City council votes 6-4 to make future hires live in Springfield 

Future city employees will have to live inside Springfield under an ordinance passed Tuesday by the city council.

The controversial issue created a split among some unions, with police, fire and lineman unions opposing the measure and 15 other unions already adopting residency requirements in their contracts. The new ordinance also has potential to affect the city’s minority recruitment efforts when it takes effect next year.

Springfield Mayor Jim Langfelder proposed the ordinance, making good on a campaign promise and negotiating with several unions to gain support before bringing the idea to the city council.

The main bargaining units which have not agreed to a residency requirement are the unions covering city police officers, firefighters and linemen at City Water, Light and Power.

Springfield previously had a full residency requirement from 1976 to 2000, when the prior ordinance was repealed. A version of the ordinance remained in effect prior to Tuesday’s vote, requiring certain members of the mayor’s administration to live in the city.

As of June 1, 595 (42 percent) of the city’s 1,414 employees lived outside the city boundaries, according to the mayor’s office. That doesn’t include temporary workers and four regular employees whose places of residence could not be verified. The city’s data shows that nearly 58 percent of Springfield firefighters and 38 percent of police officers live outside the city boundaries.

The ordinance passed Tuesday requires all employees hired after Jan. 1, 2017, to live within the city limits or move here within 12 months of being hired. Existing employees who already live outside the city would not be required to move. The council voted to amend the mayor’s original proposal by creating a process for employees to obtain a waiver in case of hardship. Such employees would have to prove the hardship each year and face a public vote by the city council.

Voting in favor of the amended ordinance were Ward 2 Ald. Herman Senor, Ward 3 Ald. Doris Turner, Ward 4 Ald. John Fulgenzi, Ward 5 Ald. Aaron Proctor, Ward 7 Ald. Joe McMenamin and Ward 9 Ald. Jim Donelan. Four aldermen voted against the ordinance: Ward 1 Ald. Chuck Redpath, Ward 6 Ald. Cory Jobe, Ward 8 Ald. Kris Theilen and Ward 10 Ald. Ralph Hanauer.

Several people spoke regarding the ordinance prior to the vote just before 9 p.m., including residents of Springfield who work for the city, employees who live outside the city, past employees who chose to remain in Springfield, a former alderman and two union representatives with opposing views. 

Ultimately, Langfelder’s insistence on not “watering down” his original plan prevailed, defeating two amendments that would have enlarged the allowable residency area – one to include all of Sangamon County and another to include a mile-and-a-half swath around the city boundaries.

A 2012 voter referendum showed Springfield residents favor a residency requirement 59 percent to 41 percent. More than 50,000 people weighed in on the question, and every ward except Ward 1 (Redpath) voted in support of residency. Ward 1 mostly covers the area south of Stevenson Drive and east of Sixth Street, including Lake Springfield and the University of Illinois Springfield.

However, Theilen and others cast doubt on the referendum results, claiming many residents didn’t know they were voting to exclude city employees from living in “holes in the donut” – the many small municipalities surrounded by or touching Springfield, such as Leland Grove, Jerome and Southern View.

Paul Moore is a former CWLP supervisor of 20 years and president of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 193, which represents 136 employees at CWLP. Moore says 120 of those workers are linemen who are paid with revenue from the utility’s energy sales, not with tax dollars, which he says undercuts the argument that employees paid through taxes should live in the city.

“When there’s an outage, these crews come in at all hours of the night to restore power,” Moore said. “Not one single person asks, “Hey, does that lineman live in Springfield?”

Ernesto Johnson serves as co-chairman of the civic engagement task force with the Faith Coalition for the Common Good. A Springfield resident of 40 years, Johnson says the city’s police and fire presence used to be more visible when those employees all lived in the city, providing better relationships between public servants and the public. Johnson says the residency requirement will strengthen neighborhoods, create more job opportunities for Springfield residents and improve the city’s economy.

“Nobody’s telling you where to work; it’s just a job requirement,” he said. “You can still have your fishing cabin in the country, but you need to spend the majority of your time living in the city.”

Mostly unspoken in the debate over the residency requirement is how it might affect the city’s minority recruitment efforts. Data from the city show the proportion of non-white city employees is increasing, but the workforce remains mostly white. An employment audit released in April says that during 2015, just 150 of the city’s 1,421 workers at the time were non-white. That’s 10.5 percent, compared with Springfield’s non-white population of 24 percent.

The police and fire departments, along with CWLP, are among those with the lowest percentages of non-white employees. Combined, those three departments account for 1,055 workers, with just 89 non-white workers.

The city hasn’t examined the racial makeup among employees who live elsewhere, but with only 150 non-white city employees total, it’s clear that the majority of the nearly 600 workers who live outside the city are white.

Likewise, data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that the areas surrounding Springfield have significantly fewer non-white residents than the city itself. Capital Township, which has the same boundaries as Springfield, is 24 percent non-white, but the remaining townships in Sangamon County have on average 3.5 percent non-white residents.

Limiting city jobs to only those living within the city reduces the number of eligible white applicants and increases the percentage of nonwhite people in the pool of available workers.

However, in an interview with Illinois Times prior to the vote, Hanauer in Ward 10 noted that the ordinance gives future employees up to 12 months to move, meaning the city could still hire people living outside the city.

“I just don’t agree with the logic that this helps the east side,” Hanauer said.

Contact Patrick Yeagle at [email protected].

For a rundown of the arguments for and against the ordinance, visit www.illinoistimes.com.