Erin Allen: Good morning. Welcome to Wednesday. I'm Erin Allen and this is The Rundown. 

Is your license expired? Has your license been expired for a minute now? After several extensions for Mr. Jesse White, time is basically up. You'll need to get your expired Illinois driver's license your learner's permit or your state ID renewed by tomorrow. The Secretary of State began to laying ID expiration dates during the early months of the pandemic when facilities were shut down. But December 1 is the final deadline. 

So Chicago's Magnificent Mile is known for shopping storefront after luxurious storefront, you pretty much know what you're gonna get as you walk up north Michigan Avenue. But in the past couple of years, many of those stores have become vacant. The pandemic has led to fewer downtown workers, less frequent tourists and dwindling businesses for a once bustling shopping district, which means vacancies on the Mile are at an all time high. In response many Michigan Avenue business owners are looking to pivot. Nichole Benolken manages the 360 observation deck in the Hancock Building. She told WBEZ's daily talk show Reset, that to lure visitors the mag mile should become more entertainment driven.

Nichole Benolken: There's this general push towards mixed use and crafting places that sell for live, play and work. And while that's true for a building, it can certainly be true for a region or a district as well.

Erin Allen: Benolken says adding benches and expanding sidewalks would create more space for visitors to linger and provide more revenue to the downtown area. 

If you heard that conversation with my colleague Adora Namigadde last week on The Rundown, about the water in Dixmoor we have an update. Illinois Congressman Bobby Rush is vowing to fix the ongoing water problems and Chicago south suburbs and Adora tell us more.

Adora Namigadde: The latest watermain break took place on Thanksgiving in the village of Robbins. 100 homes lost water supply. But it's not the first time Robbins or surrounding South Chicago suburbs have experienced unreliable water supply issues. This is why Rush is gathering the Environmental Protection Agency with local mayor's to help create an action plan the meeting will be December 14 in Robbins.

Erin Allen: For more context on this listen to my conversation with Adora Namigadde from last Monday on The Rundown. 

And update for electric vehicle drivers and those thinking about getting one. Illinois is about to move forward with a plan for widespread charging stations. Elizabeth Ervin of the state's Department of Transportation says for the first year, interstate 74 and 80 will be designated alternative fuel corridors. Under the plan IDOT is working on, charging stations must fulfill several requirements.

Elizabeth Ervin: These stations all need to have, you know, the ability to for four vehicles to charge simultaneously, at speeds that will allow sort of an average range EV to charge in under a half an hour. 

Erin Allen: The stations must also be located within one mile of the highway and be equipped with plugs that work with a wide range of EVs. 

And before the weather a few quick hits. Natural gas prices are apparently higher in the suburbs than they are in the city. Nicor Gas is charging suburban customers 60% more than People's Gas in Chicago. Nicor Gas says it sets its prices based on current market fundamentals. And 16 hockey players at St. Ignatius High School are suing the truck driver who plowed into their team bus earlier this month. The lawsuit was filed yesterday in Indiana. The chief executives of Kroger who owns Mariano's, and of Albertsons who owns Jewel-Osco, defended a merger they proposed before a group of senators yesterday. They said the deal to combine the two largest traditional grocery companies in the country would not lead to higher food prices for consumers. We'll keep you updated on what came of that. And if you're more interested in the coop style grocery store, more and more are popping up across Chicago, big and small, from north to south. Monica Eng of Axios and JP Swenson of WBEZ's Curious City made a list of some of those new coops over at wbez.org. 

As for the weather, it is a windy day in the Windy City, with gusts occasionally going over 40 miles per hour. The high today is 32 cloudy and a little rainy. Tonight, still quite windy, but skies will be clear - low around 20 degrees. And that's it for now. Coming up this afternoon. I'll talk with my colleague Amy Qin about Chicagoans for whom English is a second language. Did you know that after Spanish, Mandarin and Cantonese are what bilingual Chicago residents speak most? More about the most common languages spoken in the city, who is speaking them and the broader context of immigration, culture and community. That's coming up today at two o'clock on The Rundown. I'm Erin Allen, talk to you then.

WBEZ transcripts are generated by an automatic speech recognition service. We do our best to edit for misspellings and typos, but mistakes do come through.