Jobs, honestly.

What's happening

The comeback story has a soft spot, and this is it.

Winnebago County unemployment was 5.0% in May 2026; the city's was 5.7%. The metro is down about 1,900 nonfarm jobs year over year.

Those aren't catastrophe numbers. They aren't comeback numbers either. They're the numbers of a place that stabilized and now has to start growing again.

What sits underneath them is better than the headline suggests. This is an aerospace and precision manufacturing town — Collins Aerospace and Woodward are both here — and the air cargo operation at RFD has been one of the fastest-growing in the country. That's a real industrial base, and a specific one. A retention strategy that can't name the employers it's retaining isn't a strategy.

Meanwhile, the most encouraging thing happening in Rockford manufacturing didn't come from an incentive package. Four former Gunite workers bought a 619,000-square-foot plant to bring back about 150 jobs at the city's oldest manufacturer. Rockford Brake Manufacturing exists because people who knew the work refused to let the building go dark.

That's the model worth copying, and it's almost the opposite of how economic development is usually run. Nobody recruited them. What they needed was a city that could answer a question quickly.

Bob has signed the front of a paycheck.

And there is a version of this you can see from the sidewalk. An empty storefront isn't only empty space. It tells the next customer, and the next person thinking about opening something, what kind of city this is. The windows on First Street and the grass on the south side of Riverside are the same problem the permit clock is: it is too slow and too confusing to start something here, so fewer people start something here.

What I'd do

Keep the employers we have. Be fast for the ones deciding.

If City Hall gives a business a deadline, City Hall should meet it. If it doesn't, the fee comes back.

The entrepreneur shouldn't have to be an expert on City Hall. City Hall should be the expert on City Hall.

Retention before recruitment. Keep the employers we have, help them grow here, then recruit the next one.

Before Rockford spends money chasing the next company, it should ask why the employers already here expand somewhere else.

And if taxpayers help finance a deal, taxpayers should be able to see what they bought. Every incentive gets a dollar amount, a jobs target, a deadline, and a public report saying whether the promise was kept. How that applies to the data center.

1. A permit-time guarantee with a refund attached. The city publishes its own turnaround target. If it misses, the applicant gets the fee back. A deadline with no consequence is a suggestion, and every business owner in this city knows it.
2. One person responsible for walking each new business through it. Not a list of departments to figure out alone. The applicant opening a first business has never done this before; the city employee has done it hundreds of times. Right now the process quietly assumes the opposite.
3. Fill the windows. City Hall should be actively helping property owners and would-be operators get viable businesses into vacant commercial space — starting with the two items above, because a storefront that takes months to permit is a storefront that stays papered over.
4. Retention visits as the primary job of economic development. Starting with the twenty largest employers inside 90 days, then the top two hundred on a rolling schedule, asked one question: what would make you expand here instead of somewhere else. Most job loss isn't a headline closure. It's an expansion that quietly happened in Beloit.
5. A manufacturing succession desk. Rockford has a generation of owner-operators approaching retirement with no succession plan, and each one is a plant that either transfers or closes. Connect them to buyers, ESOP advisors, and financing before the decision is made — not after the auction is scheduled.
6. Name the reasons we lose. When an expansion goes across the state line, the city says publicly what the deciding factor was: permit timeline, utility cost, site readiness, workforce, or incentive. Published annually. You cannot fix a pattern you won't describe.
7. Site readiness before recruitment. A prepared site with utilities and zoning settled beats a marketing budget, every time.
8. Correct the record about this city, deliberately. Violent crime has fallen four years running, and Rockford still turns up on "worst places to live" lists. That gap between the reputation and the reality costs the city hires and costs it investment. What the city says about itself is one of the few things a mayor controls outright, and it needs no new appropriation.

Rockford Works — where the jobs are, what they pay, and how people get into them, with every figure sourced and dated.