This past Tuesday the League of Women Voters held a public forum with former Freeport Mayor Jim Gitz as the presenter on the upcoming home rule referendum.
While the event was purported to be a "pro-con" event, the former mayor assured it was all pro for home rule and all con against home rule. Furthermore, he provided very little attribution and was often misleading. At the end he congratulated himself for sparing the crowd from "legalese". However you cannot have an informative or effective discussion on home rule without discussion about Illinois Statutes and case law.
But former Mayor Gitz did not want an informative or effective discussion, his goal was to convince Freeport voters that home rule must be maintained. That was obvious when early in his presentation he eluded to the "severe" debt limit the Freeport City Council would be subject to if they were not home rule. Right now, Freeport has no debt limit whereas non-home rule municipalities are subject to a debt limit of "8.625% of their current assessed valuation."
The following photo provides attribution to the above paragraph, it's from the book "Home Rule and Intergovernmental Cooperation and Conflict" and is used by the Illinois Institute for Continuing Legal Education to educate Illinois' attorneys.
If 8.625% of a municipality's assessed value is all that "severe" as Freeport's former mayor claimed, why hasn't Rockford, Dixon, Rock Falls, Sterling or even Lena complained that they can't indebt their citizens to a greater degree?
The former mayor also suggested we'd be having referendum on top of referendum if home rule is repealed by Freeport voters. How? Wasn't it former Mayor Gitz himself that vetoed a budget because the city council wanted to increase the home rule sales tax by one-half of a percent? Didn't our mayor, at that time, say that using home rule to raise the sales tax was an improper use of this power and such a decision should go to referendum? Do I need to pull and picture those meeting minutes?
Also, when are the citizens of Freeport entitled to a say so on tax and spend issues? Despite a plethora of city council created taxes and a mountain of debt (I suspect well beyond the legal limit if Freeport was not home rule) not one decision was made by voters. Every tax created and every dollar borrowed was the result of a decision made by the Freeport City Council, not the taxpayers, yet it is only ever the citizens that are accountable for these actions, city council members can simply leave Freeport, which some council members of the not so distant past have done.
"Property taxes will go through the roof" is another popular refrain made by those that wish to retain home rule power. However, like Jim Gitz, they all evade the most important fact. Stephenson County is a "tax cap" county as voters approved the "Property Tax Extension Limitation Law" (PTELL) years ago. This law limits the amount property taxes can be raised by units of local government. As a home rule unit, The City of Freeport is the only taxing body wholly contained in Stephenson County not bound by PTELL. Without home rule, the City will have do the hard work of staying within a budget established by taxpayers, not the eight of them.
Most of his presentation was based upon his claim that all of the taxes created under home rule would disappear. Former Mayor Gitz offered no citation to support this claim. Well, I'm here to tell you that Jim Gitz and all his lawyerly credentials do not get to make such decisions and it's not like Jim Gitz hasn't misled the public and city council in the past to get his own way. So those that want to use the argument that these home rule taxes, legally created at the time the ordinances creating them were passed, will "go away" had better provide some proof to back that claim. So far, I have seen nothing, only hyperbole from those wanting to to retain home rule.
It's also often claimed that these home rule sales taxes are paid by people other than Freeporters, however, there is nothing to support that claim. If anyone knows how much of these sales tax dollars come from elsewhere than they would know exactly how much business our high sales taxes drive north to Wisconsin. I'll bet there are plenty more Illinois license plates in Monroe at this moment than there are Wisconsin plates in Freeport. That's not an accident or dumb luck. If it can be known with any type of accuracy how much is coming in and where it's coming from, then it should be known how much is being driven out too.
I asked our former mayor that if we repealed home rule this November couldn't the city council place it back on the ballot "in two years". To which he played dumb. That's the lobbyist in him, if a fact disrupts an underlying claim, pretend you're not familiar with the fact.
The loss of home rule would require the Freeport City Council to do what every other unit of local government in northwest Illinois has to do, budget and govern. Home rule has allowed the Freeport City Council to evade the hard work of governing as they've used home rule as a "get out of jail free card" every time things got tough throughout the past 30-years. Borrow more money and create a new tax to pay for it, that's been the method of operation since 1992.
Next up, how home rule is used to bury the poor in charges while subsidizing the wealthy.
As always, yours in honesty
John Samuel Cook
2022
First problem is they had him as commentator. Haven't we had our fill of this practicing attorney from years gone by. It's like watching the same movie entitled "Freeport" over and over and over and over... .
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