WGLT's Sound IdeasOn today's episode, the town of Normal scales back its longer-term investments in infrastructure and other projects, Eureka College notices more students struggling to read, a federal corruption trial offers a rare glimpse into the very private life of Illinois once-powerful Illinois House Speaker, and a McLean County native has reached an ambitious goal of running cross country to raise awareness about the dangers of social media.
The town of Normal scales back long-term projects including infrastructure investments. We're being cautious in terms of what our revenue forecasts are looking at like, so we want to make sure we have a balanced budget going forward. Coming up on WGLT's news magazine Sound Ideas.
Good afternoon. I'm Lauren Warnecke. On today's show, Eureka College wants to get back to basics for students struggling with one of the three R's. I have noticed that faculty are struggling to get students to read longer, longer texts now than they have in the past. A federal corruption trial offers a rare glimpse into the very private life of Illinois's once powerful House Speaker, and a McLean County native ran cross country to raise awareness about the dangers of social media.
All that coming up after a Bloomington Normal news update. This is Sound Ideas on 89.1, WGLT and WGLT.org, part of the NPR network.
From the campus of Illinois State University in Normal, this is WGLT's news magazine Sound Ideas. I'm Lauren Warnecke. The Normal Town council just approved its six-year community investment plan. The town hopes to spend close to $200 million on 426 projects over that period.
Next year alone, the tally is 54.5 million. That's a mild pullback. In this interview with WGLT's Charlie Schlenker, Mayor Chris Koos says that will happen in equipment purchases and other areas. A lot of the pullback's going to be in in some road projects and other areas.
And I wouldn't call it a large pullback. I would think incrementally we're we're very close, I think.
Um, to what we spent last year, but, um, we're being cautious in terms of what our revenue forecasts are looking at, looking like, so we wanna make sure we have a balanced budget going forward. It was a a 6 year plan, but, uh, it's important to note that we only vote on the coming year.
And the rest of it is more projections and so it's, it's a, it's a fluid plan in terms of what happens over the next 6 years. So next year is 54.5 million. What goes into that? It's balanced out between uh uh road work, capital projects that could include building maintenance, parks and recreation projects, police and fire projects it's, it's, it's spread out.
Uh, among all our capital needs, the town is going to spend 21 million bucks on vehicles over the six-year period. That seems like a lot.
Vehicles have gotten very expensive, uh, and it, it's been an ongoing thing, you know, sometimes if you look at a hook and ladder truck for the fire department can reach close to a million dollars, you know, uh, for pickup trucks in this environment were $260,000 a garbage truck was about $420,000 and we see that.
As as these vehicles become more sophisticated and that we, we see that that's gonna continue to increase. Later this month you'll have the annual budget meeting on the 21st. City manager Pam Reese has said it's gonna be as largely a status quo budget, no new workers. What is your sense of what the town will do and why? Well, I think we'll continue to do what we can do and and focus on, on what we'd call basic services.
I think it'd be safe to say what we did was we'll do is almost a repeat of what we did last year. Finance director Andrew Huhne said there will be a budget pull back in economic development money. Why there? Is that the right place to make up ground? It's, it's an area that we can be flexible with and and a lot of economic development.
Comes out of partnerships, uh, grant money, things like that, so.
That's a little bit more of a fluid fund. Kuhn also says a planned annual 2% water rate increase over the six year period may not be enough to meet the needs for water infrastructure. How do you think that should be addressed? New revenue or cuts or what? Um, probably, um, what we'll look at is we periodically do an independent evaluation of our water and sewer system.
To to get a good look at what we're doing we have for over the years worked very, very hard at maintaining our water infrastructure and communities around us that have not are now suffering some uh incredibly high rate increases and um in some situations where they have private, privately owned water services uh they're noticing.
Deterioration of the system, it's not being maintained as well as it should. We have worked very hard to to maintain our system to keep it a top notch, and that requires work every year in and out. Sewer fund reserves are also falling over the six year period. Is that a check on or a matter of concern? How do you frame that? I would call that a watchful category, you know, we're continuing to reign sewer sewers.
It's the same philosophy we have for water. We have to maintain our basic infrastructure. If we, if we start slacking on that.
Uh, we may save a little money in the short term, but the cost to the taxpayer in the long term is always higher. The town gets federal money in the town budget as part of the Community development block grant or CDBG program.
Are you worried about pullbacks under a new administration? I wouldn't say I'm worried, but in a new administration you have no idea what's coming down the pike, especially in this administration coming in. There's a lot of, a lot of ifs. There's a lot of promises for drastic action whether or not that can actually happen or not, uh, remains to be seen. Uh, we see a Congress that is starting to push back on some of the proposed, uh, ideas of the new administration coming in, so.
We're always looking in the realm of a changing administration what the priorities of the administration are gonna be and what are the things that that administration doesn't really care about, uh, and it's not really come out, isn't it rather more than a watchful, uh, case there though, but the, the last time the nation had a sustained conversation about uh deficit reduction was the Clinton administration, and that's been clearly articulated both by.
House and Senate Republican lawmakers and the president elect, I and I agree, and they're gonna look at that and those are things we're gonna have to pay attention to. uh, we're gonna have to work with our, uh, our local, uh, representatives and senators, uh, from the state of Illinois and, and, and advocate for our policy. We'll do that through the Illinois municipal League, we'll do it through the US Conference of Mayors.
It'll be a negotiation. It'll be a give and take. It always is. This is Sound Ideas. I'm Charlie Schlenker. We're talking with Chris Koos, the mayor of Normal.
You are also on the National Amtrak board for about a year now, so what insights do you have now that you didn't have before? I think uh the challenges of aging infrastructure, I knew it was there but I had no idea how how much need there is in the national systems um for infrastructure improvement.
Uh for rolling stock improvement, um we have train sets that are, that are running that were built in the 70s to Amtrak's credit, their maintenance people have an incredible ability to rework those pieces of equipment, but it's, you know, there's a diminishing return on that. So that's part of the issue. Also, it's kind of interesting, you have state routes.
And so you have um 20 to 30 different DOTs and departments of transportation at the state level that may have different ideas about what their state needs or doesn't need in terms of uh state state-owned passenger rail systems. So that that's kind of an interesting dynamic. How is Amtrak doing? Uh, Amtrak's doing well. Ridership is up. Uh, we're gonna see some significant increases in ridership when the newestcela trains, uh, get on the Northeast corridor.
We're seeing increases in the state routes that affect us Chicago to Saint Louis and the routes that uh go through Champaign to Carbondale and, and, and uh also the western routes that are taking Galesburg and McComb, you know, one thing I'd like to work on is there was always an idea that, uh, uh, the Chicago Saint Louis line would get 1 to 2 more trains per day, uh, that was killed under the Rauner years and I'd like to kind of revisit that and see if that's a possibility.
Are there data that would support that from last year's ridership numbers?
I think the argument is that we're regaining pre-COVID numbers in ridership and, and that's an important story and and based on those numbers pre-COVID, uh there was uh interest at the state level to to add those trains. uh I think it's a matter of reviving that concept and getting the conversation going again there was.
Record ridership on the Illinois service and we see that continuing to grow. The demand is there. That's Chris Koos, the mayor of Normal. He spoke with WGLT's Charlie Schlenker. Amtrak had a 15% increase in ridership last budget year for a total of nearly 33 million passengers. The 8% increase in revenue was also a record.
Amtrak had no National Transportation Safety Board level accidents. The service still had a net loss of about $1.8 billion. Coming up tomorrow on Sound Ideas, the Regional Office of Education has identified just nearly 600 students as homeless across the four counties it covers. Yet some funding streams to help have run dry, finding help for the housing insecure. That's on tomorrow's show.
It's Sound Ideas. I'm Lauren Warnecke. A few years ago, an administrator at Eureka College in Woodford County noticed a pattern with incoming students. Trained in writing education and working on the private liberal arts college's writing enriched curriculum, she noticed a growing need for additional student support in college-level writing, but it wasn't quite that straightforward. Students weren't writing well because they were also struggling to read at the college level.
WGLT's Lindsay Jones spoke with Eureka Provost and vice president of academic Affairs, Anne Fulop about a new position the college created to help get students up to speed. So writing is the way that students express critical thinking, right? And the higher level thinking skills. And so when we uncover
that the issue with the writing was the reading comprehension. We said we need to address this problem. Now, this goes beyond our students with, with reading disabilities, right? The dyslexia, the, they're usually accommodated, that's not the issue. The literacy rates are rising in America and, and have been, and we get students from all over the country. So this isn't an Illinois centric issue. This is students coming to us from many states.
That just have, uh, for whatever reason. However, their schools taught them to read, didn't teach them to read, how, what they were reading, weren't reading in high school. They're not reading at the level that we need them to read at to be able to effectively write. And so this position is meant to give them that extra comprehension.
That extra vocabulary, extra kind of reading strategies to move them from the level that they're at, which is not they they're literate, of course, right, but to get them ready for the college level of reading. Much was made a while back about a particular type of, maybe you would call it pedagogy or methodology that was used broadly in schools across the country to teach reading.
And it may or may not have been as effective as it was initially portrayed. Is what we're seeing at the higher education level as students come in, is it possibly related to that? It it could possibly be a factor. I do not know how every one of my students was taught English in their K through 12 or taught to read in their K through 12.
Um, but considering that that program was nationwide, and considering I'm seeing this from students from all different states, it could be a factor, right? And I'm sure the pandemic didn't help. As you know, online schooling was not equitable, right, uh, across the country. And this is that generation, right? This is that age group that's
Was affected that way. So, I'm sure there's a couple of different factors that could be affecting us. So I understand that you're provost now and your discipline was psychology, but did you see any of like the broader trends that people have talked about with regard to students really immersing themselves in a substantive text and their ability to do that? I haven't in the students uh that I've been teaching. Um, my faculty is telling me there's been a shift.
Right, that they have to spend, I think, more time. I, I used to teach students how to read primary texts because you're teaching scientific literacy at the same time that you're teaching that. That wasn't expected, right? Students don't know how to read. You, you have to learn to read journal articles in college. That's not something that's a high school curriculum.
But I, I have noticed that faculty are struggling to get students to read longer, longer texts now than they have in the past. So there has been somewhat of that, that shift. And again, is that because students just don't want to, or is that because it's more difficult for them to do it. So it actually takes them more time to do it than it took a, a previous generation, and that's partly what we're trying to figure out.
Does it make it more challenging for faculty to have to figure out a way to sort of like, not start from scratch, but really start from a beginning point that they may not have been used to starting from? Yes, yeah, you have to have expert teachers. You have to have people that are really good in the classroom to, to shift their pedagogy and shift their strategies. And I'm really fortunate that Eureka College has such a stellar teaching faculty.
That are um terminally degreed and really good at their their stuff and really student-centric, and we keep our class sizes small enough that they, they can pivot and maneuver and adjust, and they talk about their teaching strategies with each other all the time.
And um yeah, it makes the job much more challenging. They have to refocus what they're doing, of course. That was WGLT's Lindsay Jones speaking with Eureka College provost Anne Fullip about a new reading specialist position the college has created. That specialist is expected to serve 20 to 25 students once established.
You're listening to WGLT and WGLT.org. I'm Lauren Warnecke. There was a surprising announcement today at the Federal corruption trial for ex-Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan.
Madigan is now going to testify in the trial. As politics and government reporter Dave McKinney reports. Madigan wielded power for decades, but very little was known about his private life. On a yellow legal pad using a rigid and careful cursive style, Madigan wrote out the list of invitees to his seventy-sixth birthday
party. It was going to be at a favorite Italian restaurant near Midway Airport, and Madigan wanted it to be casual dress with no gifts. On this list his 4 kids, a Chicago bank executive, and former alderman Frank Olivo, who's not been charged but is now at the center of the government case against Madigan.
Prosecutors say Olivo was one of several allies Madigan allegedly helped get no work com ed gigs that paid hundreds of thousands of dollars over multiple years while the company had legislation pending. Madigan co-defendant Michael McClain also showed up. Thanks for being at the party. Oh, it's very nice and it's an honor to
be there, um,
We understand what it means. Thank you very much. This secret FBI recording and Madigan's birthday list are among hundreds of exhibits in his and McClain's federal corruption trial. Prosecutors believe their dozens of wiretaps confirm an almost mob-like pattern of criminal behavior by the pair.
But in those same exhibits, the government also has pulled back the curtain on Madigan's personal life in a way almost never seen before. Take for example, this seemingly mundane conversation between Madigan and his wife Shirley.
Hi sweetheart, how are you doing? Very well, very well. So they have 3 soups. OK. Now the reason that soup order is a piece of evidence in his trial is because Madigan made the call to his wife using McClain's cell phone. Madigan didn't carry his own phone, and it was a practice prosecutors said was geared at shielding Madigan from law enforcement.
The then Speaker and McClain were at a Southwest Side Italian restaurant called Bruna's, where Madigan sometimes goes multiple times a week and is known to almost always order the broiled fish.
In another recording with government mole Danny Solis, Madigan explains his love of that place, that it's nearby and he doesn't have to go to where his kids live in the north side to have a night out with them. I tell him, I'll take you to dinner. I'll buy the dinner, but you got to go to Bruna's because I don't want to go to the North side. I don't want to go north of.
It's OK with them. So we're there like Saturday and Sunday night on the weekend and then I go with Andrew. All told, the FBI documented more than 100 meals Madigan and McClain had together, places like Palermo's, the Union League, and Coco Pazzo.
But Bruna's kept coming up in multiple recordings. In this one with Solis, Madigan recounted how he stepped in when he couldn't get through to the restaurant because its phone was malfunctioning. They can't get the the landline going. So I wind up making a call.
To one of the lobbyists for AT&T, hey, get out there and take care of it. In another, Madigan tells Solis that his daughter Lisa was with him at Bruna's the night before. Solis expresses amazement that she chose not to seek a 5th term as Attorney General, but Madigan says his daughter has a full life ahead of her, a life where parenting should trump politics.
You got 2 girls, one girl's in the 7th grade, the other one is like in the 5th grade. They both require a lot of attention.
I told her a long time ago. I said the only thing, your only obligation in life is to take care of your kids. That's it. That and maybe root for the fighting Irish. Another side of the former speaker shown in the government's evidence was that of a rabid super fan of Notre Dame, his alma mater. In this recording, McClain tells Solis about Madigan's radically
Altered personality when Notre Dame games are on TV. He's yelling and screaming all the time, so you don't want to go, you don't want to sit in the room in the living room with him and watch a game. Prosecutors have put Madigan atop a well tuned racketeering operation allegedly designed to keep him in power and to reward both him and his followers financially.
But whether the evidentiary snippets showing a softer version of Madigan counter that narrative from prosecutors is something only those in the jury box know for sure. That was Dave McKinney reporting. Mike Madigan's trial resumed yesterday after an extended holiday break.
We close today on sound ideas with a follow up to a story WGLT brought you last fall. McLean County native Ben Tracy has completed his ambitious attempt to run across the country, and he arrived on schedule. Tracy, who is a 2012 graduate of Ridgeview High School, ran more than 3000 miles from San Francisco to Ocean City, Maryland.
Success to me is getting to Maryland.
Before Christmas, uh, we've said it is December 20th is the, is the final date and helping these families tell their stories, calling more attention to these issues and, and their solutions and.
You know, using every avenue possible to do that.
During his trip, Tracy gave more than 40 presentations to about 10,000 students, parents, and educators. He also interviewed families who lost children to the harms caused by social media.
The number one thing I would say to parents is to have open communication. That what these kids need to hear is there is nothing that you can't come talk to us about, no matter how awkward it is or how.
Comfortable. Tracy
speaks from experience. He was fired his first day on the job when working for Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner in 2017 for social media posts he made as a teenager. You can hear our full interview with Ben Tracy at WGLT.org. Support for more of that, please comes from Onward injury law, providing legal services to personal injury clients in Bloomington, Normal and Central Illinois.
Thanks for choosing WGLT's sound ideas made possible in part by Bloomington Normal Audiology. I'm Lauren Warnecke. Story help today came from WGLT's Charlie Schlenker and Lindsay Jones and Dave McKinney. Bren McMonigal edits the show. You can find all our sound ideas, interviews, and stories at WGLT.org, and you can subscribe to sound ideas on the NPR app and wherever you get your podcasts.
We want to know what you think of sound ideas. Comment on our Facebook page. We're WGLTFM. @WGLTNews is our handle on Instagram, Threads and TikTok. This is 89.1 WGLT and WGLT.org, part of the NPR network.
