FOLLOWING PROCEDURE
I work in state procurement and this is just how it is, unfortunately (ABC loses State Fair contract,” May 7). It’s whatever is most advantageous to the state. It’s a sealed quote; everyone has the same opportunity as everyone else. There isn’t a saddest story exemption. In two years, the American Business Club will have another opportunity and now they have more market research and can analyze what they can truly bid while still covering overhead.
Trust me, everyone wouldn’t feel the same way if this was for police vehicles. People would be outraged that the state didn’t award the contract to the lowest bidder and wasted taxpayer money.
Chaney Ann Lovellette
Via Facebook.com/illinoistimes
SHOW SUPPORT
As a whole, the American Business Club was extremely disappointed to learn of this. As the article stated, this was a major fundraiser that we used to help support local charities throughout central Illinois. However, we will still do as much as we can to help local charities to the best of our abilities. Please support any ABC fundraisers that you see or hear about, as well as any other charitable fundraisers throughout central Illinois.
Brett Burgess
Via Facebook.com/illinoistimes
NEED RESIDENTS
I agree the downtown core needs a larger base of residents to balance out tourists and office workers (“Invest in residents first,” April 23). There’s not much open land left for building capacity at a meaningful density. My preference is to convert the Wyndham to all apartments and condos of mixed sizes and prices, to be multi-generational, multi-class. Residents in a walkable neighborhood will spend money in the downtown core 365 days a year.
Parking-wise, I thought it was a big mistake to make the underground parking monthly and deny it to Old State Capitol visitors and events. That’s going to hurt businesses on the square and for blocks around and cripple the events. The city should own all the downtown parking and treat it like sales-promoting infrastructure instead of as a disincentivizing, parasitic revenue source. That’s 1980s’ thinking.
Mark Suszko
Springfield
ASK PEOPLE
Perhaps Springfield is beyond repair as a cohesive community. However, it is vital that we stop the dysfunction of urban sprawl and reestablish a city center that will attract residents as well as tourists.
I have lost track of how many consultants have been hired to propose plans which have ended up on a shelf gathering dust.
One problem is that professional planners work primarily with maps rather than with people. They plot demographics and resources and ignore the attitudes of people who will work and live in the areas the planner maps out.
For many years, people have told city officials and the hired planners that parking is a problem in the city core. They have been answered with maps that show lots of parking spaces scattered all over the area – but not clustered where convenient to the places the public wants to go. So, what is the city’s latest response to the problem? The parking garage under the Old State Capitol is to be turned into monthly rental spaces.
A friend and I went to the Old Capitol Art Fair last year. I suggested we park underground where we could pop up at the entrance to the exhibits. We both have physical disabilities. We walked up the ramp to the elevator only to find a sign that it was out of order. On the surface again, we found no handicap parking was designated in the area.
There are elaborate plans for developing a park-like corridor when the tracks are taken up on Third Street. Who is going to use it? Have state workers and others in the area been involved in the planning process? The plan I saw included an area to which the Old Capitol Farmers Market can be moved – no thought about parking. One reason that the Adams Street location has worked so well is the Sangamo Club parking lot.
I would suggest hiring a community organizer, preferably a resident in the district. Then follow the extraordinarily successful program developed by the Main Street Project, an offshoot of The National Trust for Historic Preservation. The project turned the planning process inside out by beginning with only a few interested individuals who selected a small-scale, doable project that would be noticeable. Subsequent, more ambitious projects would multiply and so would the number of participants. At the end of two years, the community would be able to put together a master plan for comprehensive development.
Sally Robinson
Springfield
This article appears in Summerguide 2026.
