Crazy Politico's ideas on fixing Illinois

Over 200 years ago, Thomas Jefferson came up with the idea of dividing the largely undeveloped Northwest Territory, an area that later became the states of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota, into six-mile by six-mile parcels. Those parcels were further subdivided into affordable lots for future settlers.

In Illinois, the legacy of those 36 square-mile pieces of land is the joke known as township government. When Illinois was being settled, township government made sense. In 2006, township government in the state, particularly in areas such as Cook and DuPage Counties with few unincorporated areas, it makes no sense. This little-seen, little-heard-from unit of the public sector does virtually nothing other than stock local food pantries and provide sinecures for otherwise unemployable friends and relatives of various elected officials of both parties.

The food pantry obligation can easily be absorbed by another division of government.

The way to "fix" Illinois, according to Bob over at Crazy Politico's Rantings, is to eliminate or consolidate the multiple layers of government strangling the nation's fifth-most populous state.

From his blog:

There isn't an easy answer to making the state fiscally healthy, but there is an easy starting point; reduce the number of government taxing bodies. In this article I'll only concentrate on local bodies, not those run by the State, that's another bag of worms for someone with much more research time than I have.

Such a review is underway in Springfield, but I'm pretty sure that with the Democrats pretty well controlling everything in the capital, it will be ignored. The number of taxing and government bodies in the state is amazing, frustrating, and horribly redundant.

For instance, if you live in Gurnee, IL you have most the following taxing bodies showing up on your property tax bill, though only two of the school districts will (the High School) and either district 50 or 56 for (elementary and middle school):

Village of Gurnee, Lake County, Lake County Forest Preserve District, Central Lake County Joint Action Water Agency, Warren Township, Warren Township Road and Bridge, Warren Gravel, School District 56, School District 50, High School District 121, Community College District 532, Gurnee Park District.

Where I live, in Morton Grove, the situation is the same. Only I have the misfortune of having to pay for that boondoggle known as Cook County Government, which in reality is a patronage army that legendary Boston Mayor James Curley would envy.

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