A pleasant surprise today — a box full of copies of my new book, fresh from the printer. After some 40 years, the thrill of seeing one’s name in print has faded, but I confess that opening a box — I thought it was from Amazon — felt a bit like Christmas Eve when I […]
James Krohe Jr.
Posted inOpinion
More floppies in a shoebox
Having found itself unable to solve the state’s big problems, legislators the other day took up a small one – the agreement to spend $2.4 million over five years for space in a converted furniture store in which to store records of the Department of Human Services. I know nothing about that lease as a […]
Posted inNews
Lasting impressions
In this week’s column I say my two cents’ worth about the warehousing of State of Illinois documents, which is, pretty much, that storing such documents on acid-free paper in a controlled environment of a warehouse is probably the best solution, digitization being both more costly and less reliably durable than print. But there are storage […]
Posted inNews
“He will not settle”: Will Howarth on Thoreau
Wandering the web, I ran across something new by Will Howarth, in American Scholar. Howarth, as some of our readers will know, is a local-boy-made-good. A 1958 grad of SHS (of whose Hall of Fame he is a member), this son of Mayor Nelson Howarth has taught at Princeton since 1966. He is a former […]
Posted inOpinion
Missing links
If Mr. Rauner thinks that reforming Illinois’ workers’ comp is hard, wait until he tries to reform the state’s geology. It turns out that yet another reason Illinois Inc. is not economically competitive with neighbor states is that its landscape is too plain. We know that because golf course developer Mike Keiser said so to […]
Posted inOpinion
Golf, of course
Chicago Highlands’ 5th hole. Photo from Golf Advisor This week I wrote about golf, more specifically about golf courses in and around Illinois. Among them are Chicago Highlands in suburban Westchester and Chicago’s Harborside International. Also of interest is “Tee Time,” the two-page review of golf’s past in Springfield in Springfield Entertainment: A Pictorial History […]
Posted inOpinion
Frozen assets
“Everyone in Illinois,” says Bruce Rauner, “knows that property taxes are too high” compared to other states. Everyone in Illinois knows nothing of the sort. Mr. Rauner, for example, knows only that most Illinoisans believe that property taxes are too high compared to the value of services delivered. Or that they are too high compared […]
Posted inOpinion
A downtown action park?
As I discuss at length in “Park-ing problems,” the Rauner-backed North Mansion Y-Block Development Group NFP has proposed to fill the vacant Y block with a block-square park whose main features would be a 12-story clocktower/observation deck and a “wonderwall,” similar to the video tower in Chicago’s Millennium Park. These features have been talked about […]
Posted inOpinion
Park-ing problems
You know how it goes. A rich family buys an old place in a once-posh neighborhood and starts to fix it up. They’re worried that plans for multi-family apartments in the empty lot across the street will ruin property values, so they try to buy the lot themselves and expand their yard. That, pretty much, […]
Posted inOpinion
Oh, for a Thucydides of the prairie
In 2013, a too-small audience gathered on the U of I main campus to listen to the first of a series of lectures offered by the Prairie Research Institute, as our state’s scientific surveys are now collectively known. It began like this: “On a bright summer morning more than 50 years ago, my father said, […]
Posted inOpinion
Will Baumol
Will Baumol died on May 4. He is the economist who conceived of the concept of “cost disease.” An interesting man and an important thinker. He is obituarized here and his ideas are discussed here, here and here. Briefly put, Baumol argued that costs rise to provide government services because of productivity gains in other […]
Posted inOpinion
Ride sharing
Buildings are coming down along Ninth Street to make way for an off-street transfer facility for the Springfield Mass Transit District, with an eye toward construction someday of a full-scaled transit center served by bus, taxi and Amtrak. Alas, there is a chance that Springfield, after decades of dithering, will finally get a transit hub […]
