WBEZ | Science

Architect’s Pilsen vision is green and fashion friendly

Fri, 17 May 2013 16:23:00 -0500

Architect Patricia Saldaña Natke grew up on the 4800 block of South Marshfield Avenue, in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood. Her parents, immigrants from Mexico, worked in the Stockyards.

Some days after school, Saldaña Natke would take the bus away from her aging, blue collar neighborhood with its bungalows and smoke stacks, up to the Loop, and marvel at the sparkling skyscrapers and expansive public parks in the city’s downtown.

“I would look at the beautiful buildings and wonder why those kinds of spaces weren’t in existence where I lived,” Saldaña Natke recalled. “That’s the reason I became an architect; I felt that public places should be the greatest in the area of most need.”

Saldaña Natke channeled those beliefs into UrbanWorks, the architecture and planning firm she founded, which specializes in socially and environmentally conscious planning and design work -- the kind she dreamed about as a kid. She’s set her sights on one Chicago hood in particular: Pilsen.

“[Pilsen] needs to be a place where people can move upward in mobility,” Saldaña Natke said. “The entire core of why I work in Pilsen comes to the fact that there are neighborhoods that need a lot of attention.”

UrbanWorks’ previous Pilsen projects include a college dormitory intended to help keep students from the neighborhood on the path to academic success, a high school designed to resemble the copper canyons of Mexico and Saldaña Natke’s most ambitious project: a master plan for Pilsen.

In architecture and planning circles, a master plan is a grand vision for the future development of a neighborhood.

“It’s much more than a wish list,” Saldaña Natke said. “It may be implemented slightly different than the plan shows, but the core of it should remain intact.”

This plan isn’t funded, but Saldaña Natke is working with 25th Ward Alderman Danny Solis and the Department of Housing and Economic Development to assemble funds to inch her vision along.

Saldaña Natke consulted with Pilsen residents in a series of community meetings, including a neighborhood-wide meeting at Providence of God Catholic Church in 2004. The resulting plan aims to build on Pilsen’s assets: its strong Mexican cultural heritage, its historic architecture.

“The community says church steeples are its high rises,” Saldaña Natke said.

It calls for a main commercial drag zoned for pedestrian use and access to the Chicago River.

The plan also addresses what Saldaña Natke says are the neighborhood’s challenges: While the west side of Pilsen is served by the CTA’s Pink, Green and Orange Lines, the east side has few transportation options, leaving the neighborhood disconnected.

And, there is a surprising lack of green space in Pilsen. According to Saldaña Natke, the city requires two acres of green space for every 1,000 Chicago residents.

“But the Park District just said to us that the recommended amount is four acres of green space,” she said. “[Pilsen] is over 18 acres short.”

So, UrbanWorks’ master plan starts there. Saldaña Natke envisions more green space along the neighborhood’s largely industrial waterfront, and the transformation of an abandoned, surface-level railway that runs along Sangamon Street into a stretch of park—something like New York’s High Line or the Northwest Side’s Bloomingdale Trail, only without the elevation. Then, she hopes to transform the abandoned buildings that line the railroad into a fashion and textile incubator.

A fashion incubator?

Yes, Saldaña Natke says.

“You shouldn’t need to go to 900 North Michigan or Michigan Avenue to see all the high-end fashion shows. Why can’t it be in the neighborhoods?”

You can hear Saldaña Natke describe her dream in more detail in the audio above.

Dynamic Range showcases hidden gems unearthed from Chicago Amplified’s vast archive of public events and appears on weekends. Patricia Saldana Natke spoke at an event presented by the Chicago Architecture Foundation in April of 2013. Click here to hear the event in its entirety.

Robin Amer is a producer on WBEZ’s digital team. Follow her on Twitter @rsamer.

Violence in the streets can start in the home

Fri, 17 May 2013 07:51:00 -0500

Ubaldina is a mother of six, who works the night shift at a packing company so she can be there when her kids come home from school.

She’s raising her kids alone now. She said her husband abused her verbally and physically almost every weekend.

“He came home drunk one day,” Ubaldina said. “I was pregnant with my 12-year-old. And the police came home and arrested him because they found him hitting me. I was on the floor with my face covered in blood.”

Ubaldina said she didn’t have the strength to end the relationship, until her husband tried to abuse her oldest daughter.

“I woke up,” she said. “I didn't make any noise or turn on the lights. I was going to the bathroom and everything was dark. I went back and heard my daughter’s bed moving and that’s when I opened the door and I found him there, but my daughter had no clothes on.”

All of her children slept in that bedroom. They watched what happened next.

“I took him out of the room,” Ubaldina said. “ I slapped him in the face twice and pushed him out. I was so angry that I remember going to the kitchen sink and grabbing a knife. I wanted to kill him.”

Ubaldina took her kids out of their house and waved down a cop car. Juvenal, her oldest son who is now 16, was terrified.

“That really got to me. I wanted to like, already be grown so I could beat up my dad. I wanted to beat him up, and I got so mad.” Juvenal said.

His dad was arrested, convicted and is still in prison. Ubaldina said her kids got some counseling at the time, but nothing to deal with all the domestic violence they witnessed at home.

Today, eight years later, Juvenal and his younger sister still struggle with anger. They’ve both been arrested for getting into fights at school.

“My anger is like when you feel the blood is coming up to your head and is not working back now. You get this nervous feeling and your hands ball up,” Juvenal said.

Experts say that anger can lead to violence on the streets if youth, like Juvenal, have ties to local gangs. They’re finding a link between domestic violence and youth involvement in gangs that goes largely unreported.

“Domestic violence is basically at the root of much of the violence that we see here in the streets,” said Father Dave Kelly of Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation. He teaches at-risk youth -- even rival gang members -- how to resolve their disputes peacefully.

“Most of the kids whom we deal with, youth who are locked up, speak of the violence they had to endure a big part of their life,” Father Kelly said.

Several other agencies say they’re seeing the same pattern.

CeaseFire Illinois, the local branch of Cure Violence, tries to “interrupt” violence before it erupts in the streets. More and more, leaders there say, they’re being asked to intercede in homes, too.

But there’s no single way to measure how big the problem is in Chicago. The Chicago Division of Domestic Violence said it doesn’t collect data on the number of minors who witness violence at home. They referred me to the Chicago Office of Violence Prevention, which doesn’t collect such data either.

“The primary challenge is to find a unique way to count children,” said Chicago Office of Violence Prevention Director Marlita White. “That is going to continue to be a difficult thing, because you are dependent on internal resources of very different departments. And often times you have a child who may be exposed to domestic violence, but also to community violence or to child abuse or neglect.”

The Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority collects some data from state-funded domestic violence programs. They said of the 22 state-funded domestic violence organizations in Chicago, more than 11,000 victims of domestic violence sought services last year. Those clients had a total of more than 20,000 children, but only 1,348 of them were identified as witnesses of domestic violence, and also received some type of supportive service.

Domestic violence groups said victims of domestic violence like Ubaldina are often afraid to come forward themselves. They’re also hesitant to acknowledge their kids witnessed the violence and are in need of services. The leaders of those groups said there is no uniform intake form that asks that information.

Some of those agencies like Mujeres Latinas en Accion are starting to identify and treat these young people, but they lack resources and can serve only small pockets of the population. But even when the resources are there, it can be hard to fight the influence of gangs over kids like Juvenal who have seen violence at home.

Juvenal said if he has trouble at home or if he’s being bullied and no one is around to protect him, the gangs are there.

“It’s easy man. It’s really easy. If what you need is protection, they are gonna throw it at you,” he said.

His mom said the gangs have been after him since he was 13. He also has cousins who are already gang members.

What stands between Juvenal and the gangs is the aid of one cop.

Officer Rafael Yañez mentors Juvenal and other at-risk youth. He founded an organization called Union Impact Center that provides after-school sports and mentoring.

On his own time, Yañez picks up Juvenal and his sisters every Saturday and drives them to a local gym.

“He is running away from the problems and the male figures and the real role models that he has are not the most positive ones, but are the only ones there,” Yañez said.

Juvenal sits up front so they can talk. Juvenal tells Yañez his plans of building a recording studio in his room. At the gym, they talk about the importance of keeping good grades for college and, as usual, they play ball.

Yañez said it’s hard for Juvenal to control his anger and that gets him in trouble.

“There was a time where I had to be in his high school, I was called by the principal maybe every week. Sometimes every other day to come and talk to him about his behavior,” he said, adding that’s slowed down since the pair started working together.

And he said Juvenal’s mom, Ubaldina, calls him when her son comes home late or breaks the rules.

“I prayed to God so my kid would not accept to join the gangs,” Ubaldina said.

Despite all of this support, there are ongoing pressures for Juvenal. His family lives in a crowded apartment. The TV is always on, and his younger siblings play everywhere.

At home he loses his temper easily. Ubaldina worries because her son is growing up without a father. And if he wants to go out, the gangs are right there.

“My perimeter is where I live and how I get to school, that’s it. You know like sometimes I get mad because I can’t go places that some of my friends can go to,” Juvenal said.

He lives with a constant reminder of the looming violence just across the street. It’s a memorial made of stuffed animals and beer cans.

A young man* who lives nearby stooped to clear garbage away from it and said the altar’s there to remember a friend who was shot three years ago, on Thanksgiving.

“All his friends gathered up before going back to their families for Thanksgiving and I guess they thought they were gangbangers and started shooting at the group, and he is the one that got shot,” the neighborhood resident said.

So Juvenal sees this every day. And he said he stays inside as much as he can. He’s trying to figure out how to build that recording studio in his bedroom using foam and cardboard.

But the lure of the streets is evident even in his favorite rap tune, “Knuck if You Buck.” He likes the song because he said it reminds him to always stand strong.

But even though Juvenal’s trying to stay out of a gang, he knows one more fight could change everything. If he joins, he said he’ll have to get tattooed, carry their guns and sell their drugs.

When I ask Juvenal where he sees himself in five years, he said he isn’t sure if he’ll even make it that far.

*Name withheld by WBEZ to protect the family’s confidentiality. And WBEZ isn’t using the last names of the family in this story to protect their confidentiality, given the nature of the abuse.

Calumet brain trust tackles environmental issues across state line

Thu, 16 May 2013 18:24:00 -0500

Although county lines parcel out the southern shore of Lake Michigan like garden plots, the environmental issues that unify people from Michigan City, Ind. to Chicago do not respect political boundaries.

Nor do most economic issues. Industrial decay and depopulation have left communities throughout the greater Calumet region with some common problems, as well as shared opportunities.

That was the message from the inaugural Calumet Summit, a conference convened this week in Gary, Indiana’s lakefront Marquette Park by the Calumet Stewardship Initiative.

The summit follows some major moves in the Calumet area, not least of which is the Millennium Reserve initiative, dubbed the nation's largest "open space" project. (Although it might better be described as a regional plan that ties conservation to urban redevelopment.)

After 140 years of heavy industry, many of the region’s factories have closed and left brownfields, violence and unemployment in their wake. And while efforts to rehabilitate the Great Lakes have mopped up some pollution and begun to clamp down on invasive species, a report released Tuesday by the international body that advises Canada and U.S. on the lakes said the area still faces serious challenges. Agricultural runoff, flooding, drought, and the march of both invasive species and a changing climate are among the problems that plague people who call the southern end of Lake Michigan home.

Joel Brammeier, president and CEO of the Alliance for the Great Lakes, said as much Tuesday at the Calumet Summit. The Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, a federal funding program initiated by President Barack Obama’s administration, has enabled environmental work and research in recent years. Perhaps more importantly, Brammeier said, it has brought attention to the region and galvanized those already doing important work on the ground.

"As important as the money is the near-universal expression of support for the program year after year," he said. "That’s really at the heart of the success in moving money to entities on the ground."

Volunteer environmental stewards and planners alike see a future in green development.

Few people articulate that vision better than Lauren Riga. Tapped by Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson to head Gary’s new department of Green Urbanism, 28-year-old Riga previously served as a U.N. delegate at the 2010 climate change conference. About one quarter of Gary's buildings are vacant. As Riga and the mayor look to spur an economic revival, they plan to incorporate green infrastructure into new development. Meanwhile local and state agencies have helped rehabilitate habitat along the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, home to a series of fragile ecosystems known as pannes — wetlands nestled between sand dunes.

"[Riga] represents a new way of thinking for the region," said Andrew Pelloso, an environmental consultant who formerly worked for Indiana’s Department of Environmental Management.

"Everyone seems to see the region by Gary’s fate and fortune so what they do matters," he said.

Whether updating Northwest Indiana's stormwater infrastructure or retrofitting Chicago schoolyards, presenters at the summit emphasized action.

"Between now and the next summit go out and do something," U.S. Rep. Peter Visclosky told the audience, "or everyone will have wasted their time over the two days."

Pelloso said for all the region’s challenges, and the bureaucratic headache it can be to get things done, the conference’s take-home message was affirming.

"We’re bound together by a common resource,” he said. “Not by state lines.”

Chris Bentley writes about environmental issues. Follow him on Twitter at @Cementley.

Keeping an aromatic invader at bay

Tue, 14 May 2013 15:12:00 -0500

Each spring the "Garlic Mustard Challenge," which sounds more like competitive eating than conservation, enlists volunteers around the country for a blitz on an invasive plant that has edged out native species from Maine to Oregon.

In the relative hotbed of biodiversity that is the northern Illinois-Indiana border, however, it only takes a couple faithful stewards to keep the aromatic invader at bay.

John Pastirik and Linda Ruxton live just blocks from Eggers Woods, the Forest Preserve site where they have led weekly garlic mustard pulls every spring for six years.

Pulling the white-flowered weed up from the roots, Ruxton explains how the plants quickly colonize new territory.

“Every single one matters,” she said. “Because they each make thousands of seeds.”

Like most successful invaders, garlic mustard can weather many environmental conditions. It springs up sooner than other understory plants and grows quickly, gaining an edge for sunlight and space on the forest floor.

But they only flower every other year, which gives conservationists a window to cut back the population.

Where Pastirik, Ruxton and other volunteers have cleared the garlic mustard, native plants and wildflowers flourish. Solomon’s Seal, Jack in the Pulpit, and Wild Geranium dot an expanse of Mayapples spanning the forest floor between white, red and burr oaks.

Pastirik, 55, grew up and still lives in the East Side neighborhood where Eggers Grove sits. Pastirik said his five older brothers teased him for taking a census of the preserve’s tree species while he was a Cub Scout, but it hasn’t kept him out of the woods.

Eggers Grove is a series of lowland marshes and slightly raised ridges — remnants of Lake Michigan’s shorelines in its ancient iterations. Severe flooding in recent years has drowned many of the oaks lower along the sloping gradients between ridges. But the high ground is also risky.

Gnawed oak trunks and stumps reveal the recent arrival of beavers. Pastirik says it might be possible to lure them away by planting Aspens or other desirable species nearby, but trapping may be the only way to keep them from chewing through the keystone species of this former oak savanna.

Human use also takes it toll on the preserve. ATVs and dirt bikes, although they are forbidden, have dug tread marks into the trail. Invasive species like garlic mustard latch onto that upturned soil.

“The ruts act like furrows in a farm field,” Pastirik said.

Farther along the trail, where volunteers have not visited lately, the weeds grow almost waist-high. Hoisting an empty fertilizer bag full of uprooted garlic mustard, Ruxton signals to Pastirik where he should bring the crew next week.

Chris Bentley writes about the environment. Follow him on Twitter at @Cementley.

More on methane: EPA reexamines potency of greenhouse gas

Mon, 13 May 2013 17:12:00 -0500

In the debate surrounding the United States' natural gas resources, it is often noted that methane, the primary component of natural gas, is 21 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. There are two main issues with that statement, although that is the figure used by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Carbon dioxide, whose concentration recently reached a long-feared milestone, remains the most important greenhouse gas trapping heat in the atmosphere. But as we open more oil and gas wells, even small amounts of methane leakage could tilt the balance of greenhouse gas emissions from new fossil fuel resources.

The ratio of a molecule’s ability to trap heat, and thus cause global warming, relative to one molecule of carbon dioxide is called its global warming potential. The EPA recently proposed raising raising methane's global warming potential to 25. Amending the number to 25 would be a 19 percent increase — significant, but only keeping pace with revisions codified more than six year ago in the fourth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. The 21 figure used by EPA was first put forth in the 1990s. IPCC upped it to 23 in 2001. Its fifth report is expected later this year.

The other issue is that methane is especially short-lived. Unlike carbon dioxide, which persists in the atmosphere for 500 years, methane only lasts about 12 years in the atmosphere before chemical reactions break it down. EPA typically estimates global warming potentials based on 100-year timescales, but estimated over a 20-year time scale methane could be more than 50 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

Why does that matter? In the short-term, methane and other short-lived gases could exacerbate near-term climate impacts, just as the world struggles to get the real driver (CO₂) under control. One California congressman recently proposed a bill targeting those short-lived pollutants to mitigate near-term climate change.

Researchers at NOAA and the University of Texas at Austin are working on a review of greenhouse gas emissions from natural gas. An EPA revision recently rolled back its estimate of emissions from one part of the fracking process but simultaneously upped its most recent figure for emissions from fracking itself.

Those revisions came on the heels of EPA’s separate announcement that it could raise methane’s global warming potential to 25. In the words of Anthony Ingraffea, a Cornell professor of civil and environmental engineering and noted critic of shale gas production on climate change grounds, “sometimes the EPA giveth, sometimes it taketh away.”

EPA will accept comments on the proposed rule until May 17. Comments should reference docket No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2012-0934.

Huge magnetic ring coming to Chicago’s suburbs via the long road

Mon, 13 May 2013 16:11:00 -0500

Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory in west suburban Batavia has a very unusual shipment coming this summer: an electromagnetic ring so wide its journey will shut down whole highways.

The ring, which looks like a huge hula-hoop, currently resides at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, where it’s been used to conduct high-level experiments on tiny subatomic particles called muons.

“We use them to probe the basic underlying structure of particle physics,” said Chris Polly, a Fermilab physicist. “What are the particles out there, how do they interact at the most fundamental level?” But after being created by high-energy interactions between particles, they only exist for about two millionths of a second.

“Right now, there’s muons passing through you,” Polly said. Those muons sometimes come to earth in “showers” produced by high-energy particle collisions in the earth’s atmosphere; countless invisible muons shower down over wide areas. “We sometimes build experiments that are a mile underground just because we’re trying to get away from the muons.”

Despite being common, muons are elusive and difficult to study. Because the miniscule particles exist so briefly before decaying into electrons and neutrinos, they have to be carefully suspended in a magnetic field for observation. That’s where the magic muon ring comes in: the latest in muon experiments requires a very strong magnetic field, and the way to create that field is through a ring that’s fifty feet in diameter, or about four highway lanes wide.

The muon ring’s massive metal casings can be removed, but the ring itself has to stay in one piece and can’t be tilted more than a few degrees. That means its journey to the western suburbs of Chicago this summer will begin with a barge trip down around the tip of Florida, through the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississippi River to get to Chicago’s waterways. The ring will then get off the boat at Lemont Port to be transported to the Batavia lab using high-tech remote control carts. Between the carts, the ring and the entourage of police officers and scientists, the process is expected to shut down stretches of I-88 and I-355 overnight in July. The entire trip is about 3,200 miles.

Polly’s excited about the ring’s arrival because the previous Muon g-2 (pronounced “g-minus-two”) experiment at the Brookhaven Lab found inconsistencies not predicted by physicists. These anomalous observations could suggest the existence of a previously unknown particle; in other words, the Standard Model of physics could be proven to be incomplete.

The results of the Brookhaven experiment are suggestive but uncertain, mainly because a definitive answer would require 20 to 25 times more data than Brookhaven’s researchers were able to gather with the technology available to them. Fermilab’s advanced accelerator technology, some of which is left over from the now-defunct Tevatron, will allow the the lab to produce the necessary amount of muons for the experiment.

Fermilab broke ground last week on a new experimental lab to accompany the ring, and the ring won’t be ready to experiment with until 2016. At that point, Polly says the experiment is expected to take three to four years to complete. But he says it’s worth the wait.

“It could be a harbinger of new physics,” said Polly. “There could be new particles in the universe.”

The shipping cost for the magnetic donut is 2.5 million dollars, but Fermilab says that’s just a tenth of what it would cost to build a new one.

You can watch a demonstration of the ring’s mode of transportation and follow its actual movement this summer on the Muon g-2 website.

Lewis Wallace is a Pritzker Journalism Fellow at WBEZ. Follow him @lewispants.

Boogaard family sues NHL for son's death

Mon, 13 May 2013 12:39:00 -0500

The family of a National Hockey League player who died of an accidental overdose of pain medication and alcohol has filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the NHL, blaming it for brain damage he suffered as an enforcer and for his addiction to prescription painkillers.

Derek Boogaard, who was found dead on May 13, 2011, at age 28, was posthumously diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain ailment that can be caused by repeated blows to the head, according to the 55-page lawsuit filed in Cook County Circuit Court late Friday.

One of the attorneys who filed the lawsuit, William Gibbs, said Monday the NHL profited from Boogaard's physical abilities as team doctors dispensed "pain pills like candy" after he suffered repeated injuries.

"The NHL drafted Derek Boogaard because it wanted his massive body to fight in order to enhance ratings, earnings and exposure," Gibbs said. "Then, once he became addicted to these narcotics, the NHL promised his family that it would take care of him. It failed."

Boogaard's mother echoed that sentiment.

"He was there protecting his teammates at all costs, but who was there to protect him?" Joanne Boogaard said in a statement release by her attorneys.

The lawsuit says the NHL couldn't claim ignorance about the consequences to Boogaard.

"Prior to and during Derek Boogaard's career, the NHL knew, or should have known, that the Enforcers/Fighters in the NHL had an increased risk of brain damage due to concussive and sub-concussive brain trauma and were particularly susceptible to addiction issues," it says.

Boogaard scored only three goals in his six-season career in 277 regular season games but took part in at least 66 on-ice fights; in the 2008-2009 season with the Minnesota Wild, he received 1,021 prescriptions from NHL team physicians, dentists, trainers and staff, the lawsuit says.

In April, 2011, the NHL "knew, or should have known, that Derek Boogaard, a known drug addict, with probable brain damage due to concussive brain traumas sustained in NHF fights, was not complying with treatment (at a treatment center)," the suit alleges.

NHL Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly told The Associated Press in an email Sunday night that league has not received the lawsuit and generally does not comment on pending litigation. The suit was filed in Illinois in part because the NHL has a business interest in the state through the Chicago Blackhawks and Boogaard "engaged in one-ice fights during his NHL career" in Chicago, the filing says.

"To distill this to one sentence, you take a young man, you subject him to trauma, you give him pills for that trauma, he becomes addicted to those pills, you promise to treat him for that addiction, and you fail," William Gibbs, attorney for the Boogaards, told The New York Times.

Boogaard was under contract with the New York Rangers at the time of his death. He played his first five NHL seasons with the Minnesota Wild and one season with the Rangers after signing a four-year, $6.5 million contract with New York in July 2010.

Boogaard sustained a concussion during his last game on Dec. 9, 2010. Known as one of the league's toughest fighters, the 6-foot-7, 255-pound Boogaard played 277 NHL games, scored three goals and racked up 589 penalty minutes.

Boogaard's family filed a lawsuit against the NHL Players Association last September, seeking $9.8 million, but it was dismissed this spring. The family said the union, after expressing interest in helping pursue a case against the league, missed a deadline for filing a grievance. A judge ruled the family waited too long to act and dismissed the case.

The latest lawsuit details the treatment Boogaard received from team doctors of the Rangers and Minnesota Wild, and the officials from the league's Substance Abuse and Behavioral Health Program, which oversaw Boogaard's care after he entered rehabilitation while playing for the Wild in 2009.

Illinois Lt. Gov supports medical marijuana

Mon, 13 May 2013 07:51:00 -0500

Lt. Gov. Sheila Simon said she is in favor of a bill allowing the medical use of marijuana, explaining Sunday that testimony from seriously ill veterans and other patients helped change her mind.

"As a former prosecutor my first reaction was, 'I'm not interested in changing our laws on medical marijuana,'" she told The Associated Press in an interview Sunday.

But she said that after hearing from patients and reading up on the bill, she's convinced the regulations are strict enough.

Backers of the measure, which has cleared the Illinois House and awaits a Senate vote, have said the same thing.

The plan, touted as the strictest in the nation among states that have legalized medical marijuana, would authorize physicians to prescribe marijuana to patients with whom they have an existing relationship and who are living with at least one of more than 30 medical conditions, including cancer.

The proposal creates a framework for a pilot program that includes requiring patients and caregivers to undergo background checks. It also sets a 2.5-ounce limit per patient per purchase and sets out state-regulated dispensaries.

Supporters say marijuana can relieve continual pain without the detrimental side effects of prescription drugs. But opponents say the program could encourage recreational use, especially among teenagers.

The Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police and the Illinois Sheriffs' Association are opposed to the measure, saying there's no sure way to figure out whether a motorist is driving under the influence of marijuana.

But Simon told the AP the bill is strict enough to prevent misuse.

"It does a good job of both getting medical marijuana to people who need and keeping it away from those who don't," she said.

Gov. Pat Quinn, a Chicago Democrat, has been noncommittal whether he would sign the bill, saying instead that he is open-minded to the idea.

Simon is weighing a run for another statewide office instead of seeking another term as lieutenant governor. The Carbondale Democrat declined Sunday to say which office she will run for, saying she will wait to see how other shape up.

Simon is likely choosing between Illinois' attorney general, comptroller or treasurer. In recent months, Simon has played up her law-related background and accomplishments including as a pro bono lawyer and prosecutor.

Her decision comes as the 2014 governor's race is heating up and Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan is weighing a possible challenge to Quinn.

Englewood seeks celebrity help to keep school open near urban garden

Fri, 10 May 2013 09:05:00 -0500

Students at Yale Elementary enjoy spring weather during recess. Laughter wafts from the playground. Girls in school uniforms chat in the grass, away from younger students.

Next to the school, on 70th Street and Princeton Avenue, is a vast garden, larger than most backyard gardens. Adult volunteers massage the soil to plant daffodils the color of bright sunshine.

In the summer, this mini-farm—with the help of children—will grow tomatoes, greens and dill. The garden is called Eat to Live, and the kids even learn a little bit about urban agriculture and healthy eating in the classroom. Across the street from the garden there’s land that will become an urban farm this summer. Eat to Live Englewood will provide residents with a permanent space for food production, community learning and disease prevention education. The goal is to reduce health disparities.

But Yale is slated to close at the end of the academic year as part of the Chicago Public Schools controversial plan to shutdown 54 schools.

Pushback against school closings is familiar. Many communities champion their neighborhood school as unique. They argue that a one-size-fits-all policy shouldn’t be used to shut their school down. That’s true for parents at Yale Elementary School. They say the school’s urban garden fits right in with a burgeoning focus on urban agriculture in the larger Englewood community.

Parts of the Englewood neighborhood are in a food desert. Alisa Ivory’s two children attend Yale and she toils in the garden. She and garden neighbor Demetria Scott chat about healthy food and the impact the garden has had on their lives and their childrens’.

"We are some junk food junkies," Ivory says. "And now my idea is turning away from a lot of junk food. Because that’s what it is - junk for your body."

"We went to Aldi’s one day up the street, Michael was like can we get some plain yogurt and some granola. And some bananas. And I said oh, yeah, Michael, we can get that," Scott says.

Behind the garden, on the next street over, is a ghostly boarded-up home. It’s the house singer and actress Jennifer Hudson grew up in—and where members of her family were killed several years ago.

Hudson attended Yale Elementary. As part of its large restructuring plan, Chicago Public Schools is proposing to close Yale and move its students to Harvard Elementary, about a mile away. Both schools are on the bottom of CPS academic ratings in a poverty-stricken neighborhood.

Yvette Moyo is the director of Real Men Charities, which started the Yale Eat to Live garden. At one of the school closing hearings, Moyo revealed an idea.

“At the microphone I said, you could have called Jennifer Hudson and asked her is there something you want to do in the area that you grew up in and an area where tragedy took place. Would you like to see it come back to life again and would you play a role in it,” Moyo recalls.

Moyo just learned that Hudson’s representatives declined her request. But she figures there are other Chicagoans who might like to help make an urban agriculture elementary school. Quincy Jones, maybe, or Lupe Fiasco, Common, or R. Kelly.

The city of Chicago is invested in reducing food instability around the neighborhood.

That’s a big reason Moyo doesn’t want Yale to close.

"The vision we’ve given to the children for two years is that they’re at the cutting edge of everything Chicago will be in the future and that is a part of an urban agriculture movement that not will only provide jobs but businesses for them and their parents, which is what’s really missing - the opportunity to be fruitful and to provide for families and communities," Moyo says. "When we talk about underemployment and the level of literacy the dropout rate of the parents even. This is something that we can provide for the community. And we kind of promised that we’ll be there for them, that they have added value by working in the Eat to Live Garden."

The school garden at Yale is heading into its second season.

Moyo says even if Yale closes at the end of the school year, plans for all the farms will continue.

And she says that’s why she’ll be going after other groups to help keep the school open.

So Moyo says she’ll keep writing letters to celebrities, and holding onto the garden’s mantra: "Everything Good Grows in Englewood."

Natalie Moore is a WBEZ reporter. Follow her @natalieymoore.

A push to stop wasting Lake Michigan water

Tue, 07 May 2013 07:46:00 -0500

The Illinois Department of Natural Resources has proposed an update to the rules for diverting water from Lake Michigan. Northeast Illinois takes hundreds of millions of gallons of water out of the lake daily for municipal use and for diversion into the Chicago area waterway system, but a great deal of the diverted water actually escapes through leaky pipes.

“We waste a lot of money pumping, treating, distributing water that never gets sold,” said Josh Ellis of the non-profit Metropolitan Planning Council.

Ellis estimates that as much as 70 million gallons a day are lost to leaks in aging infrastructure across the region. That’s the equivalent of a Willis Tower full of water every few days, a loss that may not be sustainable as the regional population grows or new municipalities in northeast Illinois move to using Lake Michigan water.

“The time to start thinking and figuring out what needs to be done is now,” said Daniel Injerd, the chief of Lake Michigan management for IDNR. “We need, as an agency, to try to send a stronger message to communities to say it’s really time to start looking at water loss.”

IDNR is in charge of the permits for all Illinois entities who get water out of Lake Michigan, including the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, and for the first time since 1980, the agency is proposing a significant change to the permitting policy. Rather than allowing a certain amount of leakage based on the age of the pipes in a village, town, or city, the new permitting process would require municipalities to account for all their water -- or submit a detailed plan for how to update aging infrastructure. Injerd says more than half of the 215 agencies that now have water allocation permits would be in violation of the leakage limits under the new rule.

The revised water diversion rule also includes more strict limitations on sprinkler use and requirements for water-efficient plumbing in new construction. Finally, the proposed documents suggests, but does not require, that municipalities adjust the price of water to reflect the real cost of moving and treating water and of upgrading water infrastructure.

Ellis thinks the proposed changes should go even further.

“Right now most water rate systems don’t generate enough revenue to cover the full costs of providing water services,” said Ellis. “We’re paying for the pipes, the pumps, the chemicals, the electricity...we feel that IDNR, through its permit conditions can prompt more municipalities to develop rate systems that generate enough revenue to pay for these things.”

Short of raising prices or pulling from other revenue sources, right now municipalities have to seek out state loans to support infrastructure upgrades.

But Injerd says IDNR is not planning to impose requirements on water pricing.

“Probably most of our permittees think that’s not an area we need to delve into,” said Injerd. “It’s really not our role as a state agency to set water rates. But I have no problem recommending that communities develop a water rate that represents the true cost of providing a water supply.”

A 1967 Supreme Court decision limited Illinois’ water diversion from the lake, and it’s the role of the DNR to see that what the state pulls out doesn’t exceed that limit. A full quarter of the water diverted by Illinois is stormwater runoff that would have been returned to Lake Michigan via the waterways before the Chicago River was engineered to flow out of the lake in 1900.

Public comment on the proposed water allocation rule change is open through the end of May, and the Metropolitan Planning Council will be holding an event Tuesday May 8 to discuss Lake Michigan water loss.

Lewis Wallace is a Pritzker Journalism Fellow at WBEZ. Follow him @lewispants.