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DON’T GIVE UP
It was disappointing to see the Springfield City Council vote down Ward 3 Ald. Roy Williams’ resolution to put an advisory referendum on the March 17 primary ballot on whether the city should enact a landlord registry ordinance (“City Council denies public vote on landlord registry,” Nov. 19).
In my four terms on the City Council and Sangamon County Board I never voted no on an advisory referendum because a representative’s job is to carry out the will of the people, and there is no better way to find out what that is than an advisory referendum.
All is not lost, though. There’s a second way to get this advisory referendum on the ballot and that is through the initiative petition process; 3,508 ink signatures of city-registered voters would be needed to get this question on the ballot. If collected and filed with the city clerk by Dec. 15, it would go on the March primary ballot. If collected and filed by Aug. 3, it would go on the November general election ballot.
After the County Board voted no on my resolution for a binding referendum to enact recall for the county sheriff, I and others started collecting signatures to put this on the ballot in the November 2026 general election. We already have a large number of the 6,359 signatures needed. We should work together to get both measures on the ballot as soon as possible.
To collect ink signatures for the recall petition, download and print it at sangamonrecall.org, The landlord registry petition will be available soon from the Faith Coalition For The Common Good.
Sam Cahnman
County Board member, District 18
LESS GOVERNMENT
This measure represents an unnecessary expansion of government power into what has always been a private commercial relationship between two consenting adults – a landlord and a tenant. A lease agreement is already governed by state property and contract law. The city’s role is to enforce existing safety and building codes, not to pre-approve or license private commerce.
By conditioning every rental transaction on a government license and inspection, this ordinance inserts the city directly into private enterprise, creating new fees, administrative burdens and forced entry into private dwellings – even when no complaint or violation exists. That’s not public safety; that’s regulatory overreach.
It also risks distorting the housing market. Smaller landlords – many of them local, working-class residents – will either sell their properties or raise rents to cover new costs. The result will not be safer housing, but less affordable housing and more concentration of ownership in large corporate hands.
We all want safe homes. But we already have housing codes, fire codes and complaint processes to handle problem properties. Expanding bureaucracy over every rental unit is unnecessary, invasive and economically harmful.
I urge citizens and the Springfield City Council to continue to reject this ordinance and instead focus on targeted enforcement against negligent landlords – not a blanket policy that penalizes everyone for the actions of a few.
Kelvin D. Coburn
Chatham
LEARN FROM HISTORY
Larry Golden refers to what we are going through now, quoting Hannah Arendt, as “the banality of evil” (“America facing the ‘banality of evil,’” Oct 23.) I would say it is banal because, to quote Yogi Berra, it’s “deja vu all over again.”
Fear of something or someone has been tinder for so many atrocities committed for the sake of our safety that it has become a tired, predictable routine. From the Trail of Tears to Jim Crow; from the Japanese internments (which Golden cited) to the Red Scare of the 1920s and Red Scare 2.0 of the 1950s; from the war on drugs to the war on terror (the fear of fear itself); we have been through this psychodrama too many times, and the scars are all over our body politic like welts on the back of a slave. It serves no purpose but that of the Anglo-Saxon imperial madness that drives our nation even now.
When we decide we truly want to be a republic of equality under the law and equal justice for all, it will require us to stop falling for our baseless fears and begin to see each other as fully human, warts and all.
Jeffrey Hobbs
Springfield
This article appears in November 27-December 3, 2025.
Hobbs forgot to mention global warming and environmental hysteria as a means to regulate, inter alia, our showers, toilets, lightbulbs, refrigerators, washing machines, faucets, lawnmowers—and everything else people use around their homes, all for the “greater good”, as Hobbs and his totalitarian fellow travelers call it.