Our View: Township consolidation is a small but key step | Northwest Herald

As the McHenry County Board closely examines whether to put a referendum question on the ballot on consolidating the county’s townships from 17 to 8, it’s important to look at the big picture.

 

With about 7,000 taxing bodies, Illinois leads the nation in the number of line items that show up on our property tax bills. Coincidentally, Illinois has the second highest property taxes in the United States behind New Jersey.

These facts can’t only be coincidences. Would consolidating units of government save money and reduce property taxes? Unless it is done with breathtaking incompetence, it’s difficult to see how it could not.

Regardless of which agency performs them, government services need to be performed. Students need an education, roads need to be maintained, police and firefighters are needed to provide safety, and the list goes on.

It’s also important that some local control be maintained in making the decisions that affect the residents in those communities. Decisions made on behalf of Chicago residents are different than decisions made for McHenry residents. This is one of the major arguments against consolidation.

But the benefits of local control are diluted when residents have so many different taxing bodies governing them that they’re left dizzy keeping track of who’s in charge. In many cases, it’s different people controlling their village, their parks, their libraries, their fire districts, their townships, their county, etc.

By spreading the accountability so widely, it removes accountability. Taxpayers are left barely knowing who is taxing them and for what.

And each one of those taxing bodies, in addition to serving residents, serves its own interests. They provide jobs and often pensions. The more vital the services they provide, the easier it is to justify their need for more employees, more tax dollars.

Consolidating townships is the tip of the iceberg of bloated government that’s flattened Illinois’ economy, leaving a mountain of debt just as the glaciers flattened the Illinois landscape, leaving the Great Lakes behind.

But Illinois needs to start somewhere, and it needs to do so fearlessly and without regard to the hundreds of tiny fiefdoms who are fighting for self preservation. It must do so wisely in the interest of taxpayers and the economy, not merely in the interest of political philosophy.

McHenry County Board Chairman Joseph Gottemoeller has appropriately asked the McHenry County State’s Attorney’s Office to review the law and guide the board on what it might consider to put as a question to voters.

Common sense tells us government consolidation has to be part of the solution for turning Illinois around for the better. But those steps need to be taken much faster than the pace of a glacier.

 

Our View: Township consolidation is a small but key step | Northwest Herald