City of Belvidere may provide land bank to region

 

Land bank to help revive Rockford region’s abandoned properties

By Jeff Kolkey
Staff writer

Posted Aug 25, 2018 at 6:00 AM

ROCKFORD — Regional leaders could tap Belvidere’s home rule authority to establish a land bank dedicated to rehabilitating problem properties and stabilizing neighborhoods in Boone and Winnebago counties.

City leaders had hoped to establish a Rockford-based land bank to acquire blighted properties and put them back into productive use, but that strategy hit a road block this spring when voters rejected restoration of home rule — a set of self-governing powers stripped from the city 35 years ago.

Without home rule authority, Rockford doesn’t have the power to establish a land bank on its own. That’s where Belvidere, the Region 1 Planning Council and a $225,000 grant from the Illinois Housing Development Authority enter the picture.

By harnessing Belvidere’s home rule authority through intergovernmental agreements, a regional land bank can be established throughout Boone and Winnebago counties, Rockford City Administrator Todd Cagnoni said.

“A land bank would allow us to go after some of the blighted properties in the community where the private sector has failed,” Cagnoni said.

What is a land bank?

A land bank isn’t a bank at all. It is a unit of government that specializes in the acquisition of distressed, foreclosed or abandoned properties. It works to eliminate liens and tax liabilities and transfer clean title to new owners in order to restore blighted properties and put them back into the hands of the private sector.

It could give the Rockford region a new weapon in its fight against blighted properties. It is envisioned that the regional land bank could eventually join forces with and manage a Freeport land bank.

The land bank would be governed by an appointed board of trustees and a director.

“You are basically taking a property that is functionally obsolete, restoring it, creating new stock and creating a new marketplace for properties in that neighborhood,” said Michael Dunn Jr., executive director of the Region 1 Planning Council. “That is very, very powerful.”

Why it’s needed

Studies have found that a home that is foreclosed, but not vacant, lowers neighboring property values by up to 3.9 percent, said Andrew Field of the Illinois Housing Development Authority.

“However, if a home is foreclosed, tax delinquent and vacant, it can lower neighboring property values by nearly two and a half times that amount,” Field said in an email to the Register Star. “By acquiring, managing and repurposing these parcels, land banks provide benefits such as increased tax base, reduction in crime and improved quality of life for nearby homeowners.”

Rockford is monitoring more than 1,920 vacant properties where water service has been turned off for thee months or more as potential candidates for demolition. Another estimated 3,708 residential and 720 commercial properties are believed vacant.

Those structures can attract crime, vagrants and arson. They also devalue neighboring properties and can have a destabilizing effect on neighborhoods, Cagnoni said.

In Belvidere, and other areas of Boone and Winnebago counties, there are similar concerns, but on a far smaller scale.

Belvidere is monitoring 26 homes it considers distressed, Mayor Mike Chamberlain said.

Chamberlain has sought the creation of a land bank for years. Until the recent grant, there was no seed money for it.

“We have 26 residential units on our list that are rundown to the point where they need to be rehabbed or taken down,” Chamberlain said. “We have a couple that are actually abandoned. For us, it’s not so much the residential, it’s more looking at larger properties that can be rehabbed, that were manufacturing or institutional buildings, we would look at trying to rehab into something positive for the community.”

How it works

Land banks are new to Illinois, where there are only two established, but have had success in Ohio and Michigan, said Eric Setter, 29, who was hired by the Regional 1 Planning Council to manage the $225,000 grant.

Setter is a Rockford native who is returning home after working for Peoria for six years, most recently as a land development manager.

Setter said land banks acquire properties and clear title most often through the state’s abandonment law. After a property has remained tax delinquent for two or more years, or has an unpaid water bill for two or more years, the land bank can seek an abandonment order from the court awarding a municipality clean title to the property, he said.

“It’s a way to get properties that are in the tax sale trustee limbo of three, five or even 10 years of delinquency and sales in error and what not,” Setter said. “Hopefully, if it’s only been vacant for two years, we may be able to go in and save it before it’s to the point where demolition is the only option.”

The properties can be demolished or rehabilitated, subdivided or consolidated, Setter said. Money can come from grant funding, municipalities, nonprofit organizations or even the private sector.

Any profit is reinvested in the land bank for future acquisitions of blighted properties.

“It’s not ever going to enter into a fair market transaction,” Dunn said. “A land bank’s role is to go in and acquire property that if not for the land bank would sit there blighted and vacant.”

Land banks avoid serving as the landlord of a property, if it can.

“It can be a landlord, but the goal is to get the property back into private sector hands as fast as possible,” Dunn said. “Rehabilitate, refurbish and create new real estate markets for property that doesn’t have a private sector buyer today — because of taxes, liens, foreclosure, blight or whatever reason.”

What’s next

The $225,000 Land Bank Capacity Grant was funded by a national settlement with lenders by Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan with other state attorneys general over fraudulent foreclosure and mortgage practices.

The Region 1 Planning Council will use it to work with advisors from the Illinois Housing Development Authority, in addition to leaders from Belvidere and Rockford and Boone and Winnebago counties, to create a governance structure, mission and goals.

Aldermen from Rockford and Belvidere and Boone and Winnebago county board members would be asked to sign an intergovernmental agreement in the next few months to create the land bank.

Dunn said there is hope for future grant funding that will help the new land bank acquire properties.

Jeff Kolkey: 815-987-1374; jkolkey@rrstar.com; @jeffkolkey

Above is from:  http://www.rrstar.com/news/20180824/land-bank-to-help-revive-rockford-regions-abandoned-properties

how does a land bank work?

The best answer maybe to look at a working land bank.  Chicago (Cook County) has a land bank.  SEE:  http://www.cookcountylandbank.org/

Mollie Tibbetts case exposes farms' worst-kept secret: hiring undocumented immigrants

Alan Gomez, USA TODAY Published 3:00 p.m. ET Aug. 24, 2018 | Updated 11:59 a.m. ET Aug. 25, 2018

President Trump is discussing prison reform with state officials at his New Jersey golf club. The administration is pressing for legislation that would provide $50 million to prisons for drug treatment, education and job skills programs. (Aug. 9)AP, AP

(Photo: Jacob Ford, Odessa American via AP)

Dane Lang, a co-owner of Yarrabee Farms outside of Brooklyn, Iowa, stood outside his family farm this week and lamented that he had employed the undocumented immigrant charged in the murder of 20-year-old Mollie Tibbetts.

Then he was asked if any other non-U.S. citizens were among the 10 employees on the dairy farm.

"I don't think I can comment to that," Lang said.

That vague answer highlights the worst-kept secret in the agriculture business: roughly half of the nation's 1.4 million field workers (47 percent, or 685,000 workers) are undocumented immigrants. And that estimate, from the Labor Department, is a conservative one with labor experts citing far higher percentages.

While presidents have approached undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. in vastly different ways, Republicans and Democratic administrations — under heavy lobbying from the agricultural industry — have always treated undocumented farm workers differently.

While the federal government was herding more than 100,000 Japanese immigrants into internment camps during World War II, it was also administering the Bracero Program, which allowed millions of Mexicans to enter the U.S. to work on farms.

When President Ronald Reagan signed a landmark immigration law in 1986 that granted amnesty to nearly 3 million undocumented immigrants, those who worked on farms were given the easiest path to U.S. citizenship.

A bipartisan immigration reform bill that passed the Senate (but not the House) in 2013 would have created a special "blue card" just for agricultural workers and their immediate families that granted them legal status and the chance to become U.S. citizens.

And now, many Republicans are citing Tibbetts' death as a reason to pass a bill requiring all U.S. companies to use the federal E-Verify system to check the immigration status of all job applicants. But even that bill — the Legal Workforce Act filed by Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas — gives farmers 2.5 years before they must start vetting their field workers, the only such exception.

Chris Chmielenski, deputy director of NumbersUSA, a group that advocates for lower levels of legal and illegal immigration, said that history reflects both the power of the agricultural industry, and the willingness of politicians to help them out.

He says the easiest solution would be to require that all U.S. business use E-Verify, which allows employers to check the immigration status of job applicants using a government website. The Iowa farm that employed Cristhian Bahena Rivera, who is charged with first-degree murder in Tibbetts' death, initially said they used that program to screen Rivera, but later backtracked and conceded that they had used a different system not designed to flag immigration violations.

"That would have a pretty big impact on future flows of illegal immigration," Chmielenski said.

But farmers, ranchers, and other business owners who rely on undocumented immigrants say passing an E-Verify bill would cripple their industries. Already struggling to recruit enough Americans to do the back-breaking field work, and operating under the constant threat of raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, they say implementing E-Verify with no other changes to the immigration system would put untold numbers of companies out of business.

That's why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said that it would only support mandatory electronic worker verification if it's coupled with an overhaul, and expansion, of the country's guest worker programs. The American Farm Bureau Federation goes a step further, arguing that passing E-Verify alone would cause production to drop by $60 billion and food prices to increase by 5 to 6 percent.

"Farmers and ranchers get that we have immigration laws in our country, and they want nothing more than to be able to attain their workers legally," said John-Walt Boatright, the national affairs coordinator for the Florida Farm Bureau. "But we cannot have E-Verify without a workable, functioning, accessible guest work program in place."

Dane Lang, co-owner of Yarrabee Farms, speaks to the press with his father and co-owner Craig Lang, on their family's farm on August 22, 2018, in Brooklyn, Iowa. Cristhian Rivera, a former employee at the farm, has been charged with the murder of Mollie Tibbetts. (Photo: Brian Powers, The Des Moines Register)

Farmers across the country saw exactly what would happen if the government took an enforcement-only approach after Arizona passed an anti-immigration bill in 2010, leading a half-dozen states to follow suit. The laws, which included the requirement that all businesses use the E-Verify system, sent undocumented immigrants out of those states in droves.

Alabama's immigration law pushed up to 80,000 workers out of the state, according to a study conducted by the University of Alabama.

Georgia's immigration law led to more than $140 million in unharvested crops in 2011 because so many workers fled the state, according to a report commissioned by the Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association.

The fleeing workers in Arizona resulted in an average 2 percent drop in the state's gross domestic product every year through 2015, according to an analysis conducted by The Wall Street Journal.

Finding American workers to make up for the shortfall was just as difficult. In Georgia, Gov. Republican Nathan Deal turned to people on probation in 2011, but most walked off the jobs almost immediately.

That same year in North Carolina, as 489,000 people were unemployed statewide, the North Carolina Growers Association listed 6,500 available jobs, but just 268 North Carolinians applied, 163 showed up for work, and only seven finished the season, according to a study by the Partnership for a New American Economy.

The solution, according to farmers, is a nationwide guest worker program that improves on the current H2A visa program that has been a headache for farmers for decades.

Those visas are designed for temporary, seasonal workers, and have been used more frequently in recent years. The number of H2A visas approved has increased from 74,192 in 2013 to 161,583 in 2017, according to State Department data.

"That doesn't mean it's a great program," he said. "It just means it's the only program."

Boatright said the H2A program is too rigid to accommodate the unpredictable timing of harvests. He said it's overloaded with too many regulations that often requires farms to have immigration attorneys on staff just to fill out paperwork. And because the visas cannot be used for year-round workers, Boatright said it makes dairies, nurseries, and livestock ranches ineligible.

Chmielenski said his organization, which can successfully pressure Washington by activating its network of thousands of supporters to flood congressional offices with calls, emails, and Tweets, is willing to consider a tandem bill that includes mandatory E-Verify with improvements to the agricultural guest worker program. And that, in the end, may be the only way to get a bill through Congress.

"We acknowledge the fact that H2A could be cleaned up," he said. "We're willing to work with them on that and to give them a pool of foreign workers they can tap into when there's not an American worker willing to do that for a decent wage."

Above is from:  https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/08/24/iowa-murder-casts-spotlight-farms-hiring-undocumented-immigrants/1075320002/

Big Stormwater Project in Belvidere?

Above is from:  http://www.rrstar.com/news/20180825/report-suggests-42m-fix-for-belvideres-flooding-woes

By Susan Vela
Staff writer

Posted at 12:05 PM

BELVIDERE — Sheila Fowler bought a foreclosed Fourth Street home for a sweet price, made extensive repairs and then saw her renovations and money get wiped away with spring flooding.

Floodwaters ripped through her property soon after the purchase of her home nearly 20 years ago.

“It came through in the night, and the roar of the water was incredible,” she said.

Rushing water wrecked a privacy fence, and sewage flooded the basement. She bleached the stinking waste away once the water disappeared, but the flooding, sewage and stench recurred in 2007, 2009, 2016 and 2017. Help is on the way, but solutions for the south side’s drainage problems come with a $42 million price tag. The city has set aside $1 million to begin improvements and it’s not clear how long it will take to finish the public works upgrades.

“Of course, everything is depending on the funds available,” said Brent Anderson, the city’s public works director. “We’re seeing more heavier rains more frequently than we have in the past.”

The City Council adopted a citywide 2-cent-per-gallon gasoline tax in July and a sales tax on Monday that, taken together, will generate $1.5 million annually for infrastructure improvements and escalating pension expenses. City officials are also considering a utility fee that would generate about $500,000 a year more for Belvidere, Anderson said.

Fowler and her neighbors are thankful help may be on the way. Yet they’re not sure how long they can wait.

“The citizens of the south side strongly urged you to hear our prayers and hear our voices. You did,” Fowler said at Monday’s City Council session. “Thank God Mother Nature passed us with a flood this year. We’ll breathe easy through the fall and winter. Come spring, we’ll all start praying once again, just like we’re praying that you will help us tonight by setting money aside for our $42 million project.”

Belvidere considers $42 million in stormwater improvements

Belvidere officials are mulling over $42 million in stormwater improvements that they’ll pay for in five phases.

• Phase 1: $370,000: Construction of ponds on two church properties south of Bellwood Drive.

• Phase 2: $1,810,000: Redesign of the Belvidere High School detention pond.

• Phase 3: $11,490,000: Basin improvements, a new stormwater pond at Washington Academy, conveyance improvements on Seventh Street, Fifth Avenue and Pearl Street and a swale at Birch Avenue and West Tenth Street.

• Phase 4: $19,180,000: Improvements would start on East Sixth Street and continue throughout the system to West Locust Street.

• Phase 5: $9,400,000: Improvements along Bellwood, Cedardale and Elmwood drives, Fremont and East Eighth streets and a small section of East Avenue. There also would be two proposed stormwater detention ponds at Fremont Street and the intersection of East Eighth Street and Whitney Boulevard.

Source: City of Belvidere

Baxter & Woodman, a Crystal Lake company, issued its south side stormwater study findings in March. The 100-plus page report details problems with a watershed area that is approximately 1,300 acres and consisting of nine separate municipal drainage basins.

“The south side of the city was mostly developed before modern stormwater regulations were in effect,” the report reads. “Topography is hilly and rolling, creating areas where large amounts of stormwater flow overland through streets and properties. The rolling topography also includes large depressional areas where ponding can reach several feet deep before surface flow can continue downstream.”

The $87,500 study shows pictures of standing stormwater and also details the five proposed phases, which include new and redesigned detention ponds, conveyance improvements and more. Bellwood Drive, Pearl Street and Whitney Boulevard will receive some of the attention.

Anderson said construction of ponds south of Bellwood Drive could begin by the end of this year. The high school pond redesign will have to wait until next year, he said.

John Dal Santo doesn’t know how many more storms his 913 Caswell St. home can take. He’s experienced two severe storms in the past three years. He had 40 inches of water in his basement because of a 2016 downpour; 34 inches in 2017.

“We can’t store anything in our basement,” he said. “I can deal with rainwater getting in my basement. It’s the sewage. Last summer, it happened in the middle of July. We want to stay but, no, I don’t feel optimistic. I know there’s a breaking point to everybody.”

City aldermen say they’re committed to the proposed improvements. However, city finances will dictate how much upgrades the city can tackle in the coming years.

“I wouldn’t want to have the mess in my basement that some of those people had,” Alderman Ronald Brooks said. “You just can’t let the people pay their taxes and lose all their possessions in one rain storm. It’s going to take money. You just can’t ignore it.”

Susan Vela: 815-987-1392; svela@rrstar.com; @susanvela

Above is from:  http://www.rrstar.com/news/20180825/report-suggests-42m-fix-for-belvideres-flooding-woes

Boone County police say 'no refusal' DUI policy is keeping streets safe

By:

• James Leonardi

Posted: Aug 21, 2018 06:27 PM CDT

Updated: Aug 21, 2018 06:29 PM CDT

BOONE COUNTY, Ill. - It's been several months since Boone County law enforcement enacted their 24/7 "no refusal" DUI program. Since the news has gotten out, they've already seen a drastic increase in prosecutable cases.

"It's going exactly like we felt it should go," said Boone County Sheriff Dave Ernest, describing the recent success of the newly implemented policy.

Since April 2018, if drivers, suspected of drinking and driving, refuse a breathalyzer test, a warrant is issued to draw blood from the suspect.

So far, several of those warrants have been issued, giving prosecutors solid evidence to try the case.

"We have used the search warrants multiple times and, since the story broke to educate people that this is the process in Boone County, that, in itself, has helped us not have to go through search warrants, since people know we're not bluffing, that we're actually going to go through this process," he said.

Boone County State's Attorney Tricia Smith says it's been a relatively smooth and effective process for her office. They've even been working on ways to let officers get warrants from inside their squad cars, rather than at the jail.

"I have heard from officers that once they say they may seek a search warrant from a judge, that people are complying and submitting to the breath test at the time, and that saves everybody time and money," Smith said.

Since the initiative was rolled out, Smith says those pulled over for DUI already know there's no way around beating the system, and that's already saving time on traffic stops.

"We really feel that, if you're drinking here in Boone County and you get stopped, you will be convicted of DUI in these courts," Smith continued.

Sheriff Ernest hopes his officers will soon be able to utilize all area hospitals when taking suspects to get their blood drawn, but admits it's been a tough process to get all providers on board.

"I can't say enough about St. Anthony's hospital. They have been so cooperative through this whole process. We are still working with other hospitals, trying to get there - and it's getting better - but it's an educational process that we all need to work together to make Boone County safe," Ernest said.

A few other counties in Illinois have implemented the same policy.

Above is from:  https://www.mystateline.com/news/boone-county-police-say-no-refusal-dui-policy-is-keeping-streets-safe/1386487257

How a Trump tariff is strangling American newspapers

Nearly half of 272 newspaper publishers who responded to a recent survey said they had laid off staff as a direct result of newsprint price increases. (Angela Major/AP)

By Paul Farhi

, Reporter

August 24 at 7:00 AM

Print isn’t dead. But the soaring cost of newsprint is contributing to the slow death of America’s newspapers.

A months-long spike in the price of paper, driven by federal tariffs imposed by the Trump administration on Canadian suppliers, is slamming newspapers at a time when the news about the news industry wasn’t very good to begin with.

Newspapers, magazines and print advertisers have seen the cost of their most basic commodity rise at double-digit rates since the Commerce Department began imposing the tariffs in March on Canadian imports, by far the publishing industry’s dominant paper source.

The result has been a kind of slow-motion breakdown for newspapers, long beset by declining ad revenue and disappearing readers. Even in an increasingly digital world, old-fashioned ink-on-paper remains the lifeblood of most newspapers. Print ads and subscriptions account for 75 percent or more of the revenue of an average daily newspaper. Newsprint is typically a publication’s second-biggest operating expense after labor.

And so rising paper prices have fallen like an ax throughout the news business:

● The Tampa Bay Times in April cut 50 positions, or about 7 percent of its workforce, after projecting a $3 million increase in its newsprint budget, said chief executive Paul Tash. The paper also undertook economizing measures, such as reducing publication of a free tabloid paper from five days to just one day a week. “You might be able to absorb [higher costs] if the rest of the business was going swimmingly,” said Tash, “but this is a tough environment for newspapers.”

● McClatchy Newspapers, publisher of the Miami Herald, Kansas City Star and more than two dozen other regional papers, on Tuesday laid off 3.5 percent of its workforce, or about 140 people. The layoff had several causes, but the company’s chief financial officer, Elaine Lintecum, said rising newsprint prices were a contributing factor.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette this week cut its print edition from seven days a week to five, eliminating Tuesday and Saturday publication. Editor David Shribman said the change was in the works for some time, saying: “We are emphasizing digital because the market is going digital.” But he added, “These tariffs aren’t helping us.”

(The Washington Post said its newsprint costs have risen 25 percent over the past year, but it has absorbed the costs without taking economizing measures).

Smaller papers are feeling the bite, too. The twice-weekly Storm Lake Times in Iowa (circulation 3,000) has seen its newsprint and printing bills rise by about 13 percent since the start of the year, according to Art Cullen, the paper’s editor. The Times, which won a Pulitzer Prize last year for editorial writing, is still running the same amount of copy, he said, but it has trimmed the size of its TV magazine, cut back on color printing and consolidated sections.

For Cullen, the newsprint crisis is just one battle in an ongoing war. “The real issue is the decline of rural communities and how that is sapping the small-newspaper industry,” he said. “What is harder to live with is knowing that the hardware store that closed used to run a quarter-page ad with you once a week and that the car dealers seem infatuated with Facebook,” he said. “We feel blessed to break even.”

The broader impact of the newsprint issue was laid out in a survey last month by the News Media Alliance, a trade group that is seeking to overturn the tariffs. Nearly half of the 272 newspaper publishers who responded to the survey said they had laid off staff as a direct result of newsprint price increases; some 71 percent said they had cut back the number of pages they published each day.

The organization said the publishers reported an average annual newsprint cost increase of $176,818 — a sum that could easily fund three or more newsroom jobs at many publications.

For many publishers, the price increase has been a double whammy. Advertisers that get their messages out via “preprints” — free-standing ad circulars distributed by newspapers — have also cut back as their costs have risen, further hurting publishers. The National Newspaper Association, a trade group whose membership is smaller dailies and weeklies, estimated last month that its members had seen a 20 percent reduction in preprints this year.

While the paper tariffs seem like a twofer for President Trump — a chance to protect domestic paper companies and a way to undermine the news media he has called “the enemy of the people” — there is no record of Trump raising the issue in public. Trump has been far more vocal about his desire for tariffs on foreign suppliers of other products, such as steel, aluminum and dairy.

[Trump’s trade war threatens the U.S. newspaper industry]

The paper tariffs were imposed by the Commerce Department after the North Pacific Paper Co. (or NorPac) petitioned the agency for relief last summer. NorPac, based in Longview, Wash., argued that Canadian companies are subsidized by their government and injured American competitors by selling newsprint below cost, an unfair trading practice.

The Commerce Department investigated and found in NorPac’s favor; it began imposing higher duties on Canadian products in January (it reduced the duty on some products this month). In combination with a long decline among American suppliers — the demand for newsprint has shrunk steadily over the past two decades — this set newsprint prices on a sharp upward trajectory, said Paul Boyle, senior vice president of public policy at the News Media Alliance.

The tariffs have helped protect NorPac, which employs about 400 workers, but has set off widespread concern among publishers, who have few domestic sources of supply.

“We’re not seeking an advantage. We simply want a level playing field,” said David Richey, a NorPac spokesman. “We understand that newspaper publishers face a difficult marketplace, but high-quality local journalism should not rely on unfairly traded imports.”

Newspaper publishers have pinned their hopes for relief on two tracks, one legislative and one bureaucratic.

Legislation supported by publishers has been introduced in the Senate by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and in the House by Rep. Kristi L. Noem (R-S.D.) that would suspend the tariffs pending a study of their effects on the American economy. NorPac favors continuing the tariffs and opposes the legislation.

It is unclear, however, whether the measures have wide enough support to pass.

A more promising avenue, at least from Boyle’s perspective, may be the U.S. International Trade Commission, an independent federal agency that has the authority to modify or overturn the tariffs, pending a showing of harm to American industry.

The commission’s five members will consider the issue Wednesday.

Above is from:  https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/how-a-trump-tariff-is-strangling-american-newspapers/2018/08/23/2ecc7fb6-a62a-11e8-8fac-12e98c13528d_story.html?utm_term=.62aba17bc490