wayward's blog

Via http://www.ucimc.org/node/3112, Danielle Chynoweth is apparently stepping down from City Council.

Dear Mayor Prussing and Urbana City Council Members,

Please accept this letter announcing my resignation from Urbana City Council.

After much consideration and attempts to schedule my professional life around council commitments, I have concluded that, with greatly increased travel and professional commitments, I will not be in a position to adequately serve Ward 2 residents.

Through my business, OJC Technologies, I have taken on the role of Development Director for Patch Adams. This new role will require me to travel extensively in the next year as we gather support to build a Health Care Teaching Center and Free Clinic in West Virginia. This is just one part of the growth in business we are experiencing at OJC. Other new contracts will be taking me out of the country as well.

These changes involve exciting professional opportunities as well as benefits for downtown Urbana. OJC Technologies, a company of 18 staff members (and growing), will be expanding into an office space in the former Busey Hall/Princess Theater on Main Street. This will allow OJC to grow, and for the Independent Media Center, which housed OJC for the past three years, to provide expanded services for artists and non-profits in the downtown post office building it owns.

I have thoroughly enjoyed working with you all and am proud of what we have accomplished together:
• Urbana’s new Public Arts Program, along with the gallery incentive program, will support and grow the arts and culture throughout Urbana.
• A Citizen Review Board of Police now provides independent review of citizen complaints.
• Business on Philo Road is expanding and beautification efforts are underway.
• Our new Rental Registration program protects tenant safety and levels the playing field for landlords.
• City Hall is more diverse in terms of gender and race than it has ever been in history.
• The firefighters have a contract that respects their contribution to this community.
• Urbana is installing bike lanes and paths throughout the city.
• The City of Urbana has sponsored two affordable homes that use passive solar to reduce energy costs by up to 75% and will soon be home to an entire affordable green neighborhood that will set a new standard for energy efficiency.
• Urbana Public Television has grown to hundreds of members and efforts are underway to establish a stand-alone public access television station where non-profits, churches, and residents can have a local voice.
• We have exciting plans for Boneyard Creek developments including a park and performance space by the creek that will greatly enhance downtown Urbana.
I am also proud of accomplishments with the previous council. We expanded the library, passed a living wage ordinance, passed an anti-war resolution which we hand delivered to Congress, and acknowledged the relationships of gay, lesbian, and non-married straight couples with our Domestic Partner Registry. And we consistently supported the growth and proliferation of local businesses that keep our tax dollars local.

Of the all changes, the one I am most proud of is the blossoming of citizen participation in government. Many council meetings are well attended because citizens see that their input has impact.

I am honored and blessed to have been able to serve Urbana for the past seven years. I thank everyone who has challenged me and supported me through these years. Although I am stepping down, I have every intention to stay in the community and continue to work to improve it, whether that be through holding a future elected position or in another role in our community. I wish you all the very best.

Sincerely,

Danielle Chynoweth
412 W. Illinois St.
Lovely Urbana, Illinois

Update: The News-Gazette has a story at http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2008/07/15/chynoweth_resigns_from_urbana_city_council

Medical cannabis is apparently patented ... by the U.S. government. 

US Patent 6630507 - "Cannabinoids as antioxidants and neuroprotectants" was issued to The United States of America as represented by the Department of Health and Human Services on October 7, 2003.

Source: http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6630507.html

Discuss.

Via the Trib (http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chicago-illinois-countrywide-financial-suit-jun25,0,2336686.story):

Attorney General Lisa Madigan filed an 81-page lawsuit Wednesday in Cook County Circuit Court against Countrywide Financial Corp., the nation's biggest mortgage lender, alleging that it engaged in unfair and deceptive conduct in creating, originating, marketing and servicing what turned out to be many unaffordable mortgages for Illinois homeowners.

The lawsuit comes after a nine-month proble by Madigan's office into Countrywide lending practices.

Besides Countrywide and its Countrywide Home Loans Inc. unit, the complaint also names as defendants Countrywide's subprime lending unit, Full Spectrum Lending; the company's servicing arm, Countrywide Home Loans Servicing LP; and Angelo Mozilo, the co-founder and former Countrywide whose name has become synonymous with the excesses of the subprime mortgage industry.

The complaint alleges that Countrywide sold risky and costly loans to borrowers who couldn't afford them.

"Countrywide's unfair lending practices have harmed tens of thousands of borrowers who've been placed in unaffordable loans and, as a result, our communities are now being destabilized by a skyrocketing number of home foreclosures," Madigan said in a statement.

The accompanying video is also pretty interesting - she talks in more detail about Countrywide's "hybrid ARMs", which in some cases allowed borrowers to make such low payments initially that their debt increased.

Via today's N-G:

The county's nursing home is in even worse shape than it appears, a University of Illinois accountancy professor said.

Rachel Schwartz, who edits a scholarly journal on accounting practices, is serving as an unpaid consultant to the county board. She said Tuesday that data supplied to the county on Champaign County Nursing Home finances paints a rosier portrait than documents filed with the state.

The nursing home is asking for a $592,000 loan from the county at its Thursday meeting. Treasurer Dan Welch has said the county can't afford any more such loans.

Schwartz has looked through invoices – public documents – and found that the nursing home relies more on contract services for nursing and other therapies than budgets suggest. She said the facility uses a hybrid of accounting practices that reduces transparency.

From what Schwartz has seen, she said expenses are recorded as they are paid, while revenues are reported as the service is provided.

Speaking less technically, Schwartz said that financially, the nursing home "is dying."

Discuss.

Today's N-G has an excellent article on how Jon White might have been stopped earlier, and wasn't.  There's also a followup about what's happened since, and some related articles about mandatory reporting.

Jon White could have been stopped much earlier.

There were at least seven warning points at which a school employee in either Urbana or McLean County could have justified a call to the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.

No one did.

And so White – the man convicted of aggravated criminal sexual abuse for acts involving 10 children – kept teaching.

Discuss.

This week, I have jury duty, though I did not actually end up sitting on a jury.  We ended up in the jury area, which was under construction but usable.  They didn't have a working video system, so they played the audio of Judge Ladd and the head of courthouse security talking.  It was explained to us that cellphones were banned because it was possible to record audio and video with them.  This bothered me for a couple of reasons.  For one thing, there are other devices that are also capable of doing these things which are allowed.  At a deeper level, this suggested that the court didn't expect that jurors would obey the rules unless they were actively enforced.  But it also seems like the system depends on an honor system to work properly.  Unless you have a sequestered jury, nobody is going to be making sure that the jurors aren't reading news stories about the trial, talking to others, etc.  So if jurors can't even be trusted not to do egregiously inappropriate stuff like taking photos in the courtroom, what about the other stuff?

Someone pointed out that it only took one idiot juror to cause an expensive mistrial, and the court might as well do whatever it can to prevent this.  I'd also heard that Champaign County didn't enforce jury summons, and wondered whether some of the rationale for this was to let potential problem jurors self-select themselves out of the pool.  If someone gets a summons saying that they're legally obligated to report for jury duty and ignores it, what are the odds that they'd comply with other rules about jury service?

Since I have jury duty next week, I pulled up the court calendar to see whether there were any big trials scheduled.  One case, Doe vs Odle, seemed to be allocated for a lot of time.  But when I looked up case number 05L00080, it just said that the case had been impounded by the court.  What's up with that?

The Springfield State-Journal Register had a story about two IDOT employees who used their own mowers and gas to mow the weeds outside Camp Butler National Cemetery for Memorial Day.  IDOT now only uses its vehicles for "essential" purposes.  It initially surprised me that IDOT was having so much trouble, since they were funded by the state gas tax.  It looks like some of those revenues are being siphoned off by other parts of state government, because IDOT now pays CMS for more "services" than it did in the past.

In Bob Lynch’s eyes, it was one of those situations where somebody had to do it.

When the Illinois Department of Transportation announced last month that because of budget constraints, it was curtailing the use of state vehicles except for essential purposes, it meant that much of the grass and weeds along state highways wouldn’t be mowed.

And that included the stretch of Old U.S. 36 just outside Camp Butler National Cemetery.

“For them not to cut this before Memorial Day is just wrong,” said Lynch, a highway maintainer who works at IDOT’s Riverton depot. The depot is responsible for mowing from Dirksen Parkway east along Sangamon Avenue and Camp Butler Road. 

So Lynch and his boss, IDOT field tech Mike McDermott were out in the rain using their own riding mowers, their own gas and their own time to cut the right of way early Friday morning.

From the News-Gazette:

With Medicaid cutbacks, deficit-spending, fines from one state agency and major sanctions from another, the Champaign County Nursing Home has had a bad year.

Since May 8, the facility has been barred from accepting new Medicare or Medicaid residents. The state agency that regulates nursing homes is tabulating a $200-a-day fine since Jan. 16, when a patient was injured.

The facility has until July 16 to get back into substantial compliance, said Susan Hofer, a spokeswoman for the Illinois Department of Public Health.

If there are six months of noncompliance, the home could be shut down, Hofer said. She declined to discuss the nature of the injury to the resident.

After the Jan. 16 incident, there were public health inspections on Feb. 8, Feb. 26. March 19, April 17 and May 21, Hofer said.

"At each of those times, some things had been fixed and some were not in compliance," Hofer said.

The Champaign County Board discussed negotiating the penalties in closed session Thursday night, but would not discuss the matter with reporters.

Discuss.

Patrick Thompson was just acquitted.  It didn't sound like the state's case was very strong, so I think this is the right verdict.  There's a story in the News-Gazette at http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2008/05/16/jury_acquits_thompson_of_sexual_abuse_after_an_hour .  Apparently, it didn't take the jury long to decide.

According to the News-Gazette, Brian Chesley received conditional discharge and 100 hours of community service.

A Rantoul teen convicted of resisting and obstructing police in Douglass Park in north Champaign more than a year ago has been sentenced to a year of conditional discharge and 100 hours of public service.

The sentence for Brian Chesley, 19, who also lives part time with a grandmother in Urbana, means he will have a misdemeanor conviction on his record but will not have to report to a probation officer for monitoring. It was the least restrictive sentence that Champaign County Judge John Kennedy could have imposed for the crimes.

What's interesting is that the Very Green candidate for CB 9 started out with a couple of felony charges and ended up with first offender's probation, meaning that he'll have no record if he successfully completes it.  Chesley started out with an offer of diversion and ended up with a couple of misdemeanor convictions.  I wonder if this has anything to do with the former getting Diana Lenik as a defense attorney and the latter getting Kirchner and Wyman?

According to the Southern Illinoisan, two SIU professors won't be punished for finishing the state ethics test too quickly.

Two Southern Illinois University math professors threatened with firings because they took the state ethics exam too fast will keep their jobs, their lawyer said Tuesday.

Professors Walter Wallis and Marvin Zeman sued the state after being threatened with discipline including firing because the state accused them of breezing through their ethics test too quickly to have fully understood the material.

Their lawyer, Ralph Lowenstein, said Tuesday Wallis and Zeman reached a legal settlement with the state in which both get to keep their jobs and won't face any discipline. The settlement also acknowledges the two passed the test.

''Basically, I would consider it a complete capitulation on their part,'' Lowenstein said of the state.

Via the N-G (http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2008/04/17/white_women_lead_jury_makeup)

For the third year in a row, more white women than any other demographic group sat in judgment of defendants in Champaign County court cases.

The over-representation of white women and the non-existence of Asian males in the jury pool were among the findings of the fourth annual report of the Champaign County Courtwatching Project.

I'd consider myself moderately pro-choice, but this nauseates me.  http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/24513

Art major Aliza Shvarts '08 wants to make a statement.

Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself "as often as possible" while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.

The goal in creating the art exhibition, Shvarts said, was to spark conversation and debate on the relationship between art and the human body. But her project has already provoked more than just debate, inciting, for instance, outcry at a forum for fellow senior art majors held last week. And when told about Shvarts' project, students on both ends of the abortion debate have expressed shock . saying the project does everything from violate moral code to trivialize abortion.

But Shvarts insists her concept was not designed for "shock value."

"I hope it inspires some sort of discourse," Shvarts said. "Sure, some people will be upset with the message and will not agree with it, but it's not the intention of the piece to scandalize anyone."

The "fabricators," or donors, of the sperm were not paid for their services, but Shvarts required them to periodically take tests for sexually transmitted diseases. She said she was not concerned about any medical effects the forced miscarriages may have had on her body. The abortifacient drugs she took were legal and herbal, she said, and she did not feel the need to consult a doctor about her repeated miscarriages.

Shvarts declined to specify the number of sperm donors she used, as well as the number of times she inseminated herself.

Brian Chesley was found guilty this afternoon on both counts.

There's a blog post from last year at http://www.illinipundit.com/2007/03/31/crash%2C-champaign-style .  Kirchner and Wyman found it and decided to subpoena me, so I got served around 9 PM the night before I was supposed to testify.  This didn't make much sense to me, and I pointed out that I hadn't even seen anything but the aftermath and most of the post was hearsay.  But I had to come anyhow, and so did Gina Jackson and Mike LaDue, who hadn't seen any more than I did.

It seemed odd that there was no witness preparation - no interview, no discussion of what people were supposed to do in court, or anything.  Gina and Mike said that there hadn't been any preparation with them either.  While we were waiting out in the hall, we met another local attorney who had a pretty good reputation, and I described the situation to him and asked if this how defense lawyers normally operated.  He said it would probably be best not to answer that question.

The second day we were there (the third for Mike LaDue), Wyman told us that they didn't actually need our testimony and we were released from our subpoenas.  This didn't seem too professional, and I was curious whether they were doing any better inside the courtroom.  I noticed that the defendant was wearing a T-shirt, baggy pants, and a hooded sweatshirt, and wondered whether they'd gotten around to discussing issues like courtroom attire with him.  Someone told me that some of the defense witnesses were contradicting each other as well as the police, and Kirchner didn't seem too happy about that.

After Gina Jackson was released as a defense witness without testifying, the state called her.  I talked to another attorney I knew that evening about the trial, and he explained some things to me.  He said that jurors are sometimes impressed by sheer numbers of witnesses, so Kirchner and Wyman might have some testify and let the jurors believe that other witnesses who are not called would have said the same thing.  So if that was the case, it wouldn't have mattered whether I'd actually seen anything - I would have just been subpoenaed to push up the number of defense witnesses.

What really bothered me about the whole case was that it seemed like the defendant might just be a pawn.  Some other people I talked with expressed similar concerns.  Someone told me that Kirchner was one of the people who'd urged the defendant to turn down the state's diversion offer.  So the kid now has a misdemeanor conviction instead of a clean record.

There's an interesting article in the Trib about Blago defending a pardon for Chandra Gill.  Gill is currently an administrator for the Loop Lab School, which had rented space in the Pilgrim Baptist Church before it was destroyed by fire.  Gill was convicted in 2002 of assaulting off-duty Urbana officer Al Johnston.  She petitioned in 2006 for a pardon, and Blago granted it in 2007.

Gov. Rod Blagojevich's administration presented a confusing picture Wednesday of what his office knew about a woman who received a criminal pardon from the governor in 2007, even as her school received a $1 million state grant to reopen after being burned out of the Pilgrim Baptist Church.

Blagojevich ducked out of a news conference Wednesday morning without answering questions about why he granted the pardon to Chandra N. Gill, who at the time was working with state officials to obtain the grant for the Loop Lab School. The school had rented space at the church until it was gutted in a 2006 fire.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-mistaken_grant_webmar06,1,994978.story

Here are some related stories:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ap-il-moneymistake-pard,0,570522.story

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-pilgrim-baptistmar05,0,6636685.story

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-pilgrim-baptist.04mar04,0,7744993.story

 Update: There's a related article in the News-Gazette at http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2008/03/13/exofficer_upset_by_pardon .  Another officer involved wasn't too pleased when she heard about the pardon, and she also questioned the $1 million being given to the Loop Lab School.

From Tom Kacich's column in yesterday's N-G:

Feuding Democrats

One of the sidelights of the recent primary election was the continuing feud among Champaign County Democrats.  It even came down to one faction of the local Dems trying to boot a member of the other group -- county board member Brendan McGinty -- off the ballot.

Attorney Ruth Wyman led a legal effort to have McGinty thrown off the primary ballot (he wasn't) because his five sheets of nominating petitions were not numbered in order.

"I think it's extremely important not only to maintain the integrity of the electoral process, but also to maintain appearance of that process," Wyman said in a Dec. 1 News-Gazette story.

It turns out, though, that McGinty wasn't the only Democrat to turn in what Wyman would consider flawed petitions.  Two other county board candidates submitted multiple pages of petitions that were not numbered at all.  Incumbent board member Michael Richards' four pages of petitions weren't numbered, nor were challenger Pattsi Petrie's six pages.

Wyman was out of town and unavailable for comment.  When he was informed, McGinty just laughed and said, "There are a lot of things I could say, but I won't."

It looks like Jon White pleaded guilty in Champaign County and is expected to plead guilty in McLean County as well.

http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2008/02/20/white_pleads_guilty_to_sexual_abuse_charges

Obama's projected to win Washington and Nebraska in the Dem primary, and he's ahead in LA (with 30% of the votes in).  McCain apparently has the GOP nomination sewn up, but I wonder if the Dems will end up with a brokered convention?

This month, I got two letters asking me to serve as an election judge.  However, this would involve a 13-14 hour day and I couldn't leave my puppy alone for that long.  Doggie daycare also wouldn't be an option.  When I called the county clerk's office to ask whether I could bring her with me, I was told no.  So I was unable to serve.  Just out of curiosity, why can't election judges bring well-behaved dogs with them?