Anyone wondering the importance of the nation’s riverways should look no further than the Midwest, where a backup to beat all backups has been going on the last few days.

Most of it is dispelled now, but for a while the Mississippi River looked like a parking lot with dozens of tows and hundreds of barges waiting to get through damaged Lock 27 in Granite City. Some of the vessels were moored all the way north of Alton, miles away. Other operators were simply porting wherever they could find room until they could make their way downstream (or, for some, upstream).

Obviously anyone looking at a map can see all the waterways north of Granite City that feed into the Mississippi, including from the Illinois River, which carries a lot of freight. What they might not realize is that roughly half the nation’s farm exports pass through those locks, making the shutdown worrisome at a time growers are completing corn harvests.

That concept might not be clear, but every commodity delayed to the market can affect the price bottom line. And that’s a concept everyone with a wallet can understand.

What transpired at Lock 27 was a bit of an anomaly, a perfect storm of occurrences that made the shutdown a rarity. A split in a steel, cylindrical protection cell dumped rock from inside the cell into the approach for the locks, blocking their use. Such cells are designed to protect the lock wall and help direct barges into the locks. This particular cell is normally under water but was exposed by this year’s drought, causing additional wear.

The mess had to be cleaned up before anything could be restarted, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and contractors spent most of five days flying by the seats of their pants to get the job done. It was a yeoman’s effort, a temporary fix until permanent repairs can be made.

The Mississippi River is the main artery of the largest inland navigation system in the world and Lock 27 is the busiest of the locks on the river. It’s also the last hurdle going south before the Gulf of Mexico. More than 73 million tons of cargo moves through each year, and an unscheduled closure can cost more than $2 million per day.

What we saw at the peak of the shutdown was a line of 455 barges waiting to get through — the estimated equivalent of 26,500 large semi-trucks. Imagine that kind of blockage on Interstate 255.

It’s imperative for the national commerce that shipping navigation remains unfettered, and that means constant attention to our system of locks, which is a growing challenge. This event could well reflect a pattern of things to come, depending in part on Mother Nature.

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Sept. 22, 2012

Belleville News-Democrat

Public safety is possible in East St. Louis with the right leadership, resources

Summer is usually the deadliest time in East St. Louis, but not this year. In 2010 the city had 13 homicides and in 2011, 10. This year there were just two between June 1 and Sept. 17.

It’s no coincidence that June 1 was the date that St. Clair County State’s Attorney Brendan Kelly filed charges against the Crown Food Mart and nightclubs and convened a special grand jury focused on East St. Louis locations most often connected to violent crime — public housing, liquor stores, nightclubs and derelict properties.

The strategy is to take away the breeding grounds for trouble. “If you have a location that is lawless, even minor crime, it gives rise to a larger sense of lawlessness,” Kelly said.

U.S. Attorney Stephen Wigginton and other federal agencies are aiding in the effort, and the understaffed city Police Department has increased the number of cases charged by 74 percent this year.

The numbers should give hope to a community that often has too little of it. To the people who thought it was impossible to turn around East St. Louis: Maybe you’re wrong. Maybe it is possible to make East St. Louis a safe place to live and work once again.

That would benefit not just East St. Louis but the entire metro-east area. Our region’s potential has been stunted by the violence associated with East St. Louis. Imagine the untapped potential if the city that is the front door to the metro-east was a safe place once again.

Making the change permanent depends in large part on local, state and federal leaders ensuring that the dollars and personnel keep flowing to law enforcement efforts like SOS and WAVE. The Illinois State Police need to continue to back up city police. And a newly formed police commission needs to get city TIF funds redirected to law enforcement. If there was ever an appropriate use of collected TIF funds, this is it.

It’s not easy to find dollars in these difficult economic times, but our leaders can’t afford to let these gains slip away. Millions of dollars have been squandered over the years trying to improve East St. Louis, but with Kelly’s leadership taxpayers can have confidence that this would be money well spent.

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Sept. 21, 2012

The (Springfield) State Journal-Register

Our Opinion: Medicaid reforms may take time

A tit-for-tat developed Sept. 17 when the two Republican legislative leaders called a news conference to complain that Gov. Pat Quinn’s administration isn’t moving fast enough to boot ineligible recipients from the state’s Medicaid program.

Trimming $350 million from the Medicaid budget by “scrubbing” those who don’t qualify to be in the program is a part of a $2.7 billion plan in the state budget to stop the growth in the program, which has skyrocketed.

During the Blagojevich administration, the Department of Healthcare and Family Services did not put much effort into figuring out who really was eligible for Medicaid each year. Basically, it was up to the recipients to tell the state if they were no longer eligible, and few did.

Before the latest Medicaid reform measure passed in May, the department already started trimming the rolls by kicking anyone out of the program whose eligibility card was returned to the state with an out-of-state forwarding address. Non-residents of Illinois obviously are not eligible for the state’s Medicaid program. As of August, the department says it removed more than 13,000 recipients because they lived out of state, had their cards returned by the postal service as undeliverable or were dead.

In the latest round of Medicaid reforms, Quinn and legislators from both parties agreed that given the staffing limitations at the department, they should hire a third-party to help the state determine who else is ineligible.

Under the reforms, the state had 90 days to put out a contract for bid and hire the qualifying firm, a deadline the department has met. But now it will take until January before the firm will start working.

“It’s our understanding that once you sign the contract, you begin,” said Sara Wojcicki Jimenez, a spokeswoman for House Minority Leader Tom Cross, R-Oswego.

But that’s not the case, said department spokesman Mike Claffey. Now that the firm, Maximus, has been hired, it has to do a few things before it begins work, including:

–Establish a call center with space, furniture and computers

–Hire and train staff

–Strike agreements with various entities that provide data

–Train state workers to use their system

“It would be impossible to get all this work done in a week or two,” Claffey said. “There’s no such thing as an off-the-shelf service that can come in and carry out a task of this complexity overnight or in a week or two.”

It seems reasonable to give the state the benefit of the doubt here. There often is a disconnect between lawmakers and legislative staff, their expectations and what is possible for the agency to do, particularly in the addled condition that state government finds itself.

We reject the idea that the Quinn administration is dragging its feet to gain some kind of political advantage with those who might find themselves ejected from Medicaid. That’s pretty desperate, even for a governor whose political skills have earned him an approval rating of 42 percent.

However, the Republicans make an important point. The state does not have $100 million sitting around if the Medicaid reform law falls far short of its savings goals. The Quinn administration needs to move expeditiously and aggressively to implement the law so it does not find itself with its hand out for more money later or forced to cut eligibility standards further. Enough people already have been hurt by the cuts that have been made.

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Sept. 21, 2012

Chicago Sun-Times

Texting and driving: Dumb and dumber

Nearly everyone knows it’s dumb. Nearly everyone knows it’s dangerous.

And most of us probably know it’s illegal in Illinois.

Yet, we continue to text and drive.

More reminders every day, and in every way possible, are clearly in order.

Last Wednesday was one of those days. As part of a national initiative spearheaded by AT&T, Gov. Pat Quinn and Secretary of State Jesse White urged Illinois drivers to take a pledge to never text and drive again. AT&T, as part of its “It Can Wait” campaign, also enlisted Chicago Bulls player Derrick Rose to star in a public service announcement.

It’s just the latest effort to try to snap us out of cellphone-induced haze. Public agencies in Illinois have been at this a while already, ticketing law-breakers, posting reminders on electronic highway signs, and even posting the number of highway deaths. That tally, of course, is regularly updated.

What other reminder could we possibly need?