Zach Meiborg

“In a little over a decade, we’ve grown our business from 15 employees to 350, but Illinois is becoming an increasingly hostile state to raise a family and do business in. My wife and I have run our family trucking, warehousing and logistics company in Rockford for 14 years, but we’re exhausted by the state of affairs in Illinois at every level.”

“Whether it’s school boards, local municipalities or the bloated state bureaucracy, we no longer see Illinois as a state where we will choose to flourish. In the next few weeks, we’re relocating to Houston and considering eventually moving our headquarters out of Illinois as well.”

“During the pandemic, we were all in. Our industry being the keystone of the supply chain, we didn’t lay anybody off and kept on trucking. Our motto was, ‘If we can at least break even, we can keep our people employed and they’re going to feel one better about themselves.’ We believe our people have an intrinsic sense of wanting to feel productive and, thankfully, we were able to avoid layoffs.”

“But we’re still going to have to pay because the entire state is going to get dinged in increased taxes to make up what was taken out of the unemployment trust fund, every single business. So, we get punished for keeping people employed, which is the backwards way of what it should be.”

“Corruption and distrust of the state are corrosive to our further business investment in Illinois. With Gov. Pritzker constantly trampling our constitutional rights in particular around attempting to mandate masks, vaccines and redefining the existing laws on the books, the state’s constant corruption scandals, complete administrative mismanagement of unemployment and reckless workers’ comp laws, and an absurdly unbalanced budget are putting Illinois in our rearview mirror.”

“If we stick around in Illinois, what is it going to look like in 20 years? Is it worth keeping our business here? Do we really want to raise our kids in an environment where we allow our government to push the schools around the way he has?”

“We pay over $1 million a year in tolls for just 200 trucks. That makes it hard to compete with other shipping companies that are bringing goods into Illinois but have lower fuel taxes in the states they’re coming from.”

“The increased fuel tax means that every good that comes into Illinois costs everybody in Illinois more money because all the goods have to come in primarily by truck. Well, those trucking companies are eating that 40-cent fuel increase, passing it along to the shippers and the receivers that are increasing the cost of their goods that much. So consumers are feeling it twice: in the goods they buy and personal fuel use.”

“Our trucks consume roughly 3.2 million gallons per year. Thirty-seven percent of those gallons were bought in Illinois. So, we pay about $700,000 in state fuel taxes and $800,000 in federal fuel taxes annually, not including sales taxes. Plus we pay another $1.4 million in other state fuel taxes. All together, we paid $2.9 million dollars in state and federal gas taxes last year. We pay more than our fair share.”

“The property taxes are massive. Every little taxing body takes their dime out of your taxes and we get increasingly less service for that investment. When you start adding up all those taxes, that’s a large reason why we’re considering shifting some of our business to another state.”

“As business owners, we’re constantly up against headwinds at every level of bureaucracy and we’re exhausted from the fight to keep and extend more job opportunities here.”

“There’s no personal responsibility in our state anymore, because our state is taking that away from us. The state is trying to be everything to us, and we don’t want that. We want personal liberty. We want freedom of choice, to make good and bad decisions. I think everyone needs to have that.”

“Our state is on a trajectory of bankruptcy, and yes, a state can go bankrupt because bankruptcy is not a choice – it’s a reaction to when your creditors decide to stop lending you money.”

“Neither my family nor my employees will be the ones left without a chair when the music stops playing here in Illinois.”

Zach Meiborg
Owner, Meiborg Trucking
Rockford, Illinois