Consolidation...How to? Part Two

Yesterday I wrote about merging the Round Lakes today I will talk about some of the practical methods of actually doing it. About a year ago I had one of our law firms draw up a memo outlining how we could go about doing it. I won't go into the level of detail the memo went into, but its quite doable. Each municipality would have to place it on the ballot in the form of a referendum. Then any community that passed the ballot measure would then be clear to merge with any other community that also voted in the positive. As long as those two communities share a border. For example we could not merge with Round Lake Heights if Round Lake Beach did not vote positively, because we do not touch the Heights.

The manner of government would be different as well. There would be a City Council divided into Wards (Trustees would be Alderman). More then likely there would be 15 wards. There would be a Mayor and a Clerk (the Clerk would not have to be elected but could be) as well. The process would also be partisan with party affiliations. For the most accurate model see Waukegan.

The other thing is that to handle the old communities debt's there is a provision that each community would become a borough with some government functions mostly managing the debt and bonds until they are exhausted. So Round Lake would not be responsible for Round Lake Beach debt and vice versa. Over time these would slowly vanish.