Rockford, Illinois: The City that was Born to Lose
By Phil Ciciora
Looking at the Art Deco façade of the Times
Theater in downtown Rockford, Ill., you wouldn't know it's one
of the city's 22 historic landmarks. Cryptic graffiti along
with a "Kucinich for President" bumper sticker covers the cracked
window of the ticket booth. A solitary, yellowing poster from
June 2003  advertising
DJ Satiro and his mix of Latin-influenced dance music is the
only outward sign that the theater was once host to more than
cigarette butts and the layer of grime that coats the box office
light bulbs. But what sticks out the most about the Times is
its marquee, which has been turned into a makeshift op-ed page
about the state of local politics for all to read: "Most corrupt
and prejudice (sic) city hall in the USA." The other side of
the marquee reads, in a nod to the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara,
"Rather die on my feet than live on my knees."
To the residents of Rockford (Illinois's "Second City"), the pessimistic outlook on local affairs broadcast by the Times - not to mention the theater's decaying, uninviting exterior - is in some ways symbolic of Rockford as a whole: both the theater and the city itself have become beacons of economic failure and social despair.
A city of 150,000 people, Rockford once prided itself as the industrial fastener capital of the world (or as some residents put it, the "screw capital of the world"), molder of the Oscar, Cracked magazine, and home of Cheap Trick - the highly-influential (and still-touring) rock band that had a few hit singles in the late 1970s. Its residents like to brag that Rockford was high up on the Soviet Union's nuclear hit list during the Cold War because of its importance as a manufacturing center.
A town best-known for holding the dubious distinction of consistently being ranked at or near the bottom of Money magazine's Top 300 places to live in the United States for 13 consecutive years, Rockford has struggled to maintain its manufacturing job base and adapt to the realities of the global economy. In 2003 alone, the Rock River Valley area - comprising the towns of Loves Park, Machesney Park, Roscoe, Rockton, and Rockford -- lost 3,300 jobs, with 2,500 of those jobs from factory closings and layoffs. Rockford and its suburbs have lost about 20 percent of their manufacturing workforce since 2001, and about 13,000 factory jobs since the nation's recession "officially" ended in November 2001.
Overall, U.S. manufacturing has shed 2.5 million jobs since President George W. Bush took office in January 2000. In contrast, 257,000 manufacturing jobs were created during the Clinton administration. In 2000, Bush won the GOP counties around Rockford, but lost the city and the state of Illinois to Al Gore.
To stanch the bleeding of manufacturing jobs, Bush announced the creation of a manufacturing czar position within the Department of Commerce on Labor Day 2003. In March 2004, six months after the position was originally announced, the Bush Administration withdrew their candidate - Nebraska businessman Tony Raimondo, chairman and chief executive officer of Behlen Manufacturing Co. - after it was reported that Raimondo had recently laid off workers and moved a plant to China. In the time it took the Bush administration to select a candidate, the nation lost another 96,000 manufacturing jobs.
As its importance as a manufacturing center has dimmed, so has Rockford's prospects of attracting new residents, who now seem to prefer living in suburban areas where crime is relatively low and jobs are easier to come by. In the 2000 census, Rockford was the second-largest city in Illinois, ahead of Aurora by about 7,000 residents. But updated census statistics from 2002 now project Rockford as the third most populous city in Illinois.
Statistically speaking, Rockford is the most dangerous municipality in Illinois. By numbers alone, a resident of Rockford is more likely to be murdered, raped, robbed and/or assaulted than a resident of Chicago, a city of whose population exceeds Rockford's by about 3 million residents. According to 2002 per capita crime statistics released by the Illinois State Police, Winnebago County (whose home seat is Rockford) had the highest crime rate per capita in Illinois, higher even than Cook County (whose home seat is Chicago).
This nexus of negative publicity for Rockford has only served to reinforce the commonly held belief among its residents that Rockford, as a city, was, well, a loser.
But taken as a whole, Rockford is not just your typical Rust Belt, blue collar-manufacturing town whose economic plight and cultural irrelevance could be the lament of a Bruce Springsteen song. Rockford is also a signal example of Middle America.
Rockford, according to a Life magazine article published in 1949, is "as nearly typical of the U.S. as any city can be." As Rockford historian Jon Lundin noted in his book Rockford: An Illustrated History, the Life magazine article was consciously referencing a sociological study on middle-class values conducted by the then well-known sociologist W. Lloyd Warner. Rockford was Warner's model for the hypothetical, typical middle-class American community named "Jonesville."
"The Joneses of the world," Lundin wrote, "were average, hard-working folks who believed in the value of home and family, and they tended to live in cities such as Rockford." Rockford, the heartland prairie town that took its name from a limestone river ford and staked its fortune to the immigrant Swedish craftsmen who made furniture for Chicagoans after the Great Chicago Fire, is a bellwether of public opinion. Forget about the cliché about public opinion playing in Peoria. The saying could just as easily be, "Will it play in Rockford?"
Rockford's problems, then, are Middle America's problems. Taking the pulse of Rockford is taking the pulse of Middle America.
City with an Inferiority Complex
Most outsiders picture Rockford as predominantly white, working-class and relatively sheltered from the scourge of big city life - underachieving schools, crime, and poverty. But the reality is much different. Rockford has a school system mired in a 13-year, $250 million desegregation lawsuit which has driven property tax rates to some of the highest in the nation; an exploding Hispanic population that has increased 193 percent since the 1990 census, accounting for 94 percent of Rockford's total population growth; endemic gang problems, partially due to economic woes and Rockford's proximity to Chicago; and a citywide poverty rate of 10 percent.
Bound to the north by a highway dotted with stores selling authentic Wisconsin cheese and fireworks, abutted to the east by Chicago and its vast expanse of outlying suburbs, Rockford doesn't know whether to be more like Wisconsin or the last suburban enclave of Chicago. Both its proximity to Wisconsin and Chicago, not to mention its isolation from them, has insulated Rockford from its neighbors to the north and east so that it hasn't developed a unique civic identity of its own. As late as 1862, Rockford sought secession from Illinois, wishing to be annexed by and eventually incorporated into Wisconsin. Today, some parts of Rockford feel more like Wisconsin than Illinois. Among the telltale signs is that there are probably just as many Green Bay Packers fans in Rockford as there are Chicago Bears fans.
While Rockford's nickname as Illinois' "Second City" may now actually be a statistical misnomer, it's still indicative of the inferiority complex that has plagued the city since its incorporation as a city in 1852. Long in the shadow of Chicago, Rockford has always played second fiddle to the Second City. It is testament to Rockford's peculiar brand of bad luck that its economic and cultural fortunes have been tied to those of Chicago - a geographical closeness that may have inhibited rather than stimulated Rockford's cultural and economic growth as well as its formation of its own unique identity.
When the filmmaker Michael Moore came to Rockford in 1996 to film The Big One (1997), his movie about the disparity between millionaire CEOs in corporate America and the downsized factory workers who become grist in the American industrial economic mill, Moore said that he wanted to see a town - Rockford - that was possibly worse off than his own much maligned hometown of Flint, Michigan. According to the 1997 Money magazine Top 300 rankings, Flint actually outranked Rockford, checking in at number 269 on the list. Rockford was number 299, up one spot from the previous year's ranking of dead last.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the Department of Labor, the Rockford Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) had an unemployment rate of 7.6 percent in May 2004, up from 7.4 percent in April but down from 8.3 percent in March and 8.7 percent in February. The national unemployment rate for May 2004 was 5.6 percent. The jobless rate in the state of Illinois during that same period of time was 6.4 percent.
Although city officials are likely to trumpet the fact that the figure marked the fifth straight annual decline and the third straight month the unemployment rate was below 9 percent, the unemployment statistics gathered by the Illinois Department of Employment Security (IDES) tells a slightly different story about the local economy. According to the IDES statistics, the unemployment rate in Rockford in May 2004 was 10.3 percent, a disparity of 2.7 percent or about 4,055 people.
Whichever statistical measuring tool one uses to gauge the state of the local economy, the story remains the same: Rockford is a city on the ropes. "There are many former shop workers who ran machines, welders and assembly personnel who went from making $16 to $18 per hour who are working for $6 per hour at Wal-Mart," said Art Goldsworthy, 47, a Rockford-area native who used to work for the Beloit Corporation in nearby Beloit, Wis., before being laid-off in May 2000.
Goldsworthy, who is married and has two daughters, said the experience of being unemployed for seven months after a life-time of employment at Beloit Corp. was "stressful." He says, "I cannot imagine how stressful it must be if you are the typical American family today and become unemployed." Goldsworthy eventually found work in early 2001 but remains insecure about the health of the local economy. "Rockford continues to lose good paying manufacturing jobs with no end in sight," he says. "I think things are pretty bad in Rockford."
In the winter of 1982, Rockford led the nation with a staggering 25.5 percent unemployment rate. As a city, Rockford was falling off the map: 43 percent of all manufacturing jobs in town were lost, and one out of every four Rockford residents was unemployed.
As a city, Rockford has negotiated American economic history's two greatest transitions - from its agrarian roots in the water, wood and soil of furniture-making and farming to the Promethean metal ore of manufacturing; and, now, from manufacturing to service - in the span of forty years. "Rockford was a cow town, then it was a furniture town, then it became a machine tool town, and then a fastener town," said Steve Bois, Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, Northern Stateline Regional Manager.
With its high concentration of family-owned manufacturing firms, Rockford is accustomed to the ups and downs of the business cycle. The recession of the 1970s, 80s and 90s brought high unemployment, but the difference between then and now is that demand eventually returned, companies rebounded, and many of the well-paying jobs came back.
That's not happening now, according to Lundin.
"We are really seeing the effect of globalization," Lundin said in a phone interview. Globalization, according to Lundin, is a structural change that will require economic turtles to reinvent themselves as economic rabbits - leaner, smarter companies that can develop commercial applications from high-tech concepts. But what concerns local leaders most is not that Rockford's bread-and-butter manufacturing jobs are not only going to cheaper overseas competitors, it is the fact that they are also moving out of state.
According to Brian Davis, public relations spokesman for U.S. Rep. Dan Manzullo (R-Egan), the word is spreading that Illinois is not a business-friendly state.
When Textron Fastening Systems, a division of aviation conglomerate Textron, Inc., announced they were downsizing 700 workers in fall 2003, Davis said that Textron also announced that they were constructing a $35 million plant in Mississippi that would hire 700 workers. "They're not leaving the country," Davis said, "they're leaving the state of Illinois and going to a neighboring state."
"It's no fault of the Rock River Valley," said State Senator Dave Syverson (R-Rockford). "It's because we have a new legislature, a new governor that took over in January of last year that added a whole bunch of business taxes - increased worker's comp, increased unemployment. All those taxes have made Illinois less competitive labor-wise than other states."
"If you look at the labor costs, the overall cost of health care, workman's comp, and unemployment," Syverson continued, "(they're all) lower in Wisconsin. So, the Rockford area can do a lot to try to bring businesses in the front door, but when you have exoduses from the back door, it's no fault of your own because of policies of a governor and national policies that are not good in our area of manufacturing. It is a real problem."
According to Syverson, the Money magazine ranking has been nothing but an albatross for the city. The stigma attached to the ranking has also been a burden that the state legislator has had to explain away while courting business in Springfield for the much maligned area.
"Some people in Rockford just love to be negative, and they will use [the ranking] to perpetuate [negativity]," he said. "When I entertain business people in Rockford, they love the town because of all it has to offer."
Regardless of whether Rockford's businesses gain or lose from globally-minded trade policies such as NAFTA, couched within those trade policies is an implicit ideology that sees nothing wrong - ethically or financially -- with a race-to-the-bottom competition for the wages of middle- to lower-class working people. Combine that prevailing Darwinian capitalist ethic with the paternalistic shrinking of the size and scope of government - i.e., reducing taxes along with such social safety nets as unemployment, worker's compensation and health care tax credits for the unemployed - by the Republican-controlled federal government and, for one-note manufacturing-heavy towns such as Rockford, it's a recipe socio-economic disaster.
Are the Lights Going Off?
In newspapers and magazine across the country, Rockford's economy in the early 1980s became a symbol for the deep recession that gripped the nation. Major media outlets such as The New York Times and Newsweek focused their spotlight on Rockford's economic failure, labeling its unemployment problem a "sickness."
"That was the atmosphere that we were operating under at the time," said John McNamara, Rockford's Democratic mayor from 1981 to 1989. A Vietnam veteran and a former public defender, McNamara presided over Rockford when the city was at the height of its Second Great Depression. Under McNamara's watch, homelessness rose drastically, and soup kitchens made a comeback. "We devoted a hell of a lot of time, money, and energy to solving the unemployment problem," he said. "Back then, everyone had the strong feeling that we could recover the jobs that were lost because we could still be competitive."
To counter the pessimism that was sweeping across the city, and to embody the spirit of dogged determination that McNamara wanted the city to embrace in the face of such depressing times, he affixed a bumper sticker to the front of his city council desk that read, "Keep the light ON! I'M STAYING."
"We've paid the price in some ways of being a company town for some time where we've had these good, solid big-box employers, large companies that employ 1,000 to 1,500 people," Lundin said. "The goal in life for a lot of people [in Rockford], then, is to get in to one of these companies. It's kind of like working for the fire department and getting your pension."
Local government, according to Lundin, has to be able to see things for what they are, and understand the community's best options. "I don't know if our leadership is really weighing those options very well or if they even have a plan," he said. "We're very short-sighted in this city."
Betting on a Casino
Most local leaders believe that Rockford getting a riverboat casino along the banks of the Rock River in the downtown would provide jobs and a much needed morale boost for the city. Beloit, Wis., Rockford's neighbor to the north by about 20 minutes, is moving ahead with their plans for a casino, seemingly unfazed by the efforts of Rockford-area lawmakers to bring a gambling facility to the area. If Beloit gets a casino, Syverson believes it would be a double negative for Rockford. Not only will money be funneled out of the municipality and the state, but Rockford also will incur all the social problems associated with gambling.
"If Beloit gets that casino, their own marketing says that 85 percent of their revenue will come from Winnebago County and northern Illinois," he said. "That's going to take millions of dollars out of our economy and put it into Beloit. We know that a small percentage of the population has a problem with gambling. We're going to end up dealing with those people after they've left all their money in Wisconsin."
Syverson said that the Rockford-Beloit market could not sustain two casinos, and Rockford getting a casino first could pre-empt Beloit from getting one. "Either way, whether it's associated with Rockford or Beloit," Syverson said, "there are going to be problems associated with gambling. But if Rockford gets it, what Rockford gets is an increase in tourism, the city will build a convention center from the proceeds from the Riverboat, so the taxpayers would have to pay for any of that. A convention center plus the gaming plus the hotels will attract more conventions to Rockford, which will create jobs and revenue for Rockford."
Syverson said the city's cut of the Riverboat would be about $8 to $10 million a year. The county's cut would be $2.25 million a year, which would be used for economic development. There would be $100 million worth of construction for the Riverboat and another $30 million in construction for the convention center. "So there are a lot of benefits to go with, but there are also a lot of downsides," he said. "But the reality is that the downsides are going to happen if Beloit has it or Rockford has it."
Lundin, for one, is not impressed with the plan. "I violently disagree with [Rockford getting a casino]," he said. "I don't think that that addresses the issue. People who run the casinos pull their profits out of town. Think about it, if we're down to that, if the only way we can pick ourselves up economically is through a casino, that's a joke." The question Lundin wants the answer to the most is
, "Where are these people in Rockford generating the money to go gamble?"
"I think they've got it wrong, especially if a casino is the last, best, desperate hope for everybody," he said. "We'll all be sitting by the side of the road selling Navajo blankets. It makes no sense to me at all, especially if that's the last, best, desperate hope for everybody."
Municipal Greed and Stock Portfolio Metaphors
East State Street, the main commercial thoroughfare in town, is Rockford's version of the Miracle Mile in Chicago. Its expansion from the early 1960s to the present day has created one of the largest concentrations of national franchises and "big box" stores in Illinois outside Chicago. For the more aesthetically minded resident, it's not necessarily a good thing. "We used to joke that all those cities looked like the entrance to an army base," McNamara said. "When you drove into Fort Knox, Fort Bragg, Fort Benning, every place looked the same because they were along the major highways before you got to the base themselves. They were clustered with what we're seeing now on East State Street - hotels, fast food restaurants, shopping areas."
Rockford has been more concerned in recent years with attracting retail business rather than building a viable downtown that attracts foot traffic for one simple reason: greed. "They put more incentives into getting retail than they do incentives for getting manufacturing," Syverson said. "That's part of the problem we have with the municipality that looks for the quick fix. Municipalities make a lot more money off retail operations than they do off a manufacturing operation. They greedily fight each other to get that retail business so they can get those sales tax dollars."
Nationally, service industry work pays, on average, 21 percent less than manufacturing work does. And it's even worse in Illinois, where new jobs on average pay 34 percent less than in any other state. "It's extremely shortsighted," Syverson said. "We don't aggressively go after the kind of manufacturing that still takes place in the United States because we're spending more of our money trying to court retailers."
One Barnes & Noble bookseller or other similar retail venture, Syverson said, would pay the city approximately $100,000 a year in taxes. It would take 10 manufacturing plants, he estimated, to generate that much money for a city. "That's only if the city is shortsighted and looking only at the quick revenue as opposed to those manufacturing jobs that are going to create higher income people who are going to pay more for their houses and, in the long run, create a better community," Syverson said. "But the city has been run by politicians and not by people who understand what's best for the community."
Current Rockford Mayor Doug Scott, a Democrat, thinks a good local economy is like a good stock portfolio - diverse enough so when one area sags, the other assets are able pick up the slack. "I wholly disagree that what happens out there [on East State Street] is bad for the area," he said. "This is a regional shopping area. People come from all over to shop here, and that's a good thing for us."
"Back in the early 1980s," Scott continued, "one out of every two jobs was related to manufacturing. So when then the manufacturing sector tanked in the late '70s and early '80s, we led the nation in unemployment. That's why it's good to diversify your local economy, so that when we got hit by the other economic slow-downs since then, we weren't hit as hard."
Scott, who is up for re-election in April 2005, has not lived up to his campaign promises enough for some local residents.
Elizabeth Hand, a 30-year old schoolteacher and life-long Rockford resident, will not be voting for Scott in April. "I can't stand Mayor Scott," she said. "I think he's really missed the boat on a lot of things - jobs, downtown, everything really."
Rockford is desperate for a leader that could instill the city with something it has sorely been missing for its entire existence: civic pride. Rockford, the city that once prided itself as being the inventor of the hand-cranked pencil sharpener, needs something to be proud of again. What Rockford needs most, rather than Scott's diverse portfolio metaphor, is a grander vision for what Rockford could eventually be - not a midway point between Wisconsin and first cousin Chicago, but a town with a low cost-of-living that is attractive to young people who are tired of Chicago and its suburbs.
"We ought to forget about attracting tourists and convention centers," McNamara said. "Every Tom, Dick and Harry has one. We're not a convention city."
What Rockford ought to concentrate on, according to McNamara, is the river district, which is unique to Rockford. "The jobs in the future," McNamara said, "are going to be created, not dissimilar to the past, by bright, creative people. We need to show that we're open to that and create the critical masses that you can attract more of those people."
City with an Identity Crisis
What's wrong with Rockford is a question that its residents have grappled with for some time. Lundin concurs with the assessment that Rockford is a city with a chip on its shoulder, but also thinks the city has an image problem. "In the 1940s, '50s, and '60s," he said, "this was one of the most prosperous communities in America in terms of disposable income per capita."
Lundin attributes the continual bleeding of manufacturing jobs partly to cheaper overseas labor but also the leveling effects of the global economy and the shortsightedness of Rockford's elected officials. "To this day, I think our community leaders don't see the value of maintaining that manufacturing base," he said. "I think they want us to become a center for insurance or biotechnology." But Rockford becoming something other than a blue collar-manufacturing town is something that's "just not going to happen," according to Lundin. "We'd be just as likely to say it's going to become a new tourist destination, like we're going to take tourists away from the Grand Canyon," he said.
Negativism, along with an inferiority complex due to Rockford's shortcomings, is part of a continuing theme in Rockford history. When journalist and social critic Calvin Trillin visited Rockford in 1976 to inspect the town for a New Yorker magazine article on Americana, he found a city in need of a psychotherapist and a prescription of Paxil. "In Rockford," Trillin wrote, "there is always a lot of talk about negativism. Rockford people discuss negativism the way college students in the '50s used to discuss apathy - as an endemic, mildly regrettable, permanent condition. Apathy is also discussed in Rockford, usually in conversations about negativism." Trillin saw negativism as a fully ingrained trait in Rockford's character - a trait encoded in the town's personality long before the Money magazine rankings ever came out. "When people talk about negativism in Rockford," Trillin wrote, "they are talking not about some new condition brought on by standard urban problems, but about some element in the city's character that evolved from history or geography or chance - an element that would be present in the best of times."
Even in the best of times, Rockford has always had an image problem. According to Kathleen Webster, marketing consultant for the Rockford area Visitors and Convention Bureau, Rockford lacks a defining civic characteristic. "People outside of Rockford mostly think of it as a halfway point between Chicago or Milwaukee and little else," she said. "Focus groups in Chicago didn't think anything of Rockford. They didn't think anything bad. They just didn't think anything," she said.
According to McNamara, ambivalence toward Rockford is nothing new. "If you look at Rockford historically, our first name was the Midway," he said - halfway between Galena and what was then the village of Chicago. "So we've always identified ourselves in relation to other places." With all the millions of dollars that have been spent over the years promoting Rockford through the Chamber of Commerce, the Council of 100 Businesses, and the Visitors and Convention Bureau, McNamara said that Rockford still does not have a greater identity inside or outside the community than before. "I think it's a failure of those who've been given the task of branding and marketing Rockford," he said. "I think they've done a poor job, and some of those I helped to start."
"One of our biggest issues historically is that we've been way too hard on ourselves here in Rockford," Scott said. "We're not Pollyanna. We know we've got a lot of issues, but there are also a lot of good things happening here, too. Part of my job is to let people know how good they've got it."
Rockford has had a history of political mavericks who've tried to reverse the fortunes of the Forest City. While outsiders have tended to view Rockford as an atavistic throwback to an older, more politically conservative Midwest (Rockford is about 50 miles northeast of Ronald Reagan's hometown of Dixon, Illinois), Rockford was the home of John Anderson, one of the most successful third-party candidates for president in U.S. history. In former mayor Charles Box, Rockford had a two-term African-American Democratic mayor who carried every precinct in the city. Scott, a Democrat, is possibly the most left-leaning politician in the state of Illinois. As an Illinois state representative, he once sponsored a bill authorizing the use of euthanasia.
Rockford's political confusion - an ostensibly blue-collar Republican town with Democrats in control of the city's purse strings - only reinforces the notion that Rockford is a city not only with an inferiority complex, but also one with an identity crisis. Rockford, in other words, has little self-knowledge about what's in its own best interests. "We're not Madison. We're not Urbana," McNamara said. "But those are university towns that are basically supported with government money. But we probably have more white collar townies than Chicago."
"All the fish are dead"
Rockford is the type of town that knows all too well about the reality of H. Ross Perot's "giant sucking sound," the NAFTA-related sound bite the then-presidential candidate made in 1992 during his campaign about American manufacturing jobs being siphoned off to Mexico and other cheaper overseas destinations. "A lot of people want to blame [Rockford's ills] on international trade and trade agreements," Davis said. "But things like NAFTA were designed to help our companies export to those countries, and we have small companies who have benefited from that."
The average hourly wage for manufacturing in China is less than one dollar per hour. In Mexico, it's just over two dollars per hour. Compare that to the U.S., where workers earn on average more than $21 per hour in manufacturing. "These Chinese are already eating our lunch," Lundin said. "I don't think America in manufacturing can compete in the global economy with the Chinese."
As the director of the Abilities Center, a not-for-profit, federally funded job shop affiliated with the United Way and Goodwill Industries of America, Lundin knows how to deal with people who have spotty job histories. But the trend that disturbs him most is that educated people can't find gainful employment, or are often under-employed, if they choose to live and work in the Rockford area. "What we're seeing over the last four or five years," he said, "is that people are coming here who've got college degrees and they can't even find work."
"We're supposed to be the people who teach other people to fish" (from the old saying, "Teach a man to fish and he'll never go hungry for the rest of his life") but what Lundin has found is that in Rockford, "all the fish are dead."
As the world has gotten smaller and sleeker, big, bulky Rockford has struggled to slim down and adapt to the global economy. "I just think we're being foolish in the way we're spending our resources and not capitalizing on those things that are unique to us that we already have, like the downtown and the river district," McNamara said.
"There are some things happening in a lot of different places along the river but what we lack is leadership," Lundin said. "The leadership wants to put a casino in there."
Lundin is still bullish about Rockford's future. "I hope we get the leadership to meet us there," he said. "I think it's a very wonderful little community. I couldn't live in the Chicago suburbs. To me, that not as appealing as what we've got here."
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