The Corn Latitudes

If I live to be 80 I will never see Illinois clear out its thicket of special purpose local governments. Most were set up to provide services that locals couldn’t otherwise pay for without sacrificing their independence from multi-purpose local governments that spend The People’s tax money on the wrong kind of people.

 

I hear that Jerome had to lay off its police chief. What, you didn’t know that Jerome had a police chief? Or that Jerome had a police department? Or that Jerome needed a police department? The village is home to only 1,651 people. As for the ability of its tax base to support the full spectrum of modern municipal services, if the freezers at Shop ’n’ Save break down for a week, Jerome would have to lay off a clerk.

Why did this agglomeration of very modest subdivisions (West Grand, Leland Highpoint, and Alta Sita) in unincorporated Woodside Township undertake the fiscal perils of village-ness? For the answer we must go back to the 1930s. The City of Springfield, thanks to Commissioner Willis J. Spaulding, had a spanking new water system that delivered what he invariably described as “sparkling” lake water. This was a near-miracle; the only thing harder to swallow than Springfield’s politics over the years had been its water. As for folks in the unincorporated parts of Sangamon County, they were still drinking water from holes in the ground. They’d never seen water that sparkled except in the movies, and they wanted some.

Springfield was willing to sell its water, but how to deliver it? Or more specifically, how to pay for laying the new mains needed to deliver it? Washington was funding new water systems through the anti-Depression Work Projects Administration, which paid for labor, but locals were responsible for the rest. Unincorporated areas next to the city were connecting to Springfield’s mains, the city recovering part of the costs by assessing residents in such areas roughly a buck for each lineal foot of pipe.

 

Alas, supplying the future Jerome would take a lot of pipe to reach not a lot of residents. The neighborhood named itself Jerome because it sat on the farm that had belong to Jerome Leland whose land it once was and the area was still quasi-rural. The scattered residents would have to borrow to pay their part of the costs, and to sell the revenue bonds they needed they had to band together into a corporate entity.

Thus the rush in 1939 to incorporate themselves as villages by citizens who were eager to enjoy modern municipal amenities but preferred that someone else help pay for them. The voters who created Jerome were joined that year by voters in what became Southern View and Grandview. (Residents on the east side rejected a similar plan to become a new village of Bergen.) Rochester, already a town, also used WPA money to build mains to connect to Springfield.

Some forty years later, the then-president of the Jerome board would complain that the village had been coerced, that Spaulding had forced a “no incorporation, no water” policy on places like Jerome. “There probably never would have been a Jerome, a Southern View, or a Grandview had it not been for Willis Spaulding’s insistence on corporations,” he said. But without incorporations, there would be no drinkable water in those districts either; it was reality, not Spaulding, that coerced residents to band together. The president went on to say that Jerome residents “incurred significant indebtedness (now paid) to purchase its water mains.” Well, boo-hoo. Who else should have paid for Jerome’s mains but Jerome?

These villages were not the only ones to create themselves in order to get the things that only villages or towns can provide. In the case of Leland Grove that thing was streets. In 1950 the Springfield Transportation Company, the private predecessor to the SMTD, had been running a trial extension of service down Noble Avenue and complained publicly that the pavement on Noble Avenue was so rough that it was beating up its buses.

If the future Leland Grove (basically the Oak Knolls subdivision) incorporated as a “city” (in Illinois it’s a legal classification, not an urbanistic one) it could collect its share of taxes then going to Woodside Township and the State of Illinois (through gasoline taxes) and levy its own motor vehicle taxes. Such riches would allow the new town “pull the district out of the mud.” So it did, barely; Leland Grove built only ”semipermanent” streets (mainly paved with oil and rock chips) that were equipped only with drainage ditches rather than proper storm sewers. Still, better than mud.

There are hundreds of toy towns like these around Illinois. Like special purpose districts and too-small counties and school districts, they duplicate services and waste money. Most experts think they ought to be consolidated or otherwise put out of business. The sensible thing for a financially struggling Jerome to do would be to annex itself to the City of Springfield, put up a sign on the old village border announcing itself an historic worker cottages community, and begin the paperwork for historic preservation tax breaks. The same is true of Southern View, Grandview, and Leland Grove.

Ah, but Springfield tried to annex the Grovers in 1957 and failed emphatically. Annexation was talked about in 1960 and again in 1971 and voted on in 1976. But since state law requires that both parties to such annexations agree, it never happened. The village relishes having its own police force, whose principal duty is to keep visiting Springfielders from stopping smell Leland Grove’s roses, so to speak, and unlike poor Jerome Leland Grove brings in enough tax money from its affluent residents to pay for it.

 

Jerome incorporated in the 1930s because it couldn’t afford not to, and if it were to agree to be annexed by Springfield it would be for the same reason. Only folks who don’t need to do it look down on marrying for money. ●