This month’s Citizens Club of Springfield meeting centered on how to bring people downtown and what role the Springfield-Sangamon County Regional Planning Commission plays with developers and officials who seek to build commercial or residential real estate in Springfield.
Molly Berns, former executive director of the Springfield-Sangamon County Regional Planning Commission, said convincing people to move to downtown Springfield can happen by creating a larger workforce in that part of the capital city.
“The question is, what do we have to do to revitalize downtown? And to me, it’s about jobs,” she said. Berns explained larger employers “need to bring the offices back downtown. Let’s start there, then we’ll have young people to fill those jobs that we can entice to actually live
downtown.”
Berns said the regional planning commission, like other regional planners across the state, works as a “quasi-governmental” entity funded by a variety of grants whose major objective is to be “a fact-finding body” for the jurisdictions it covers. The commission essentially aggregates information for interested parties to strategize what to build and where to build it.
Actually getting something built falls upon private investment and politicians, she said. “The city needs to take the lead but there has to be a commitment – a strong commitment – of private development funds,” Berns said.
“The chief planner for the city of Springfield is the mayor, because it’s the mayor that puts forth an agenda for what he or she wants to accomplish in their term,” Berns said in response to a question about how the city can act on the commission’s comprehensive
planning. “So really, they are the chief planner and the regional planning commission is kind of like the staff to those efforts, as well as public works and the various other departments.”
Leah Wilson, executive director of the Kidzeum of Health and Science located downtown, asked if there are any strategies that worked somewhere else to convince people to move to a city center.
“I moved (here) about seven years ago from Cedar Rapids, and I also lived in Iowa City, so I have those two cities in my mind as I look at downtown,” she said, referencing a program Cedar Rapids just launched to pay qualified remote workers $5,000 plus incentives to move there.
That program, according to daily newspaper The Gazette, was two years in the making and required local governments to contribute more than $400,000 in funding. Cedar Rapids also has almost 25,000 more residents than Springfield, thanks to a population rebound last year.
The Jacksonville Regional Economic Development Corporation launched a similar program last year, offering $5,000 each to five young professionals who relocated to the community. Jacksonville had a population of 17,616 at the 2020 census, down from 19,446 in 2010. The second phase of its talent acquisition campaign launched in February, with an emphasis on finding candidates to fill open positions with local employers.
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Motivation to move
Berns said there is likely something to learn from Cedar Rapids, even considering geographical differences.
“Going forward, I think that you raised a good issue and that is getting some people to look at how they did that in Cedar Rapids,” she said. “We don’t have as much land in the downtown area as Cedar Rapids had, and that’s one of the difficulties.”
She said some hope may be generated behind closed doors as the central Illinois agriculture business continues to grow.
“A lot of times, things are going on that people don’t hear about until it’s announced and it can take two or three years to put some stuff together. Before I left, we were working on a number of things related to agricultural tech things that of course, I’m not at any liberty to talk about, because they weren’t signed, sealed and delivered yet,” Berns, who retired at the end of last year, said. “But there is a real direction for agribusiness in this area.”
This article appears in July 24-30, 2025.
