Illinois – James Krohe Jr

As I write this the weather is, as my grandmother used to say, sultry. Central Illinois is not on the Gulf coast, but Gulf air is in central Illinois much of the year. The damp heat typical of summer hereabouts is another of the South’s curses on Illinois. But while we got that region’s politics […]

The mayor and others have complained about the state fair’s plans to change the route of its annual Twilight Parade. In my view, they didn’t change it enough: a better route would have the parade conclude at its traditional destination at the north end of the Grandstand after beginning at the south end of  the […]

Every parent knows how hard it is to have a serious conversation when there’s a two-year-old throwing a tantrum in the next room. Thank goodness enough grownups in the General Assembly ignored the governor’s whining on the second floor to solve (sort of) the state of Illinois’ immediate spending crisis. Now the legislature can focus […]

A new set of guidelines issued by Springfield’s Bishop Thomas Paprocki bans people in same-sex marriages from receiving funeral rites in local Roman Catholic churches, receiving communion or serving in parish ministries. Paprocki has even decreed that such parents may not sponsor their own children for baptism. These strictures owe to the bishop’s conviction, echoing […]

We can all agree that Illinois’ public higher education system is in a state of crisis – or rather crises. Bruce Rauner, living in his own private Illinois, believes that tax-supported colleges and universities cost too much, thanks to bloated bureaucracies, high pension payouts, union work rules and redundant course offerings. Then there is the […]

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 […]

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 […]

“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 […]

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, […]

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, […]

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 […]