Positions, in full
Where I stand.
No dodging. No different answer for a different room. Here is my position in writing.
Every position, including the ones that never come up at a candidate forum. Written out once, so a reporter on deadline and a neighbor at a door get the same answer in the same words. This page is in my voice because my name is on it.
Read the one-line answer to every question below. If you want the reasoning, it is underneath each one. What this campaign is about is in the plan; this page is the complete record.
Somebody who doesn't work for this campaign has asked Bob a lot of this already: Rock River Current, September 14, 2026 — permitting, the cameras, home rule, apprenticeships, data centers and the budget, answered out loud to a reporter rather than written here. Where that interview and this page differ, this page is the later and fuller answer, and where a position has moved, the reasoning is written under the heading it belongs to. Everything else that has been written about Bob →
Property taxes
Keep the city levy flat.
The levy has been flat for thirteen years and it stays flat. The city is a minority of your total tax bill; the property-tax estimator shows who gets the rest, line by line.
The flat levy is the part a mayor controls. The part that moves your bill is the assessment, and that is not the mayor's to set. Homeowners — especially seniors and people on fixed incomes — are being priced out of houses they already own, because the assessed value keeps rising whether or not they ever intended to sell. A Rockford mayor cannot rewrite Illinois property-tax law. What I will do is push Springfield for an assessment system that gives long-term homeowners real predictability, and say so in public rather than let the city take the blame for a number it doesn't set. Which government controls what.
The national rankings are real, and they are a rate story, not a bill story. Rockford's effective rate is among the highest in the country largely because house values here are low, and the average bill lands close to the national average. I won't pretend the rankings don't exist. I also won't pretend a flat city levy solves the whole problem — a high rate on a low-value house falls hardest on the households with the least equity. The full explanation, with both numbers labeled.
Water rates
Publish the full rate path before families are surprised by it.
Rates will have to fund lead service line replacement. There is no version of the current federal mandate where they don't. The commitment is a published year-by-year schedule through 2037, so nobody learns the path one increase at a time.
Police staffing and the pension payment
No headcount promise that ignores the pension payment.
The state-mandated public safety pension payment is about $40.5 million a year, and growing. Any promise of a large increase in sworn headcount that doesn't address that number is not describing this budget. Mine will fit the budget the city has.
What I'd do: protect the strategies producing a four-year decline in violent crime, and fund the domestic violence response against the share of the workload it represents.
And I want officers visible and connected to the blocks they serve. Residents and business owners should know who is working their neighborhood, and people should see a presence where crime, and the fear of it, is keeping them away. Engagement and visibility are not opposites.
Automated license plate readers
Turn them off. Don’t renew the contract.
The cameras read every plate that passes them. Not the plates of people under suspicion — everyone’s. What gets built is a record of where ordinary people drove and when, almost all of it about drivers who have done nothing at all.
I spent a long time on the other version of this answer: keep the cameras, and write hard rules around the data. No sharing with federal civil immigration enforcement. No standing access for out-of-state agencies. A short retention cap. A published audit of every search. I still think those are the right rules. I no longer think a mayor can guarantee them. The data leaves the building the moment it is collected, it sits on a vendor’s system under a contract the city renews rather than writes, and every promise about who may search it later is worth exactly as much as the next administration and the next software update decide it is worth.
Auto theft here is up 22%, and I am not going to pretend the cameras have played no part in clearing some of those cases. The question is what the city pays for that help. A permanent, searchable record of everybody’s movements, held by a company, reachable by agencies Rockford does not control, is too high a price. I would rather say so before the contract comes up than after.
Two things have come to weigh more with me than the privacy argument on its own. The first is the network. The sharing is the product. A plate read on Alpine Road is searchable by agencies that answer to nobody in this city, under terms Rockford renews rather than writes. That is not a Rockford camera. It is a Rockford contribution to somebody else's database.
The second is what the cameras are quietly becoming: a substitute for police work rather than a tool for it. A city that can point at plate reads is a city that can be talked into fewer officers, and that saving shows up in salaries and pension costs while the cost shows up as a permanent record of where everybody drove. I would rather pay for officers who know the blocks they work.
Where I will be careful is public opinion. Plenty of Rockford residents tell me they want these gone, and I have not seen a poll of this city, so I will put this forward as my position rather than dress it up as everybody's. Other states have restricted or banned this kind of surveillance outright. Illinois has not, which is why it reaches the council as a renewal rather than a debate.
So:
- The contract does not get renewed, and the cameras come down when it ends.
- The cameras never become the staffing argument. No budget of mine trades sworn officers for plate reads.
- The data the city holds gets deleted rather than archived, with the deletion confirmed in writing.
- No replacement without a public vote. A different vendor selling the same idea goes to the council in open session, with the terms published before anyone signs.
- Nothing here comes out of the police budget. Whatever the subscription costs stays in public safety.
A signed contract has a term and the city honors it; what a mayor controls is whether it is renewed and how the wind-down is handled. The exact sequence gets worked out with the department and legal counsel, in public.
Immigration and local police
Immigration enforcement is federal. Rockford police investigate crime in Rockford.
Immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility. The Rockford Police Department's job is investigating crime in Rockford, and it does that job better when victims and witnesses will talk to it.
I would keep the department out of civil immigration enforcement, consistent with Illinois law, which already limits local participation. That is a position about policing effectiveness. It is not a position about federal immigration policy, which a mayor does not set.
Homelessness
Publish the count. Say the word out loud.
More people are living outside in this city than were a few years ago, and not only downtown. There are camps in parts of Rockford most residents never drive past. The habit at City Hall has been to not say so, and a thing does not stop being true because nobody at a podium says the word.
But Rockford is not a city without a homelessness system. It is a city that stopped talking about the one it built. The Continuum of Care for Rockford, Winnebago and Boone Counties joined Built for Zero in 2015. In December of that year this community reached functional zero for veteran homelessness, and in January 2017 it did the same for chronic homelessness — the first community in the United States to do both. A by-name list, a single point of entry, a command center with outreach workers, hospitals, police and code enforcement in the same room. Other cities came here to copy it.
So the honest question is not why Rockford has no plan. It is whether the plan still holds, and where the current number is. Nobody I meet at a door can tell me how many people are sleeping outside in this city tonight, and neither can I, and that is the part a mayor can fix.
- Publish the count on a schedule. The January point-in-time count and the by-name list totals already exist. Put them on the city's website, quarterly, sheltered and unsheltered separately, the same way monthly financial reporting goes back up.
- A public forum with the agencies at the table — the shelter operators, the outreach workers, the hospitals, the police, code enforcement — and the residents who live next to a camp in the room, not written to afterwards.
- Name the person at City Hall who owns it. A resident with a camp behind their fence line should have one number to call and one name to hold to it.
- A published protocol for camps. Who goes out, what notice is given, what is offered, what happens to somebody's property. Right now the answer varies by who shows up, which is unfair to the people living there and to the officers sent to deal with it.
- Back the existing system rather than build a second one. The Continuum of Care holds the data and the federal money. The city's job is to support it, publish what it shows, and stop treating it as somebody else's program.
On the claim that other places send people here: I hear it constantly, and I am not going to repeat it from the mayor's office as though it were established. I have not seen a number for it. Coordinated entry data can answer where people entered the system from, so establish it or retire it — and if it turns out to be true, the conversation is with those counties and their funders, in public, with the figures on the table.
One distinction I will hold to. Panhandling, homelessness and public disorder get talked about as one problem. They are three, with three different fixes, and running them together is how a city ends up policing poverty and solving none of it. My answers to the other two are the next two headings, and they are deliberately separate.
The money that houses people is mostly federal and state, moving through the Continuum of Care rather than the city budget. What a mayor controls is convening, publishing, code enforcement, the police response and whether the city says anything at all. Which is which.
Soliciting in the roadways
End the permit — for every group, not just the unpopular ones.
People are surprised to learn the city issues a permit for standing in the road. It sits in Chapter 24-52 of the city code and comes out of Public Works: the organization has to be registered with the Illinois Attorney General as a charity, the solicitation is allowed only on two-way streets with a dividing median, between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m., and somebody has to sign a form indemnifying the city if a volunteer gets hit.
You cannot run a permit that only the causes we like can get. That is the part I want to be plain about. Once the city opens a traffic lane to one group asking for money, it cannot sort the rest by who is asking or what they are asking for — that is what the courts have been telling Illinois cities for a decade. So the choice is honest and it is binary: everybody in the roadway, or nobody.
I pick nobody. Not because a fire department boot drive is a menace. Because a lane of moving traffic is not a place for a person to stand, the liability sits with the taxpayer, and the city cannot keep one group out of it while waving another in.
This costs somebody something, and I would rather say that now than pretend it is free. Groups that raise real money at intersections will lose that, and they are mostly groups doing good work. So the same decision comes with an alternative:
- Stop issuing the permit, and take the repeal of Chapter 24-52 to the council so the rule reads the same for everyone.
- Enforcement rests on safety, not on what somebody is saying. Standing in a live lane, blocking traffic, stepping into moving cars — the same rule for the car-wash sign, the boot drive and the man with a cardboard sign. A city that writes it any other way loses in court and pays the legal bill.
- The sidewalk stays. Asking a passer-by for money on a public sidewalk is protected speech. I am not going to promise a crackdown that a judge would throw out and a Rockford taxpayer would fund.
- A real substitute for the charities. City lots, the event footprint, a staffed table off the roadway, permitted quickly and cheaply. If the city is taking away the intersection, it owes them somewhere to stand.
Rockford is not a home rule city, so our room to write ordinances here is only what the state gives us. Ending a permit the city itself issues is squarely inside that room. Writing some new anti-panhandling ordinance is not, and it would not survive contact with a court anyway.
There is one more thing I will report only as what I have seen, because that is all it is. Early in the morning, in a west-side parking lot, vehicles and people sorting out who takes which corner for the day. I have watched it. What I cannot tell you from a parking lot is who organises it or where the money goes, and a mayor should not allege that without it. If it is organised, it is a police investigation with a case number, not a line in a stump speech — and ending the roadway permit is the right call either way.
The ordinance is the council's to repeal, not a mayor's. What a mayor controls is whether Public Works keeps issuing the permits and what the proposal in front of the council says.
Public disorder, drugs and mental health
A health system failure the police are left holding.
Open drug use, public drunkenness, people in crisis in a doorway. Downtown first and now further out. Residents who avoid a block because of it are not imagining it, and businesses we spent a decade rebuilding down there feel it first.
Most of the people at the centre of this need treatment, and the beds are not there. Illinois closed much of its inpatient psychiatric capacity, what is left is full, and an officer standing with somebody in crisis at two in the morning has three options: an emergency room, a cell, or leave them where they are. None of those is a plan. That is not a policing failure. It is what a policing department gets handed when the health system runs out.
- Co-responder capacity on the shifts the calls actually come in — clinicians paired with officers, nights and weekends, not nine to five. The same capacity the domestic violence response is built on, pointed at a second category that is filling the same officers' shifts.
- Somewhere to take a person at 2 a.m. A crisis stabilisation or receiving option, with the hospitals and the county. The city cannot run a psychiatric facility and I will not pretend otherwise, but a mayor can put those parties in one room, back the application, and keep asking in public until it exists.
- Publish what the calls are. Mental-health-related calls for service, monthly, by ward, and what happened at the end of them. You cannot argue for the beds without the number.
- Visible officers where disorder is keeping people away — said plainly, and paired with somewhere other than a cell to take people. One without the other is just moving the problem to the next block.
I will also say where I differ with the state, and what it has to do with this office. My view is that the pretrial law Springfield passed lets some people cycle through the same conduct within hours, and that serves neither the person nor the street they are on. That is a state statute. A Rockford mayor does not set bail, charging or sentencing, and a candidate who tells you he will fix it from City Hall is selling you something. What the office actually controls. What a mayor can do is fund the co-responder, push for the beds, and say out loud in Springfield what the effect on this city has been.
I will argue the state law where it can be changed rather than promise to repeal it from a desk that cannot.
Downtown
The downtown investment worked. Do the same thing on the next block.
The downtown investment worked. I am not running against it and would not reverse it. The argument is about where the next decade of that same effort goes — which is the point of the plan for your block.
Economic development incentives
Retention before recruitment.
Retention before recruitment. Incentives should be measurable, time-limited, and reported publicly against what they were supposed to produce. When an expansion goes across the state line, the city should say publicly why.
Large projects, the data center, and TIF
No blank check. Show Rockford the numbers before the vote.
A 1,400-megawatt data center has been proposed on roughly 1,300 acres at the southern edge of the city, and the South Rockford TIF is live.
I will not give you a yes or a no before the numbers are on the table. There are four questions a Rockford household should get answered first, and they are the same four I would want answered:
- What does it do to my water bill?
- What does it do to our power supply?
- How many permanent Rockford jobs does it actually create?
- How much are taxpayers giving up to get it?
A project that size is a water and power question before it is a jobs question — and the water question lands directly on the rate schedule this campaign has promised to publish through 2037.
So here is what those four questions look like as documents. All of the following get published before a council vote, not after.
- The projected water draw, and what it does to the residential rate path.
- The power demand, and who pays for any capacity built to serve it.
- The total incentive value, the jobs figure it's priced against, and the jobs per acre.
- For the TIF: what is captured, for how long, and what it displaces from the ward capital numbers.
Same standard as every other incentive above. A project this large should be able to survive public scrutiny before the vote.
Housing
Get supply moving before the demand arrives.
Rockford's housing problem is not the one Chicago has. Here the stock is old, a lot of it is tired, and the vacant ground is already sitting there — the city's own infill guide names 50 sites and more than 1,000 acres. What I want is for that inventory to start turning back into houses before the train arrives with demand attached to it. A city that builds after the demand lands is a city that prices out the people who waited through the bad years.
Four things, and all four are already somewhere in the plan:
- Report vacant lots returned to use every year, in the same document as the ward capital numbers, so acres and dollars can be read on one page.
- Abatement paired with what comes next. A demolished house with nothing planned for the lot is a tidier vacancy, not a fixed block.
- Rental licensing and inspection with real enforcement, aimed at the small number of owners who generate most of the complaints. That needs targeted authority from Springfield — which is what the home rule answer below is really about.
- Repair help before demolition notices for older owners in older housing stock. Code enforcement should be able to tell the difference between a derelict property and an eighty-year-old who can't get up a ladder.
The mayor does not control interest rates, construction costs, or what a developer decides to build. The lever the office holds is land, permits and speed.
Home rule
Worth serious consideration. Never as a blank check.
Rockford is one of the largest cities in Illinois without home rule. Since 1983 we have defaulted to Springfield on taxes and on a good deal of day-to-day operation. That is a real cost, and it is worth saying out loud: a city that cannot make its own decisions is a city whose future is partly written somewhere else.
I think home rule deserves serious consideration. I don't think it should arrive as a blank check.
Any proposal put to Rockford voters should say plainly what new authority City Hall would gain, what safeguards come with it, and what I would — and would not — use that authority to do. On the taxing question specifically: I am not asking for unlimited taxing power, and I would not use home rule to raise the city levy I have committed to keeping flat.
In the meantime, there is authority Rockford needs whether or not home rule ever passes, and I would go to Springfield for it directly: rental licensing with real enforcement, and nuisance abatement on vacant and derelict property. Named powers for named problems.
Transparency
Publish it monthly, by ward, on a schedule.
Monthly financial reporting. Annual ward capital numbers. Published permit turnaround times.
All three are decisions to publish data the city already holds. None requires a new program or a major appropriation — each costs staff time, and that is the whole price.
Seniors and the senior center
One location can't serve an entire city.
Rockford went more than a decade without a senior center after the Golden Agers burned in 2015, and when the city finally acted in February 2026 it voted 12–1 to fund a building four times larger than the project needed. The agency walked away the next day. A small nonprofit that had to make the rent work is the reason there's a center coming at all.
I would honor the city's commitment to the Living Well Center, build senior programming at the Booker Washington Center on the west side so this isn't a one-storefront answer, and publish what the city spends on older residents across every department.
Beloit runs its senior center as a city department; Rockford runs a grant. Why that difference explains eleven years.
The schools
Don't promise authority the mayor doesn't have.
The mayor has no authority over RPS 205. Saying otherwise during a campaign is how you set up a broken promise.
What the office can do: share facilities, keep routes to school safe, be a genuine partner to the district, and support Rockford Promise — the real lever the city holds.
Skilled trades, apprenticeships and the arts
A Rockford kid shouldn't need a four-year degree to build a good career here.
The mayor doesn't run Rockford Public Schools, and I won't pretend otherwise. But City Hall has a stake in what happens after graduation, and this is the part of education a mayor can actually work on.
Rockford needs engineers and college graduates. It also needs welders, electricians, plumbers, pipefitters, HVAC technicians, machinists and the contractors and shop owners who so often come out of those trades. In a manufacturing city, that isn't a consolation prize. It's the labor base, and a good share of the small employers on this year's tax rolls started as somebody's apprentice.
What I'd do: get employers, Rock Valley College, NIU, the trade programs and organized labor around one table and build a stronger local apprenticeship and technical-training pipeline — including looking at whether Rockford Promise can support vocational and apprenticeship training alongside college. Somebody who finishes an apprenticeship is earning, paying taxes and often hiring here years earlier than they otherwise would, and they are far less likely to leave.
And the arts belong in the same conversation. Not as decoration. A student who never encounters creative or performing work never finds out whether that is where they are good. Trades and the arts are both what the standard academic track leaves out, and I have spent years running a room upstairs from my shop on exactly that premise. What a mayor can actually do about arts and culture, in full.
Arts and culture
Rockford is better off with them in it, and the mayor holds real levers.
I am not neutral on this and I am not going to pretend to be. I have run a gallery above my shop for years out of the shop’s own takings. A city with music, galleries, festivals and a lit street after six is a city people stay in, and staying is what Rockford needs people to do.
The mayor cannot set a school’s curriculum or program anybody else’s venue. What the office does hold is the permit, the street closure, the public art on a capital project, the empty city-owned ground floor and the calendar — and I would use all five. The full position, with the five things I would do and the four I will not promise.
Downtown parking
Publish what enforcement costs and what it collects, then decide.
I'll publish what Rockford spends enforcing downtown parking and what that enforcement brings in. If it costs the taxpayer more than it collects, or if it is turning customers away from the businesses we spent a decade rebuilding, the policy should change. I'm not promising free parking before anybody has seen the numbers. I'm promising the numbers.
Two other things worth a practical look. Downtown employees can't get the parking permits residents can, which is a strange way to treat the people staffing the businesses. And there are two parking structures west of the river on State Street and nothing comparable east of it — worth examining before the station starts bringing people in.
Something not on this page?
Ask, and it gets added. Contact the campaign. Reporters: one address for everything, blosser4mayor@gmail.com — and if you're on deadline, call 815-669-9604 rather than email.