No, the three towns are not Rockford, Loves Park, and Machesney Park. I'm guessing we would have heard about that by now.

However, if Illinois keeps hemorrhaging population at our current rate (we've been leading the Midwest in "outbound migration" for a number of years) the Rockford-Loves Park-Machesney Park merger might be a headline someday.

For today, we're talking about 3 towns in the southwestern sector of Illinois, near St. Louis.

Alorton, Cahokia, and Centreville, Illinois would become the city of Cahokia Heights under the proposed merger, which officials in that area say would allow them to potentially receive greater federal funding to help schools, infrastructure, public safety and more.

It seems as though this is not a new proposal. Two of the towns have already been trying to get this done, but apparently Cahokia didn't get the memo about two being company and three being a crowd.

Alorton and Centreville residents voted in the March primary to consolidate their two cities into what would have been called Alcentra, but Cahokia was added to the mix in a new referendum that will be up for a vote in the November 3rd election.

Officials say they're proposing this merger not because the three towns just can't get enough of one another, but rather because of the loss of population. In the last ten years, Cahokia has lost nearly ten percent of its citizens, while Alorton is down by almost half its population, and Centreville is not faring much better.

We'll see if this sort of civic-merger trend develops elsewhere in Illinois.

How does MacLovParkRock Heights sound? Yeah...needs work.

 

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