One of the main considerations when talking about demolishing NIU's Cole Hall is how the campus should best remember the shooting victims while also trying to move past the tragedy.
It seems like razing the building so soon after five students were killed there is a rash decision being made while the NIU community is still mourning. Throw in the governor making a pitch for $40 million in state funds and all of a sudden the debate becomes political.
When you are a member of the media and you meet a real estate agent, there's one thing you can count on hearing: an earful.
A few weeks back, my wife and I were chatting with a couple while waiting for a table at a restaurant. The woman asked what I do; I asked what she does. She told me she was a Realtor, and after I told her we bought and sold property last year with relative ease she suggested that folks in my profession were making the market even more difficult than it already is.
Toll (Brothers) said all the discussion of whether the economy's in recession is dampening the mood of consumers, though it noted "glimmers of hope" in a few markets, including Naples, Fla., and the Washington, D.C., suburbs.
"Ceaseless talk of a recession continues to dampen the mood of consumers in general, whether or not a recession actually occurs. For home buyers, we believe this drumbeat, coupled with concerns over mortgages, the direction of home prices, and foreclosures, has kept pent-up demand on the sidelines," said Robert Toll, chairman and chief executive, in a statement.
With Aurora Alderman Rick Lawrence perhaps poised to launch a mayoral bid, we could see for the second consecutive election cycle a primary for the city's top elected job.
Alderman Stephanie Kifowit has already said she plans to run. And incumbent Mayor Tom Weisner has amassed a large campaign war chest, although he has not announced his intentions. If all three (and maybe more) seek the office, Aurorans will be asked to winnow the field down in a primary early next year.
After much eye-rolling and smirking from the candidates, we've just completed our editorial board endorsement session with Bill Foster and Jim Oberweis.
The best line of the day: "Jim, you're just making stuff up." That's Foster after Oberweis tried to tell the editorial board what he thought Foster's position was on immigration reform. It might just as well have been the quote either candidate used throughout the session to describe the other's positions.
This will come as no surprise, but while the primary election was a study in nuanced differences, the special general election is all about the chasm separating Oberweis and Foster on the issues. If you support the concept of universal health care, Foster's your man. If you support the war effort in Iraq, Oberweis is your guy.
Bill Foster won't participate in any public forums leading up to next month's special election. The question is, why?
Why shouldn't voters get one more crack at asking questions, or at least hearing Foster respond to questions, in a public forum?
This isn't the first time Foster has been criticized for not attending public debates. His Democratic challengers in the primary, John Laesch and Jotham Stein, took Foster to task for missing repeated forums during that election.
But Foster spokesman Andrew Dupuy said that the campaign tries to aim for the highest audience possible when scheduling public appearances, so that as many voters as possible can be informed about the candidates. He noted that four of the five upcoming appearances would reach wide audiences -- two of them are televised, and two of the editorial board meetings will appear on the Internet.
Foster and Jim Oberweis will appear before The Beacon News editorial board today. We'll have more on that here after their 3 p.m. meeting. But meeting with a bunch of newspaper people is far different than meeting with the voters, even if the editorial board sessions end up as Internet videos (as ours will).
East Aurora school officials found themselves doing damage control this week after they chose not to immediately notify parents about a threatening post on a former high school student’s MySpace Web page. There’s a lesson there, especially in the wake of the shooting at Northern Illinois University that killed five students.
Instead of parents and students receiving official word about what happened — police deemed the threat not credible — rumors spread over the Internet. The district spent Tuesday combating unsubstantiated fears.
The result was frantic parents and low attendance, as many students simply stayed home.
John Puterbaugh, an intern last summer at The Beacon News, is the editor in chief of the Northern Star, the student newspaper at Northern Illinois University.
In a column to be published Friday in the Beacon, Puterbaugh recounts how his newspaper responded to the campus shooting last week and how he is anxious about the future. It's a feeling of uncertainty -- perhaps fear -- that I'm sure thousands of students and their families all have.
Puterbaugh writes that returning to class will be more difficult than confronting the shooting's aftermath.
If I was working for the Jim Oberweis campaign, I'd consider sending a thank you note to the New York Times, for waiting to publish its hit piece on presumptive GOP Presidential nominee John McCain until after he touched down in Aurora on Wednesday.
Oberweis got both the fundraising boost and the positive press coverage without having to get tied up in this brewing story about McCain's ethics (a story largely focused on things that happened 10 years ago, by the way).
Stephanie Kifowit has a lot of ground to make up in her bid to become Aurora's next mayor.
It remains to be seen if she trails incumbent Mayor Tom Weisner in popularity. But there is no doubt she trails him when it comes to fundraising.
After all, Weisner had more cash on hand at the end of 2007 than he has had at the end of any reporting period since he announced his bid for mayor in 2003. Weisner has some $148,000 at his disposal today. For a mayoral race, that's a lot of cash to get a message out.
Of course, Weisner won't say whether he's running again, despite his fundraising prowess.
In the Oswego School District, all seems calm over proposed boundary shifts. Not so much in the Indian Prairie School District, where parents are hopping mad.
Boundary changes are often an emotional issue, where an arbitrary line can literally divide neighborhoods, and kids who have gone to school together all their lives suddenly find themselves ripped apart from their classmates.
But if the issue is so contentious in one district, why isn't it in the other?
At the conclusion of last week's live virtual town hall meeting on underage drinking, we promised that the experts who participated in the forum would reply to the unanswered questions.
Angela Halvorson of TopLine Professional Strategies, which is a consultant to the Illinois Alcoholism and Drug Dependence Association, has authored a response. Please find her answers after the jump.
Thanks again to everyone who participated in the chat. We believe it was a successful jumpstart to what should be an ongoing conversation about alcohol use among teens.
What signs should parents of NIU students look for to know they should seek professional help for their children?
This is one of the questions we asked in the wake of the Northern Illinois University shootings during an e-mail Q&A with Lorna London, a clinical psychologist with the Family Practice Residency Program at Rush-Copley Medical Center in Aurora.
London said parents should watch for changes over time in their child’s behavior for warning signs of psychological problems.
I wonder if there will come a time when even abortion-rights supporters who live in Aurora will regret that Planned Parenthood set up shop here.
As demonstrated by a lawsuit filed on behalf of Fox Valley Families Against Planned Parenthood, opponents of the clinic have no intention of stopping their efforts to bulldoze the facility.
From a press release:
"Democracy can't work for people if they are denied an opportunity to impact even their own neighborhoods," said Tom Brejcha, Chief Counsel for the Thomas More Society, which is providing legal representation for the homeowners and families involved. "It simply isn't fair to allow any entity, including Planned Parenthood, to operate outside the law."
The lawsuit asks that the Court revoke Planned Parenthood's occupancy permit and that the land be returned to its original condition.
Rich Miller over at The Capitol Fax Blog posted this: "I’m told that Sen. John McCain is making his first trip to Illinois as the presumptive nominee February 20th to attend an event for Jim Oberweis in Aurora."
If the presumptive Republican nominee for president comes to the Fox Valley to stump for Oberweis, that's obviously going to attract a lot of attention. But will it affect the congressional race at all?
Are we all safer knowing where sex offenders live, or is mandated registration just another way for us to give people a scarlet letter?
Put another way, are we better off knowing where former priest Mark Campobello goes when he is released from prison on Wednesday? If you'll recall, Campobello pleadedguilty to sexually abusing two young women while they were enrolled at local Catholic schools. He is required to register as a sex offender.
Mourners gather around the site of the crash that killed five Oswego teenagers on Route 31 in Oswego last year.
BY DAVE PARRO AND MIKE CETERA
What has changed in the year since the Oswego crash? Has the community found any new effective solutions to the problem of teen drinking? Where do we go from here?
Join us at 8 p.m. tonight if you have answers to any of those questions or have questions of your own. In an effort to start a new conversation about teen drinking on the one-year anniversary of the Oswego crash, we'll be hosting a virtual town-hall meeting to get the discussion started.
A number of experts from across the state will participate, but this online session will really be about the community. We want to hear from you about the events of a year ago, what has (or hasn't) changed and where the solutions might lie.
Peter Hoffman/Beacon News (From left) Oswego students Megan Findlay, 16; Tasha Tretternero, 17; Alex Peterson, 17; and Alyssa Plac, 17, gather at the site where five of their classmates were killed Feb. 11, 2007. Monday marks the one-year anniversary of the accident that also injured four teens.
BY DAVE PARRO
In the year since the Oswego crash claimed five young lives, there's been a lot of talk about how to combat the problem of teen drinking. But has anything really changed in the wake of the tragedy?
Kids are still dying in drunken-driving crashes. Parents are still being arrested for hosting "supervised" drinking parties. And our communities continue to be scarred by the consequences.
So has the window of opportunity for change after the Oswego crash already closed?
There's a great deal we don't know about what happened last month at an East Aurora teachers union meeting. But I think it's fair to ask why School Board member Rayanne Carlson was there in the first place.
The union, according to a story by staff writer Heather Gillers, has filed a complaint with the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board. Because no one is talking, the details are a bit sketchy. Still, Gillers learned the union wants the state board to take action to prevent Carlson from "busting into our meetings, encouraging our members to engage in unlawful activities and suggesting that union members assist (board members) in their personal agendas."
State law is sufficiently vague on what school district officials -- including board members -- can or can't do when it comes to teachers unions.
Update (2/8): MajorityAP.com has posted a follow-up story on the possible violation of House ethics rules discussed below. Tom Bowen, Foster's campaign manager, says the Democratic candidate was a campaign volunteer for Rep. Patrick Murphy in late 2006. After Murphy took office, Foster was an unpaid scientific advisor in early 2007. Bowen said he doesn't think that's a House ethics violation.
Update (2/11): MajorityAP.com has posted another follow-up story in response to Murphy's explanation of Foster's role on his staff. Murphy says Foster was exempt from House ethics rules because his role did not "supplant the normal and regular duties of paid employees" as a scientific advisor. The rules, however, still seem to require a "clearly defined program" for the volunteer that has an educational benefit.
In response to a story posted on the Majority Accountability Project's Web site Thursday, congressional candidate Bill Foster issued a press release predicting 30 days of mud-slinging leading up to the March 8 special election.
But instead of simply defending himself against the accusation raised by the pro-Republican MajorityAP, which wasn't really necessary because it wasn't all that damning, Foster's campaign went on and on slinging mud at Jim Oberweis' spokesman and conservative groups.
The Aurora Election Commission is taking a lot of heat after voters experienced ballot problems at the polls Tuesday, but the executive director says the situation has been blown out of proportion.
Carole Holtz said most of the confusion stemmed from voter error and election judges handing out the wrong ballots. Regardless, there needs to be a full review of what happened on Election Day. The volume of complaint calls suggests there was more going on here than a few isolated incidents.
A reader just pointed out to us that comments for the live blog entry were turned off. We have no idea how or when this occurred. It was inadvertent. Comments have been restored should you want to discuss Tuesday's election or the blog post.
Bill Foster's campaign sent out e-mails this early morning with headlines looking ahead at a Foster vs. Oberweis showdown on March 8, but there's still no definitive answer on whether Foster has beaten John Laesch ... or won't be invovled in a recount of the Democratic primary. Our online results show both candidates with 43 percent of the vote -- Foster with a 31,910 to 31,587 lead over Laesch.
We're chasing after a Web update, and we'll keep you posted. Right now, the numbers we're adding up don't jibe.
We'll be live-blogging throughout the day with various updates, random nuggets and tales of woe (or not) from the polling place. Please join the conversation.
How did voting go? Were there hitches or did it go smoothly? Any candidate sightings? Wacky signs? General sense of voter turnout? Add your thoughts after the jump.
UPDATE 2/5: The School Board voted to put a referendum on the November ballot.
The East Aurora School Board tonight is expected to discuss whether to put a referendum on the November ballot. If board members vote yes, that gives the district plenty of time to make a case for increasing taxes. But will any effort in this district be futile?
Time and again, voters have rejected a tax hike. Some residents say they can't afford it; others say administrators haven't done enough to show they are responsibly managing the district's finances. What, if anything, would make you support a referendum?
With early voting over, is there anything that the numbers tell us?
Kane County Clerk Jack Cunningham reports that just under 5 percent of registered voters pulled ballots prior to Election Day. That's 10,391 people who voted early. During the 2006 congressional election, about 9,800 people voted early in Kane County.
Not sure what to glean from those numbers -- especially considering this is a presidential election year.
There is, however, something potentially interesting shaping up in the 14th District Congressional race. Fewer people pulled Democratic ballots in the special election than in the regular primary.
