Innovations                                                                       

Making lemonade out of lemons:
                East St. Louis, Rantoul respond to challenging situations

Illustration by Michael Kaiser This is the cover of East St. Louis' Gardening Resource Manual.

U of I applies expertise to help East St. Louis

East St. Louis' revival is the tortoise to Rantoul's hare, but the community has taken positive steps toward improving livability. The city, located in St. Clair County on the Mississippi River, has tapped the brainpower and energy of the state's universities, mainly the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

More than 600 students from the U of I are spending thousands of hours in East St. Louis conducting community research and taking part in service projects. "This is a reciprocal learning project," says Professor Ken Reardon, who runs the urban planning portion of the project. "Residents know all kinds of things about what will and will not work in their community."

The projects draw people and ideas from the schools of architecture, landscape architecture, urban and regional planning and the university extension service. One accomplishment pointed to during the last academic year is the creation of a community development corporation for East St. Louis. Faculty and students worked with the Winstanley/Industry Park neighborhood residents to create a corporation to plan and implement neighborhood improvement projects. Kirk Goodrich, a graduate of the planning program and now the executive director of the Winstanley/Industry Park Neighborhood Organization, says the project's goal is to "improve the quality of life for residents through economic development, public safety and housing rehabilitation."

Some empty lots have been transformed into playgrounds. More than 50 university students expanded local Headstart playground facilities. Landscape students planted trees, shrubs and flowering plants.

The U of I landscape department also worked with the East St. Louis Horticulture Coalition in creating a network of community gardens in the city and developing a guide to community gardening. Students assisted local organizers in designing the gardens and performing soil tests on garden sites.

Student volunteers also rehabilitate houses. In the past year they scraped, painted and repaired the homes of eight elderly residents and fixed the storm-damaged roof of a disabled Vietnam veteran.

Pleasant gardens and neat houses do add to the livability of a community. But the best advice and energy provided by the U of I experts and students may have come in the development of the Farmers Market. In a rehabilitated Chevrolet dealership, 16 merchants sell their wares out of 24 stands. What makes this Farmers Market unique is that the vendors are local residents who have grown or created their own product, and the money they earn tends to stay in the community supporting other local merchants.

Rantoul replaces AF base with new businesses

What happens to a community when its economic rug is yanked from under it? Whether it's a slow process of abandonment as in East St. Louis or almost instantaneous as in the base closure at Rantoul, communities have found their best bet is to grab their bootstraps and help themselves.

Rantoul and East St. Louis are about as different as two Illinois communities can get. One is predominantly Caucasian, rural and prosperous. The other is predominantly African American, urban and poverty-stricken. What they have in common is a determination to make their communities better.

Rantoul, a town of 12,000 in Champaign County, faced an abrupt change when the federal government announced in 1988 that it intended to close Chanute Air Force Base, the core of the community's identity for most of this century.

Rather than panic, local government officials started an aggressive campaign to attract new businesses. In just one year, 20 companies employing 400 people moved onto the base. Frank Elliott, economic director for the city, says that several companies are expanding and the number of employees on the base should exceed 1,000 by next summer.

Mayor Katy Podagrosi cautions that several challenges lie ahead, chief among them the costs associated with doubling the city's infrastructure. But she says sales tax receipts remained stable through the transition and even increased 6 percent last year.

Champaign County puts court records online

When Linda S. Frank became the circuit clerk of Champaign County in 1991, she was flooded with requests from the public, the press and attorneys for information about court cases and records. She says she wanted people to get such information without having to call or come to the courthouse. What began as an idea to make access to the court system more efficient has transformed into a modern computer network.

The computer system, called Public Access Service (PAS), is a database specifically created for viewing from outside the courthouse 24 hours a day.

The program is in the first of two phases. Phase one began November 14, and will last up to six months, Frank says. It allows attorneys and the press to have modem access to various types of court cases. Phase two will allow the general public to use PAS in libraries or in their own homes through Prairienet, a local public access system that interacts with the Internet.

PAS provides two groups of information. The first includes general information such as courthouse telephone numbers, fee schedules and court calendars. The second includes specific court case information, such as charges, dispositions, fees and fines and docket sheets. Some records will not be available to the public for security reasons.

The records within the files will be updated every night. "There are fewer phone calls [to the circuit clerk's office] but more data to input," says Frank.

No other circuit court in Illinois provides information electronically to the public.

4/February 1995/Illinois Issues