Prairie State Wire

The above picture was taken by Kirk Allen, a resident of Kansas, Illinois, fire chief, and co-founder of the Edgar County Watchdogs.  

The water coming out of the fire hydrant is the same water that comes out of the faucets in homes in the area. According to Mr. Allen, the water has been this way for 10 years. A local Facebook group regularly provides photos and comments about the putrid water that they are expected to drink and bathe in and for which they pay monthly bills.

The reason this issue caught my eye is that just one day after Governor Pritzker signed his $53.1 billion budget, he issued a press release announcing in 24-pt type that 32 communities across Illinois would share $41 million in funding for Community Development Block Grants for public infrastructure. In relative terms, $41 million doesn’t even register as a rounding error in the $53.1 billion budget. But that’s part of the game— Pritzker knows that to most voters $41 million sounds like a huge amount. In this case, divided among 32 communities, it is on average less than $1.3 million and won’t come close to fixing the significant problem in Kansas.  

Interested in finding out about what the grant would be used for and if the need existed, I contacted Allen since I knew he lived in Kansas. That’s when he sent me the picture. On the phone, he was thrilled that Kansas was getting help from the state to fix their water problem. He told me that every main in the community needed to be replace and that the community, alone, cannot afford to fix a problem this large that had been neglected for decades. Much of Kansas’ water system has not been replaced since it was installed in 1914.

Additionally, the town also has no sewer system to speak of. They rely on septic tanks and leach fields that often overflow with excess seeping into nearby streams that are tributaries to rivers. 

Allen called me back a day later with news that the $1.3 million was not going to water main replacement but instead to replace the old water tower. In his opinion, the water tower is the last part of the system that needs to be fixed.

This story has numerous facets to it that should concern Illinoisans no matter what side of the political aisle one stands on. First, no Illinoisan should have a water system as broken as the one in Kansas. Whether it is due to mismanagement or lack of local funding, our state should prioritize clean and affordable drinking water to all communities. This includes making lead pipe replacement in Chicago a priority, where 400,000 service lines need to be replaced. The estimated time and cost to replace those lead service lines is 50 years and $8 billion, which tells you just how bad the problem is due to neglect by local officials.

Second, no one should argue that clean, affordable water shouldn’t be the top priority when it comes to infrastructure projects. Illinois has the money to do much more to help communities struggling to upgrade life-saving infrastructure but instead, Pritzker’s budget foolishly funds billions to non-profits and illegal aliens. This year’s budget officially spends nearly a billion dollars for illegal immigrant support, and that number is likely higher as not all money is tracked based on citizenship status.

Pritzker’s budget  also funds over a billion dollars to non-profits that do not provide essential services. If $41 million sounds like a big number to help poor communities with water problems, why not double that to $82 million. Pritzker could simply cut grants to chambers of commerce which are private business associations, and nebulous other entities. The Indo-Asian Center gets $3 million to help new immigrants figure out how to get government benefits—more than twice the amount Kansas gets to help give residents clean water. Here’s a short list of other bogus grants to bogus institutions that the public should not fund:  

• Puerto Rican Cultural Center    $1 million

• Institute for Positive Living        $1 million

• New Life Centers            $1 million

• Austin People Action Center    $1 million

• NAACP of Illinois State Conference     $1 million

• HACIA (Hispanic Organization)    $3.2 million

• Meet Chicago Northwest        $1 million

• Irish American Cultural Center    $ 500,000

There are thousands of these grants totaling over one billion dollars in the budget.

Illinoisans should be outraged at this misallocation of resources. Taxpayers should be incensed that their money is being wasted on identitarian groups that have no public purpose. Residents suffering from lack of clean water and modern sewer systems for years should be asking questions to every politician from city council to their state legislators about funding priorities.

Wealthy communities would never put up with this situation. This last session, the do-gooder environmentalists and virtue-signaling progressives were more concerned about CO2 pipeline legislation than the environmental hazard of sewage seeping into rivers and lack of clean drinking water in poor communities.

The next time Governor Pritzker mentions Illinois’ trillion-dollar economy and world class institutions, someone needs to ask him if he has drank the water in Kansas.