At a the October 2nd meeting of the Freeport City Council discussion centered on whether to allow the city's voters to vote on a sales tax proposal or continue the practice of using home rule to increase the sales tax in Freeport without a referendum.
Republican Mayor Jodi Miller seemed dead set against the referendum idea, arguing that by the home rule referendum passing in 2022, the council now has carte blanche authority from residents to do whatever the hell the Mayor and the city manager want and it's up to the city council to give them a rubber stamp.
Video of the meeting is available on YouTube or the City of Freeport's website.
A ridiculous analagy made by Mayor Miller during the discussion went like this:
"Just imagine, if a referee of a football game didn't want to make the hard calls, just pretend that for a moment, didn't want to make the hard calls and left it up to the fans in the stadium."
With all due respect Mayor Miller, the citizens of Freeport are not fans at a football game.
If you want to look at us, your constituentcy, as "fans in the stadum" know this, these fans own both the participating teams, the whole damn stadium and we're even the ones paying the referees' salaries.
This is our football game, not Mayor Miller's. We are the ones underwriting the football game, not the Mayor. In the Mayor's analogy the fans are subordinate. Therefore, she must believe that because they have home rule powers the public should just get in line and pay up.
So lets talk socialism. The only thing local Republicans and their leader have been doing publicly is bashing Governer Pritzker and President Biden on social media. All the while ignoring how their party brethren at the local level continue to use home rule worse than any tax and spend liberal could. Genuine principles and values are demonstrated, not talked about or posted on Facebook.
Another thing that doesn't sit well with me is that it appears Mayor Miller is doing more to represent the city manager than the residents of Freeport. Thus far she has not asked the finance department to come up with an alternative budget, one without this proposed tax increase. Nor has she asked for other financial alternatives and what the positives or negatives of those would be, with home rule there are plenty of alternatives. Please watch the Youtube video from the October 2, 2023 Freeport City Council meeting, you will get a much better idea of where the individual members of the city council stand on using home rule.
How would Mayor Miller and and the city manager govern in a non-home rule unit of government? How could they possibly run Stephenson County, any school district, or any size of municipality without their home rule bag of tricks? Is our city manager even qualified to be a city manager in an Illinois' municipality that is not home rule? Feel free to answer the questions contained herein Mayor Miller but please do so in writing.
Look around at the results that home rule as brought us--treating residents as "fans in the stadium"--nothing more than casual observers, has come at steep cost, figurative and literal, to the City of Freeport and her residents, this needs to change soon.
As always, yours in honesty,
John Samuel Cook
2024
tutty.baker@gmail.com
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