Saturday, December 28, 2013
By Greg Stanley
Rockford Register Star
ROCKFORD – As he looked back over the passing year, the headline to sum up Rockford’s 2013 should probably just be “survival,” Mayor Larry Morrissey said.
That’s a bit toned down from the State of the City address Morrissey gave to start the year, but it’s as good as any to describe a year for a city that has continued to suffer through declining property values, high unemployment and rising poverty.
It’s been a year that saw Morrissey elected to a third term, and brought significant turnover to the City Council.
The south and west sides of the city celebrated the reopening of the Morgan Street Bridge and the start of several major long-planned multi-million dollar road projects.
And it’s been a year where the city took a few blows from a national stage. The Wall Street Journal named Rockford the underwater mortgage capital of the country and Forbes listed Rockford third on its list of the most miserable cities in America.
While the Forbes ranking itself was no more revealing than the litany of “top 10” lists readers can find online on just about any topic, there’s no question that it stung here. That it was felt at neighborhood meetings and City Hall, and was on minds during sermons and ground-breakings, and at the numerous vigils for victims of violence during a bloody July. It struck a nerve, perhaps, because for a city that gets so little national attention the ranking reinforced the expectations or fears of many who have been waiting for Rockford to recover from the Great Recession and the more general decades-long slog of manufacturing decline.
Morrissey addressed that long slog in March, laying out his plan to combat it with what he called “pathways to prosperity” in his annual State of the City speech.
He recently sat down with the Register Star to revisit the address and talk about which goals have been met and which haven’t.
Question: In your address, you called several times for the city to create jobs for the citizens it actually has and not just for the ones it wants. How has your administration and the city measured up to that in 2013?
Answer: It’s been a tough year. We’ve continued to struggle as a nation through one of the longest periods of recession in the last hundred years. We continue to go through that struggle as a community with a high unemployment rate. But we’ve taken a number of steps forward – we moved forward on creating a partnership with New York-based Etsy. Basically we’re trying to challenge the conventional approach to poverty and job creation and mesh the worlds together, When you deal with folks out of the job market, a lot of them are going to be better off with self-employment. Those are the skills we’re trying to build.
Read more at the Rockford Register Star online: http://www.rrstar.com/article/20131228/NEWS/131229654/10329/NEWS#ixzz2pH7b103z1