The main argument
Your bill is the whole bill, not the tax line.
City Hall can tell you the tax levy stayed flat while your water bill, your fees and your insurance all went up.
I will keep the city levy flat, publish the total a Rockford household pays the city, and publish the water-rate path through 2037 — before those costs reach your mailbox.
Rockford families already live with a high property-tax rate, a rising water bill and a household budget with not much room left in it. Bob won't promise to cut costs he cannot deliver. He will tell you which government controls what.
The levy has held for thirteen years. Water, fees and insurance didn't. And 14,085 Rockford service lines are confirmed lead, with another 29,304 still unidentified — all of them due out of the ground by 2037. Here is who pays for that.
Bob's commitment
- I will keep the city levy flat.
- I will publish the full water-rate schedule through 2037.
- I will keep private-side lead replacement free to the homeowner.
- I will coordinate pipe replacement with street work, so no street is dug twice.
Want to see the math? Keep reading.
Rockford's property tax levy has been flat for thirteen consecutive years and the city's own rate has fallen from $3.31 to roughly $1.93 per $100 of assessed value. Bob will not break that streak.
Below, in Bob's words.
What's happening
The levy held. Your costs didn't.
A flat levy is real and worth defending. It is also not what people mean when they say things have gotten expensive.
In 2025 the water rate went up 9%. Permit and license fees went up. Insurance went up. The line on the tax bill held still while everything around it moved.
And the city is a minority of what's printed on your property tax bill. The school district and the county are the larger share. A candidate who lets you believe the mayor sets your whole tax bill is setting up a broken promise — and in a two-year term, it arrives fast. Here is exactly which pieces the mayor's office controls.
Put in your home's value and see how your own property tax bill divides, line by line.
The number that gets used against a flat levy
Here's the fact this campaign isn't going to wait to be hit with.
Rockford ranks near the top of the country on property tax rate. In ATTOM's annual analysis released in April 2026, covering 2025, the Rockford metro had the fifth-highest effective rate in the nation, at 1.86%, behind Binghamton, Champaign, Trenton and Peoria, against a national rate of 0.9%. The year before, Rockford ranked first in the country at nearly 2.1%, and Illinois held 27 of the top 50 counties.
Two different numbers are in play here, and they measure different things.
- The city's own rate, the $3.31 to $1.93 figure above, is a levy rate per $100 of equalized assessed value. It covers the city's share alone.
- ATTOM's 1.86% is an effective rate against market value, covering every taxing body on the bill: school district, county, city, park district, library, the rest.
Swapping one for the other is how tax arguments get made dishonestly, in both directions.
Both things are true at once: Rockford's property-tax rate is among the highest in the country, and the average dollar bill is close to the national average, because houses here are worth less. Neither fact makes the bill easier to pay.
The detail behind that: in the year the metro ranked first in the country, the average bill here was about $4,500, essentially the national average of $4,427. A homeowner in New Jersey or the Chicago suburbs writes a far larger check. They also have a great deal more house behind it.
That's the part a flat levy doesn't fix. A high rate on a low-value house means the households with the least equity carry the heaviest proportional load. Holding the levy flat keeps the number from getting worse. It does nothing about the ratio.
The only way to change that is to raise what a Rockford house is worth. That's what the plan for your block and the train are for.
Every lead line, out of the ground by 2037
Federal rules require every lead service line in Rockford to be out of the ground by November 1, 2037. The city's plan for doing it is due to the EPA in November 2027, about six months into the next mayor's term. Illinois has its own replacement mandate on top of that, running on its own schedule.
The city finished its inventory in 2024. It found 14,085 confirmed lead service lines and 452 galvanized lines that federal rules treat the same way. It also found 29,304 lines nobody can identify, and until a line is identified, it counts as lead. About 4,400 have been replaced since 2017, and 850 in 2025 — the city's fastest year so far, and still a fifth of the pace the deadline needs.
So the answer to "how many" is: at least 14,500, and as many as 43,800 if the unidentified lines come back lead. The city has said it needs to reach about 3,000 a year to make the deadline.
Which is worth doing the multiplication on. Three thousand a year for ten years is 30,000 lines. That clears the floor comfortably and it does not clear the ceiling. If the unknowns come back lead in any number, the pace the city is currently naming is not fast enough — and that is an argument for identifying them quickly, not for a bigger number in a campaign leaflet.
The number is alarming. The water isn't. There is essentially no lead in Rockford's water when it leaves the plant. The supply is deep groundwater. Lead enters, when it enters, through the service pipe between the main and the tap. This is a pipe problem, not a source problem.
Meeting the deadline means about 3,000 lines a year, against 850 last year. The city spent around $4 million getting those 850 out — roughly $4,700 a line.
Three thousand lines at that unit cost would be about $14 million a year. The real figure is higher, and it is worth being precise about why: the easy runs get used up first, the private side of the line has to be included, and construction costs escalate across a ten-year program. Estimates put the eventual annual cost at an order of magnitude above what the city spends today.
The campaign is not going to print a total it cannot defend. What it will commit to is that the city publishes the assumed cost per line next to the total, every time it publishes the total — because that single number is what makes the total checkable, and it is the number currently missing.
Rockford deserves to see how that gets paid for before the bill arrives. It will be one of the largest cost decisions facing the next mayor.
And that 29,304 isn't an accounting quirk. The city mailed roughly 45,000 surveys asking homeowners to identify their own service line material. About 2,000 came back. Most private-side lines are still listed as unknown. The city doesn't have a complete picture, and neither does anyone else — which is why nobody can quote this as one number yet.
What I'd do
Publish the number before anyone has to guess at it.
- A financing plan filed with the EPA in November 2027 with real dollars in it, down to the year.
- A published year-by-year residential water rate schedule through 2037, so a homeowner sees the whole path instead of learning it one increase at a time.
- Hold the no-cost private-side replacement the city already offers, and put it in writing. The Water Division's current position is that it replaces the private side at no cost to the customer. That's a policy, not an ordinance, and a policy can be quietly dropped in a tight budget year. The commitment is to keep it and codify it.
- A phased replacement schedule organized by street, so water, paving, and sewer work happen once instead of three times.
- Quarterly public reporting on lines replaced against the pace the deadline requires, using the same figure every time.
How it gets paid for
Spread the cost instead of hitting today's ratepayers all at once.
Paying for a ten-year capital program out of a single year's cash is what makes rates jump. The alternative is ordinary public finance: borrow against the asset, spread the cost across the years the asset serves, and use every subsidized dollar available before touching a ratepayer.
- Keep the state revolving fund capital coming, and say how much of it is forgiven. Rockford was the first city in Illinois to qualify for this program and has taken at least five rounds of IEPA principal forgiveness: money the city never pays back. That's existing practice and this campaign isn't claiming credit for inventing it. What's missing is the number. Nobody publishes what share of the program forgiveness covers, and that share is the difference between a manageable rate path and a painful one.
- Federal lead service line replacement funds for as long as the appropriation exists, front-loading the years it's largest.
- Revenue bonds serviced from water rates for the remainder, so what the ratepayer feels each year is debt service rather than the full construction cost.
- No new recurring draw on the general fund. With a $40.5 million pension payment, up about $5 million in a year against $9.6 million in 2013, there's nothing there to draw on.
Two of these are decisions Springfield makes, not Rockford. The pension mandate and the local government revenue share are state law. Naming that isn't blaming a legislator. It's describing which building the decision was made in.
A published rate schedule through 2037, within 120 days.
Year by year, in dollars, for a typical residential account. If the number changes, the schedule gets republished with the reason.