The Year Ahead

First of all: Vote!

Upcoming Elections:
Primary: March 20, 2018
General: November 6, 2018

But be informed when you do it! Tom Kacich laid out some of the promises and statements at various levels of our government by the politicians we can either hold accountable to their word or slip by another year. This year is an election year so expect a lot of big talk overshadowing real record. Here are the excerpts about the county:

Tom Kacich: Officials at all levels of government look ahead to 2018

Remember how Congress and the Trump administration couldn't get anything done all year until the GOP tax plan was passed in December, how the Illinois Legislature and Gov. Bruce Rauner couldn't get a budget passed for more than two years and how the Champaign County Board couldn't get anything done about the financially plagued county nursing home?

Next year should be better, your elected officials say.

The nursing home "will have to be dealt with," said county board Chairman C. Pius Weibel...

Perhaps this will be a year of action.

At the county level, a decision on putting the nursing home up for sale "is a possibility," Weibel said coyly.

"Obviously, the nursing home issue is one that will have to be dealt with" in 2018, he said.

"We also need to find direction on the downtown jail. We've talked about it, but we've never really said this is what we're going to do and how we're going to do it," said the county board chairman who is not running for re-election.

There's plenty of county board support for closing the jail, he said, but there's no consensus on whether to add onto the satellite jail in east Urbana.

"I would like to close it, but you have to have a plan to do that," he said. "It's an old building that is taking a lot of money. It has ADA problems. Plus, it's inefficient both from an operations viewpoint and a financial viewpoint."

All politics may be local, but a lot of our local politics is a nightmare because State and federal funding that, regardless of your political philosophy, involves your tax dollars coming back to fund basic services most of us do want and support through those local governments. When the State and federal government cut funding they rely on without any alternative, the people who rely on them to keep our communities safe and taken care of during the worst of times are devastated.

Local politicians sometimes like to talk about local government as if it is in a bubble. All of it is connected. Get the whole story and demand it acts in your interests, not their party's.