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Invest in child care, for today's economy and tomorrow's

3/20/2023

 
By: Emily Klonicki, Executive Director - Alignment Rockford & Caitlin Pusateri, President - Rockford Chamber of Commerce
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These tough COVID years have highlighted how the lack of child care availability and affordability impact hiring, retention, and productivity. Businesses can’t thrive without productive employees, and parents can’t maintain or succeed in their jobs without a robust early childhood system to care for their children while they are at work.
 
This relates directly to what we at the Rockford Chamber of Commerce continually hear from our members, that there is one specific issue keeping them up at night: workforce. Whether it be retaining their current talent or attracting new, skilled talent, workforce remains a top concern for the business community. The problem is both immediate – a need for workers NOW – as well as long-term – the need for workers to fill gaps left by retiring Baby Boomers or to grow the business. While the workforce issue is multi-faceted, one driving culprit is the lack of access to affordable, reliable child care, forcing professionals into stressful, missed days of work or, even worse, an undesired exit from the workforce entirely.
 
Viewed on a macro scale, the economic implications of the child care crisis are staggering. Infant-toddler child care challenges drain an estimated $4.9 billion from Illinois’ economy every year, according to a new report from ReadyNation. Nationally, the price tag of infant-toddler child care insufficiencies total $122 billion. These numbers are more than double what they were in 2018 and reflect only the limitations of care for children younger than age 3.
 
But child care is more than just a solution for today’s workforce. It is also important to invest in high-quality early childhood education to develop the workforce of tomorrow. A highly skilled workforce of the future begins to acquire needed skills in early childhood. Both technical (or academic) skills and soft (or executive-functioning) skills that employers seek - like persistence, cooperation, and interpersonal skills - have their roots in early childhood, when high-quality programming can best set children up for success in school, careers and life.
 
Zeroing-in on these issues, Alignment Rockford serves as the convener of the early childhood coalition, Ready to Learn in Rockford. In our work with families, service providers, and other organizations in the Rockford Area, we encounter ongoing need for high-quality child care options as well as other support for parents and primary caregivers of children under the age of 5. These supports may come in the form of child care assistance subsidies from the state or from employer benefits like increased paid leave for working parents, flexible scheduling, or remote work options. The investment in care and education of young children and in the well-being of their families has great community return, as children who enter kindergarten ready to learn are much more likely to succeed academically and have greater employment opportunities, higher earning power, and better lifelong outcomes. The early childhood crisis facing our community is hardly unique to Rockford; however, we as a community can choose to take action and change the course of our future by addressing these needs in a meaningful and coordinated way.
  
As the President of the Rockford Chamber of Commerce and the Executive Director of Alignment Rockford, we see the needs of the youngest members of our community, the need to support parents of young children, and the ways in which business leaders can be involved. This is why we are members of ReadyNation network of business executives and why we encourage Rockford employers to join us in supporting solutions to the child care crisis. The ongoing work at the local level is vital, but we must also call on policymakers at the state and federal levels to invest in early care and education. Governor Pritzker’s proposal to invest in the early childhood system gives us hope that the state is moving in the right direction.  Helping to strengthen our workforce and economy — for today and tomorrow, alike — is truly everyone’s job.

​This story was published in the RRStar on March 17, 2023. Find it here.

Chamber Board Urges Local Taxing Bodies to Hold Levy Flat

10/6/2022

 

At the September 27, 2022 Rockford Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors meeting, the board voted to adopt a resolution urging local taxing bodies to hold their levies flat, the crux of the resolution is as follows:

NOW THEREFOR BE IT RESOLVED that; the Rockford Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors hereby supports and recommends to the business community to strongly encourage its local taxing bodies in Winnebago County to work together to adopt priority of reducing or keeping their levy flat and thereby reduce the overall property tax rate.

As part of our mission to Lead Business Growth, the Chamber is responsible to its members to work to remove obstacles that could be a burden to a healthy business environment. Increased property taxes are a burden on our future talent pipeline, our current workforce, and businesses that are already suffering from inflation, wage hikes, and supply chain issues. Increased property taxes right now are just not good for business.

Here is the full resolution:

WHEREAS: The property tax is an important component of our overall structure of taxes that are critical to local governments. It can be a stable, consistent revenue source for local government services (including schools), and its high collection rate makes it a reliable pledge for debt and bond security, and;

WHEREAS: The property tax is also a highly visible tax, meaning that most Illinois property owners are typically aware of the exact amount of property tax they pay, because they are explicitly billed twice per year, and;

WHEREAS:  Retaining Illinois' highest-in-the-nation 9,000 units of local government drives up tax bills, contributing to property tax rates that are among the highest in the U.S. As recent as 2019 Illinois is ranked as having the second highest real estate tax rate in the country, and;

WHEREAS: Winnebago County has one of the highest median property taxes in the United States, and is ranked 151st of the 3142 counties in order of median property taxes; Winnebago  County ranks 80th in property taxes as a percentage of income and 29th as a percentage of property value, and;   

WHEREAS: A 2012 report by the Illinois Policy Institute study on property taxes since 1990 showed that residential property taxes in Illinois have grown 3.3 times faster than median household incomes, and that the residential property tax burden as a percentage of median household income had risen 76 percent, and if Illinois had frozen its residential property taxes in 2012, it would have taken 28 years for property tax levels to return to 1990 levels, and; WHEREAS: 2022 represents the year of the quadrennial reassessment may lead to higher property values, which can also influence property tax levels; and

WHEREAS: Business community surveys conducted by the Rockford Chamber of Commerce routinely find that taxes are consistently a primary concern among the business community; 

WHEREAS: The amount of dollars a taxing body seeks for their annual budget represents the annual tax levy, which then determines the necessary tax rate to generate that levy amount;

WHEREAS: An effort has been made by some local taxing bodies within Winnebago County to hold the line on their levy amount over the past few years, thereby having the effect of lowering property tax rates and saving taxpayers millions of dollars; and dies within Winnebago County

WHEREAS: to reduce or Winnebago A concerted, collaborative effort by all taxing bo keep their levy flat will lead to an overall reduction in the gross property tax rate County;

NOW THEREFOR BE IT RESOLVED that hereby supports an ; the Rockford Chamber of Commerce Board of in Directors d recommends to the business community to strongly encourage its local taxing bodies in Winnebago County to work together to adopt priority of reducing or keeping their levy flat and thereby reduce the overall property tax rate.

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