Archive for March 2nd, 2008
March 2nd, 2008
There’s a whole lot of noise being made about North Alpine Road’s potholes.
Folks, there are huge potholes all over the area that are worse than North Alpine. Have you been on West Riverside between North Main and the bridge? Yikes!
Kishwaukee Street is a lunar surface.
And the Whitman Street/North Second Street interchange is littered with hubcaps! I counted at least 8 on one particularly holy stretch.
20th Street between Charles and Broadway was awful, but the city did a patch job that took out the worst holes.
I’m not in the road business, but I think we could alleviate the problem with future projects if we used standards that require thicker surfaces, relied more on concrete, and had a plan to tar cracks in the pavement throughout the temperate months, before they can develop into potholes the next winter.
March 2nd, 2008
My only prediction for Tuesday’s primary elections is this: John McCain will clinch the GOP nomination.
As for the Democrats, it’s anyone’s guess. But anyone who has counted Hillary Clinton out should count again: she just might become the Comeback Kid II. It’s not a prediction, just a hunch.
(Comback Kid I was Bill.)
March 2nd, 2008
My hunch is that legislators in Springfield are going to back off that boneheaded plan of Gov. Rod Blagojevich (I know, which one?) and Northern Illinois University to replace Cole Hall with a state-of-the-art, $40 million classroom building, which according to state Sen. Brad Burzynski, R-Clare, could cost $60 million when the bonds are repaid over 20 years.
Burzynski was asked by the governor to introduce a funding bill and he said he would. But when I heard Burzynski in a radio interview on Friday, he seemed to be be a little more cautious about the plan.
Cole Hall, you remember, was the scene of mass murder on Feb. 14. Five students died and the gunman killed himself.
There have been plenty of comments on this plan, and all have been negative. Every lawmaker has a list of projects that need to be done. Every state university has a backlog of deferred maintenance on buildings that are often much older than Cole Hall, built in 1968.
1968 is not “old,” by the way. Most of Rockford’s schools were built before 1968. Lincoln Middle School, for instance, dates back to the 1920s, and it’s still going strong.
NIU might be better advised to remodel the lecture room where the killings occurred and reopen the building in the fall.
March 2nd, 2008
Last week we had the first meeting of the Register Star’s 2008 Voter Panel. I’ve done these many times before, and once again I’ve heard people who say they want real change. They may not know exactly what that should be, but they don’t think anything’s getting done in Washington. They want consensus among our leaders.
Problem with that is, we have an adversarial system designed to slow down the political process, to avoid the mistakes of rushing into policies and practices that seem good on the surface, but which can be disastrous down the road.
So, the “Rodney King” approach, (can’t we all just get along?) probably isn’t the best one for a country as big and diverse as the U.S.A.
Our argumentative system developed a country that hasn’t done badly over the years.
