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Why is Lake Zurich Considering Home Rule?
If approved by voters, home rule will provide the Village with additional flexibility and local control for managing the future of the community.
 Arguments Made in Favor of Home Rule
Proponents and reformers who support home rule argue that local government officials are better able to:
1. Assess local needs and develop solutions to local problems better than officials in Springfield.
2. Find the best solutions to local problems because they have more familiarity with such problems and with local residents' preferences for how to solve them.
3. Promote and protect the interests of local residents.
4. Experiment with alternative solutions to local problems.
5. Promote civic engagement by encouraging local citizens to study issues before decisions are made.
6. Allocate scarce local resources to the highest priority needs of the community.
7. Locally elected officials can be more easily held democratically accountable by local voters for the way in which they manage local affairs.
 Arguments Made Against Home Rule
Persons who favor retaining state legislative authority over the powers and functions of local government argue that, with home rule powers local officials will:
1. Act in arbitrary and capricious manner by favoring political friends when making policy and budgetary decisions.
2. Make it more difficult for state government to address regional problems.
3. Be deprived of the economics of scale made possible by centralized control and by technical resources available to state government.
4. Lead to a lack of uniformity with regard to services, structures, and actions taken by local governments, causing inequities between communities.
5. Impose unwarranted property tax increases and other taxes on residents.
6. Result in local governments having fewer resources to be able to solve their own problems due to such inequalities.
(The above arguments are from a 2011 study by Northern Illinois University's Center for Governmental Studies.)
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Early Voting in Lake Zurich