“When you use your phone to order an Uber or make a doctor’s appointment, it’s likely going through one of our data centers,” Baumann told a Minooka Village Board meeting in January.
“We consider ourselves a utility, like water or sewer or electricity. It has that kind of importance to everyday life,” he said.
But Equinix is not a regulated utility like ComEd or Peoples Gas. Equinix is a publicly traded company whose top shareholders are Wall Street titans such as BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard.
It’s a supplier that’s kept on a tight leash by the big dogs of artificial intelligence, namely, its partners, including Microsoft and Google.
Contrasting opinions here from the corporation’s real estate director and the Chicago Tribune. On one hand, it is hard to imagine life today without the Internet, social media, and smartphones. All that data transmitted through the air requires infrastructure including cables, towers, and data centers.
On the other hand, all of this is not considered a utility in the same way by the federal and state government. Gas, electricity, and water have all sorts of regulations so that everyone can access them. They are considered essential to housing. The right to the Internet does not exist yet. And the nod above to the private market may or may make sense; other utility companies are publicly traded and seek profits.
Is this a convincing argument in the long run? Would local officials and residents be more inclined to approve a data center if they think of like a utility or more like a company?
The Chicago Tribune made its endorsement for mayor in Aurora, Illinois. This is not a small city or a recently-developed place; Aurora is the second largest community in Illinois with over 175,000 residents and it has nearly two centuries of history. The current mayor ran in the 2022 Republican primary for governor. Lots of people would be interested in voting, right?
All of this means that a relatively small portion of communities elect local officials. If turnout is under 15%, then a mayor can be elected by less than 10% of a suburb’s population. These elected officials then help make important decisions about local ordinances, land use, infrastructure, and more. They represent the community to residents and outsiders.
Does this low turnout in local elections help explain why it is difficult for mayors to make the jump to higher levels of government? They may be known in their communities – also think of Pete Buttigieg, former mayor of South Bend, Indiana – but they do not necessarily need large voting blocs to support them and help them get into office. Running for higher offices, like Congress or governor, then requires amassing many more votes.
How will different suburbs respond to the current situation in the United States regarding immigration? Two Chicago area suburbs are pursuing different approaches. Start with Skokie:
Village of Skokie officials indicated at last week’s Village Board meeting that they will strengthen the village’s “Welcoming City” ordinance.
Trustee Khem Khoeun asked Mayor George Van Dusen if the village needed to update its welcoming village ordinance given recent immigration enforcement raids and the anxiety that some people in Skokie’s immigrant community are dealing with…
Van Dusen said Skokie’s existing ordinance was established during Trump’s first term in office, when the administration attempted enacting a travel ban for seven Muslim majority countries. The ban was ultimately blocked, but the effort apparently impacted Skokie residents.
Van Dusen recalled an incident in 2017 when a personal friend of his said her daughter in grade school was concerned she could be deported because she was Muslim, despite being born in the United States.
Orland Park says its police will work with federal immigration agents on cases involving undocumented immigrants charged with or convicted of criminal offenses.
The Village Board recently adopted a resolution that also supports Senate Bill 1313 that would undo provisions of existing state law concerning law enforcement coordination with federal agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Trustees also reaffirmed Orland Park is not a sanctuary city, citing an ordinance approved by the board in January 2024…
The village said copies of the approved resolution would be sent to Gov. JB Pritzker and leaders in the Illinois General Assembly as well as Orland Park’s representatives in Springfield.
These suburbs could represent two opposite ends of a spectrum. They are different places with different locations in comparison to Chicago, different histories, and different residents. It is hard to know how many suburbs would have views similar to either one. There are hundreds of suburbs in the Chicago area and thousands across the United States. There will likely be a wide range of municipal reactions to immigration, including not making any resolution at all for a variety of reasons.
Will these resolutions be influential in the suburbs and in the state? Would businesses and residents make decisions to move to or stay in these suburbs when they pass these resolutions?
Another factor to consider: many immigrants to the United States move to and live in suburbs. They move to these two suburbs and suburbs like them. How much do these resolutions affect long-term patterns in the character of these suburbs?
There is a silver lining, though. The most radical property tax–related proposals are argued for as either general anti-tax measures or as efforts to privatize schooling. Whatever you think of their intended goals, they would also have an unintended effect of ameliorating one of the worst features of the property tax: its localism.
If North Dakota voters had voted for a repeal of the property tax, much of the revenue used to replace it likely would have come from state taxes. (The group formed to oppose it was called “Keep it Local.”) Similarly, if the state government is supporting school choice vouchers with income or sales tax revenue, that means schools as a whole rely less on local property taxes.
And there are some people willing to argue they are willing to pay higher property taxes for what they receive. It is less clear how many residents feel this way or that people do not find ways to limit their property taxes.
I am not sure this has to be pitched as an either/or: higher property taxes or lower taxes and give up financial control to other bodies. Here are two other options:
Do Americans believe that local services can and should be provided more cheaply? This could be about containing costs of existing services.
Another variation for #1 is cutting local services to limit costs.
Both of these options might be unattractive: local services tend to help enhance the status and value of properties and communities. Reducing these or threatening them could be perceived as backfiring and hurting everyone.
The choice might also depend on the local context. Would high housing values in some places lead to residents wanting to do a lot to limit property taxes? Or what if residents felt they could handle funding coming from other places? After all, real estate is local.
What will 2025 bring in the American suburbs? A third thing I will be watching for is the search for municipal revenue.
Photo by Miguel u00c1. Padriu00f1u00e1n on Pexels.com
Every government body has a budget and sources of revenue. This includes suburban communities. They may receive money from taxes, fees, state government, the federal government, and other sources.
What will happen to suburban revenues in 2025? There are multiple threats:
Slowing population growth or no population growth.
Reduced funding from the federal and/or state governments.
And it is difficult to reduce municipal costs. As suburbs develop and mature, there are certain costs to maintain infrastructure and provide the services residents expect.
One way to boost revenues is to boost local taxes and fees. This may be unpopular among locals, particularly if they already perceive their local tax burden to be high. But more of this money can go directly to local operations and small increases can be sold as small burdens for individual taxpayers.
To some degree, municipal budgets are always tight. How many suburban communities have surpluses that enable them to keep spending and expanding services and amenities?
In 2025, some suburbs may face tough financial situations. What will they do in these situations? Where might they find extra money? How much goodwill will there be among leaders, residents, and other actors to find solutions?
She noted the county’s division of transportation takes care of 220 miles of county highways and 92 miles of multiuse trails. It also maintains 650 vehicles in the countywide fleet and is responsible for snow removal on county roads.
This sounds like a lot of vehicles and I do not know if it is a lot or a little compared to similar-sized counties. At least in this story, the county is looking for a bigger transportation facility to meet all its need for space.
So in one suburban county, there are multiple actors responsible for the roads: the state for interstates and other highways, townships for some roads, municipalities for some roads, and the county for some roads. Is this the best way to approach things? Does each government body have similar vehicles? How close are each other’s roads to each other? If starting suburbia from scratch from this point on, would it be better to have one body address all the roads?
Roads are near sacred in the United States so I understand the attention paid to them. Yet the resources and energy required to maintain them, let alone expand them, is large.
“While it’s too early to make predictions, it appears that DuPage County is on track to have a large turnout for this presidential election. There’s excitement in the air,” Kaczmarek says. “In 2020, the turnout was 76.55% with 491,067 ballots cast – the largest turnout in DuPage history.”
In recent years, DuPage County has had the highest voter turnout in the region in every election.
In other words, voter turnout was high with a presidential election. But this high level of turnout does not carry over to local elections. See posts from 2022, 2019, and 2018.
I can understand why turnout is high during presidential and national races. The rhetoric is persuasive, the stakes are high, and the advertising is plentiful.
But suburbanites like local government and local control. They like seeing their tax dollars at work in the community. They like the access to local leaders. They select communities based on particular amenities that they want to preserve or enhance.
National and state politics do affect what happens in communities. But the huge drop-off between voting for the president voting for the local mayor or council is a bit odd; in day-to-day life, the suburbanite may see experience more affected by local government than by the president. With the federal system the United States has, local government (municipalities, townships, counties, etc.) have significant decision-making and monetary powers. To not participate in local elections at similar rates to national elections is to indicate less concern and interest for the former.
There are so many units of government in Illinois that people can’t even agree on the total because of differences over what technically qualifies as a government body. The U.S. Census Bureau says 6,930, while the Illinois Department of Revenue, which tracks governments authorized to levy property taxes, reports 6,042. The state comptroller’s office lists 8,529, and a study by the Civic Federation tallied the number at 8,923 as of 2019.
Regardless of the exact answer, the number of governments in Illinois outpaces that seen in bigger states, including Texas (which has 5,533, according to the Census Bureau), Pennsylvania (4,851) and California, a state with a population three times the size of Illinois but half as many local government units…
Today the state has more than 5,700 special-purpose governments, including 851 school districts, 861 drainage districts, 838 fire protection districts, 376 library districts, 348 park districts and 320 multi-township tax assessment districts, according to the state comptroller’s office. Many of the state’s nearly 1,400 districts dedicated to roads and bridges have boundaries overlapping its 1,425 townships.
Most of these governments are outside the Chicago region and represent only a sliver of the state’s population. Nearly two-thirds of Illinois residents live in the six-county Chicago metropolitan area. Meanwhile, 51 of Illinois’ 102 counties have fewer than 25,000 residents, and 15 of those have a population under 10,000, according to a 2021 Civic Federation report. About two-thirds of Illinois’ school districts have fewer than 1,000 students enrolled, and there are 26 school districts with fewer than 100 students.
Two figures stand out:
How do the different counters get to numbers so far apart? The difference is roughly 2,000 bodies of government – what exactly is the scope or taxing ability of these bodies? On the national level, who is considered to have an official count in these area?
Americans tend to like local government that responds to local needs. On one hand, all these government bodies are exerting the will of the people to control local activity. On the other hand, this could be viewed as micromanaging. Certainly there are merges that could happen in some of these categories to take advantage of economies of scale and more efficiently serve a slightly larger population? (I have discussed townships before.)
So is one way to interpret the number of government bodies in Illinois is to suggest that the price of corruption is not enough to convince residents and/or local leaders to give up local control?
The city of Woodbury in recent years has made native landscaping and pollinator gardens more intentional in some of the city’s 500 stormwater basins. The homeowners associations that rule many of Woodbury’s residential developments, dictating everything from front door colors to permitted landscaping, have become more lenient. The just-built Westwind New Home Community has in its recorded covenant a stipulation that allows homeowners to use native plantings and shrubs.
The Legislature weighed in last year with a new law saying cities cannot ban pollinator gardens or native plantings in front yards, opening a path for those who want to create a bee-friendly spot. The conflict got widespread attention after the city of Falcon Heights sued a man who planted vegetables in his front yard…
When visitors ask her for advice, Boyle sends them to Metro Blooms, a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps communities create healthier landscapes. There’s some cost to a project like Boyle’s, but the larger barrier was the social stigma…
Hong has pitched an idea to developers to allow homeowners to choose their landscaping, much the same way they might choose the home’s paint color or countertops, and to give them the option of planting native grasses and pollinator gardens. If someone just bought a new house that came with sod and in-ground irrigation, “it’s asking a lot of the homeowner to rip that all out and do something different,” Hong said…
The counterargument is that most builders choose sod for new houses because of state and federal rules about stormwater and erosion control, said Nick Erickson, the senior director of housing policy for Housing First Minnesota, the state trade association for builders.
From the story, it sounds like at least these sets of actors have gotten involved: a municipal government, homeowner’s associations, the state legislature, non-profits, and some residents. On the other hand, developers and builders may privilege grass lawns because of state and federal guidelines. Additionally, the story hints at more informal interactions as residents talk offline and online about lawns and draw upon long-established patterns about lawns and yards.
All of this suggests to me that moving away from lawns is not an easy task. Americans, particularly in the suburbs, tend to like lawns and what they represent. To present viable alternatives takes work. Many homes already exist. What might motivate people to take out a lawn and replace it with something else? What incentives are available? In this particular situation, a danger to wildlife is motivating some people to act. Elsewhere, it might be drought or limited water supplies.
If people want to envision a United States with substantially fewer grass lawns in thirty years, this article hints that multiple actors will need to work. Each could have a part to play in incentivizing other options. And as noted above, having new homes that do not start with a lawn is a potentially powerful change that could take some time to pursue.
One of the proposals would forbid Washington’s local government from banning right turns at red lights. Another would do away with the automated traffic-enforcement cameras that ticket D.C. drivers for speeding, blowing stop signs and other violations.
The provisions are not just a case of earnest traffic-engineering wonkery sneaking into Congressional oversight. They represent a culture-war cause just as real as D.C.’s needle-exchange efforts or mask mandates, two other targets of current GOP riders. At the core of it is the politically revealing question of cars versus other ways of getting around.
In blue cities across the country, local road policy in the past decade has been tweaked in the name of making things safer and more enticing for non-drivers — often by making things slower and more annoying for motorists…
In a polarized country, it was inevitable that this would become more than just a disagreement over traffic circulation and moving violations. After all, the 21st century push to promote alternative modes of transportation cites a Democratic-coded cause (climate change) to promote ways of getting around (by foot, bike, bus, or subway) that are a lot more convenient in dense blue cities.
On the right, for more than a decade, there’s been a refrain about the “war on cars” right alongside the war on Christmas. “There is a loud constituency that does not want you to drive your car,” said Jay Beeber, executive director for policy at the National Motorists Association, which has championed the measures dictating Washington policy. “A lot of this is virtue signaling.”
Four thoughts:
Is it “inevitable” that this would become a culture war issue? I am sure there is an interesting history in here. Does this go back to seat belt laws? Speed limits on highways set in the 1970s?
It is relatively easy to break this down into cities versus other areas. What about groups or political discussions in between such as suburbs promoting more walkability and bicycling, small towns and rural areas trying to lessen dependence on cars, and regions emphasizing different transportation policies? Are there Republicans for different road policies and Democrats for more driving?
The interplay between federal and local policies is worth paying attention to. Americans tend to like local government oversight of local issues. Do Americans tend to think the federal government does too much regarding traffic policies or not enough?
Where does this issue rank in the range of culture war issues? Is this more like a proxy war or the big issue? Americans like driving so this could get at core concerns about American ways of life.
