An Adams County Judge has been named to fill a vacancy on the Fourth District Appellate Court of Illinois.

Justice Lisa Holder White and the Supreme Court of Illinois announced yesterday that Eighth Circuit Court Judge Amy Lannerd has been assigned to fill the vacancy created by the decision of Justice John W. Turner of Lincoln to not seek retention. Lannerd’s assignment begins December 5^th and will run to December 2^nd, 2024.

Muddy River News reports that Lannerd is believed to be the first judge from Adams County appointed as an appellate judge to the Fourth District since Bob Cook.

Lannerd was appointed to the bench as a Circuit Judge in the Eighth Circuit in 2016, and she won election in 2018. She would have been up for retention in 2024, and her position is not expected to be filled in Adams County until then.

The Fourth District Appellate Court is composed of 41 counties in central and western Illinois that includes Adams, Brown, Calhoun, Cass, Greene, Jersey, Macoupin, Menard, Morgan, Pike, Sangamon, Schuyler, and Scott counties.

Illinois College President Barbara Farley has been named as chair of the board of directors for the Council of Independent Colleges.

The college made the announcement yesterday. Founded in 1956, the council brings together more than 700 non-profit independent colleges from across the country to support leaders and excellence in higher education. The Journal Courier reports that the council also hosts the largest annual conferences of college and university presidents in the country.

Farley has led Illinois College since 2013. Farley said in a press release that it was a great privilege to be named chair of the organization.

In addition to her role as CIC board chair, to which she was appointed in June, Farley currently serves as chair of the Midwest Conference Presidents’ Council and is a member of the boards for Memorial Health in Springfield and Jacksonville Memorial Hospital.

The Washington Elementary School renovation has been given a hard date to be completed.

Vision 117 Coordinator Bob Roads says that one portion of the renovation is complete: “Where we are at right now is where I would say as a rule of thumb, the demolition portion of the building is over. Everything that needed to be removed from the building essentially has been removed. We are in the process now of rehabilitating and adding the new things to the building.”

Roads says that a hard date for completion has been given for next summer: “With the current schedule I currently have, it has the project being done around July 25th. Essentially, what that sequence is that most of the work will be done yet this winter. The items which we’ll see go beyond this winter will be completion of the road system. They are not going to put the roads in until some time in the Spring. Then, as you’re aware of, we had problems with the delivery of the electrical panel. That’s not going to arrive until May. We have another couple of weeks of the construction of the electrical panel after that, and then, actually, the last thing that will be done is the new gym floor.”

Roads says that the new gym floor will have to acclimate to the updated HVAC system and the building temperature before it can be installed to keep with the floor’s warranty. He says that once the floor gets acclimated, it will take about 5 days to install the floor.

Roads says that teachers should be able to start coming into the new building by the first of July, with the completion date coming on July 25^th.

School district consolidation is becoming a large topic across West Central Illinois. It’s been on Illinois lawmakers’ radar for the last two years.

House Bill 7 in March 2021 called for the creation of a commission to study consolidation of school districts by studying efficiency and resource savings. The bill wouldn’t have been a forced consolidation but would have sent the question to voters in areas where school districts overlap or share administrators rather than having consolidation being decided by current school boards. The bill ended up dying in August 2021 in the General Assembly with both parties voting against the bill.

The Libertarian think tank Illinois Policy Institute said in a report back in April that rural district consolidation would ease staffing shortages made worse by Covid-19 and could cut administrative overhead. The report said if Illinois, which currently has over 850 school districts, would consolidate 220 of those districts (roughly 25%), it would save $732 million that could be placed back into the classroom or used to hire new teachers or give pay raises to current ones for retention.

Jacksonville School District 117 Superintendent Steve Ptacek says that leadership in Illinois is dragging its feet to address the ongoing teacher shortage in order to possibly force consolidation to the forefront: “I think across the state as individuals hear about the teacher shortage and they start seeing some of the low class size numbers in some of our schools throughout the state that if you combine them, there might not be as much of a [teacher] shortage. I do think that is leading to the lack of urgency that we see in many leaders throughout the state, that their could be an easy answer of ‘If we just had less schools, we wouldn’t have as much of a teacher shortage.’ I’m not saying that I agree with that or that I’m saying that is a valid argument, but I think that we have to be ready to deal with the reality that there are voices talking about concerns with the teacher shortage might be landing on some deaf ears because they might be saying that many of these schools need to consolidate.”

Currently, 16 area high schools are under 200 enrollment in the area. All of those districts have double digit vacancies of teachers, paraprofessionals, or other staff.

Nearly 60 lawsuits surrounding the constitutionality of the SAFE-T Act are under motion to consolidate in Kankakee County.

The lawsuits filed by state’s attorneys from around Illinois including in Brown, Scott, Morgan, Greene, and Sangamon counties among others are all making identical claims that the Pretrial Fairness Act that is slated to end cash bail on January 1^st and remove detainment on certain offenses for criminal suspects is unconstitutional.

Several state’s attorneys and state lawmakers are holding town halls to hear from constituents who are both for and against the act. State Senator Steve McClure held a town hall Wednesday night at Piper Glen Golf Course in Springfield that was disrupted by demonstrators from the Faith Coalition for the Common Good who say Illinois Republicans are attempting to dismantle the SAFE-T Act. According to WMAY, the group put out a statement Thursday morning saying the concerns being raised are “lies rooted in fear-mongering and racism, and meant to preserve mass incarceration.”

McClure, a Sangamon County prosecutor, contended on What’s On Your Mind on Tuesday that the SAFE-T Act is an attempt to do away with criminal law: “There has been a push among very progress, very liberal members of the Democratic caucus in this state (not just in the Governor’s Office but in the Senate and in the House) to just do away with criminal laws in general. Look at the population of the Department of Corrections since Covid. They used Covid as an excuse to release people from the Department of Corrections, so it’s just this push towards this radical agenda, which includes not having people go to prison, not keeping people in jail, and allowing people to commit crimes but no longer designating those crimes as crimes.”

Because the first lawsuit filed against the SAFE-T Act was filed in Kankakee County, all the cases will be combined there, with a hearing date set for November 22^nd in front of the Illinois Supreme Court on the motion to consolidate.

Approximately 40 people crammed into a classroom at Lincoln Land Community College-Jacksonville on Tuesday night to hear a presentation from a large coalition of people attempting to place a halt on the permit for the Heartland Greenway CO2 Sequestration Pipeline.

The Coalition to Stop CO2 Pipelines gave a 2-hour presentation to the crowd about the hazards of CO2 Pipelines and what they can do to halt the permitting process for the pipeline that is currently before the Illinois Commerce Commission.

Coalition member Francesca Butler says she wants citizens to have as much information as possible about the science and the implications of putting the pipeline in the ground. She says she wants people to make educated decisions about their land when it comes to good-neighbor and easement agreements with Navigator CO2 Ventures, the company who operates the pipeline. The coalition informed the crowd that Navigator CO2 Ventures is an offshoot of Navigator Energy Services, the largest crude oil midstream provider in the Anadarko Basin that covers portions of the western Great Plains and the Texas Panhandle.

Butler says she hopes people got one main takeaway from the event on Tuesday night: “Consult your lawyer or your official before signing anything that Navigator sends you. Make sure you are really well-informed and well-educated before you decide what to do in terms of allowing pipeline usage.”

All three Morgan County Commissioners were on hand for the presentation including several landowners who indicated that they were within a one-mile radius of the pipeline’s proposed easement. Steve Hess of the McDonough County Farm Bureau was on hand to inform the crowd that he is attempting to put a group of farm bureau members together to lobby the Illinois Farm Bureau to take a stance on the pipeline’s construction. He said that he hopes the state Farm Bureau adopts the mindset of the recently passed two-year moratorium the state of California has taken on CO2 pipelines until new regulations can be written by the federal government.

Hess says that the Cass-Morgan Farm Bureau has already voted to oppose the pipeline’s construction, and was the first farm bureau to do so.

Lan Richart, an ecologist with the Coalition, says that four counties that are effected by the pipeline have opted to file moratoriums and intervention actions with the ICC. More information about the opposition of the pipeline can be found at noillinoisco2pipelines.org. Direct information about the Heartland Greenway can be found at heartlandgreenway.com.

The March of Dimes has classified a number of West Central Illinois counties as a maternity care desert.

A county is classified as a maternity care desert if there were no hospitals providing obstetric care, no birth centers, no obstetrician/gynecologist and no certified nurse midwives.

Calhoun, Pike, Scott, Brown, Cass, Menard, Schuyler, and Mason counties have all been given the designation of being a maternity care desert. March of Dimes says these counties join the 36% of counties nationwide with the designation, with the most located in the South and Midwest.

March of Dimes says this year’s report is much grimmer than their report two years ago. Five percent of counties have a worse designation this time around, and there’s been a 2% increase in counties classified as maternity care deserts. March of Dimes says these changes are driven primarily by the loss of obstetric providers and hospital services within counties, as a result of financial and logistical challenges including the COVID pandemic. The organization says these deserts primarily harm rural communities and people of color.

The March of Dimes report builds on a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office saying the pandemic caused an increase in in the number of women who died from pregnancy or childbirth complications in the U.S. last year. It finds that pregnancy-related deaths have spiked nearly 80% since 2018, with COVID-19 being a factor in a quarter of the reported pregnancy-related deaths last year.

Sangamon County area fire departments were called out to a semi tractor trailer fire on Interstate 72 in western Sangamon County early this morning.

According to an Illinois State Police report, at 12:24AM, troopers were dispatched to a semi engulfed in flames on Interstate 72 at milepost 87 about 5 miles east of New Berlin.

The New Berlin-Island Grove and the Loami Fire Departments along with the Springfield Fire Department’s Hazmat Team responded to the scene. Fire officials were on scene for approximately two hours suppressing the blaze while ISP diverted traffic to one lane away from the blaze.

Illinois State Police say it is currently unknown how the fire started. The semi was hauling approximately 40,000 pounds of motor oil.

No injuries were reported. No further information is available.