The plan
A plan for what City Hall can actually do.
Bob won't promise you something the mayor doesn't control.
Specific actions, real deadlines, and an explanation of how each one gets paid for. Every page below has the same three parts: what's happening, what Bob would do, and where the money comes from. Everyone running will have the first two.
Your bill. Your block. Your job.
Three things, then the detail
Make Rockford more affordable.
Know what's coming before the bill arrives. A flat city levy, a published water rate path, and a financing plan for the lead service lines that doesn't arrive as a surprise.
Make City Hall work.
Set deadlines, publish performance, answer residents. A permit-time guarantee with a refund attached, published turnaround times, and monthly financial reporting restored.
Invest in every neighborhood.
Every ward gets a capital number. Every year. Published, with a reason when the number is small — and water and street work sequenced on one calendar instead of two.
Those three principles run through Bob's plans for jobs, public safety and the train, too. The six pages below are the detail, and each one ends the same way: where the money comes from.
How it gets paid for
Bob's plan doesn't depend on pretending Rockford has money it doesn't. Every proposal identifies how it would be paid for — from existing resources, capital funds, grants or rate revenue rather than new recurring general-fund spending.
That matters more here than it would in most cities. The city's state-mandated public safety pension payment alone is about $40.5 million a year, and it is growing. A platform that quietly assumes room in the operating budget is a platform that hasn't read the budget.
The six parts of the plan
They are in reading order. The first one is the frame for the other five.
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What a mayor can do
No promises the office can't keep.
A plain table of what the office controls, what it influences, and what it doesn't touch. The mayor does not run the schools. Start here and the other five pages make more sense.
Read it → -
Your bill
Know what City Hall will cost you.
Thirteen years of a flat levy, and Bob won't break the streak. But your water rate rose 9% in 2025, and 14,085 confirmed lead service lines — plus 29,304 of unknown material — have to be out of the ground by 2037. Affordability is the whole bill. See where your property tax goes.
Read it → -
Your block
Every ward gets its fair look.
The capital program names streets. It does not tell you what your ward gets, or why. Every ward gets a capital number, published, every single year.
Read it → -
Jobs, honestly
Keep the employers already here.
The metro is down 1,900 nonfarm jobs year over year. Retention first, a manufacturing succession desk, and a permit-time guarantee with a refund attached.
Read it → -
Keep what works
Build on falling crime; attack what's getting worse.
Violent crime fell for a fourth straight year. Auto theft rose 22%, and more than half of violent incidents are domestic-violence related. Both are true. The plan has to hold both.
Read it → -
The train
Be ready before it arrives.
Passenger rail returns in late 2027 — the first since 1981. It lands inside the next term. Station-area planning cannot start the week it opens.
Read it →
A full index of positions, including the ones nobody asks about at a forum →
Ten of these commitments have a date on them. Here is the calendar →