“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 […]
James Krohe Jr.
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 […]
Posted inOpinion
Lost in Illiniville
I expect that the main campus in Urbana and Champaign of the University of Illinois is the Downstate town that many Springfieldians know best after their own – in some parts the prettiest and in some ways (people walking!) the most interesting. It is indeed a town, with a daily population of nearly 54,000 students, […]
Posted inOpinion
Breaking news: Trumps misreads the law
Donald Trump’s bluster about penalizing “sanctuary cities” such as Chicago by withholding federal funds that have nowt to do with immigration is based on his assertion that such cities violate federal statute 8 U.S.C. § 1373(a). Except they don’t, as Nikolas Bowie, Berger-Howe Legal History Fellow at Harvard Law School, makes clear in a recent post on the excellent new […]
Posted inOpinion
Making Illinois sick again
The antics of Congressional Republicans trying to vandalize the Affordable Care Act are outside my brief here at Illinois Times, except to the extent that they threaten to do harm to Illinoisans. Happily, Illinois Issues‘ Kristy Kennedy has written the piece I haven’t had the time or space to write, and done it better. Among […]
Posted inNews
Hogs, continued
Kewanee is known to the wider world. It was officially dubbed the “Hog Capital of the World” in 1948, when government agriculture statistics showed that Henry County led the world in hog production. Kewanee is no longer the hog capital of the world, if it ever was. But the hog still figures prominently in the […]
Posted inOpinion
Pork bellies — and much else — explained
In “The hog and I” (April 20, 2017) I recalled a magazine article I wrote in 1982 about the hog industry. It was a fun piece, but the information in it is badly dated; the funniest bit is where I report that worries about the health effects of animal fats, and salt and preservatives used in […]
Posted inOpinion
White-collar flight
For 90 years, “Caterpillar” was just a different way of spelling P-e-o-r-i-a. But the company has decided to move its entire executive team of some 300 people out of the River City to Chicago’s northern suburbs. The mayor called the decision a kick in the gut, and well he might. Without these corporate Olympians, a […]
