make counterpoint.

I do look forward to former Mayor Gitz's presentation, while I won't dare speak for him and haven't asked him, I'm pretty sure his outlook on home rule will be quite different as a civilian attorney than an elected mayor; the latter having to worry about budgets and promises while still portraying the ever elusive "progress".

One more side point, while I often and publicly disagreed with Mayor Gitz on various issues over the years, I believe he always tried his best under not very favorable conditions to do what he thought was proper.  Furthermore, we do agree on many issues but those are no fun to write about.

As always, yours in honesty,

John Samuel Cook
2022