Naperville City Council Asks Its Public Library to Make Cuts

An alert longtime CB reader took the time to send a link to a Daily Herald story about Naperville’s public library today: The library’s levy request of $12,450,000 for fiscal year 2012 was 3.15 percent, or $400,000 more than the previous year, but city council members asked the board to find and consider as much…

Library Finally Shows Up

DeKalb Public Library (DKPL) showed up for a dog-and-pony show at City Council last night, armed with packets of information that, once again, escaped being received and filed publicly by Council. The only conceivable reason for such a presentation is to rewrite the narrative of its dealings of the past three years into the meeting…

Municipal Election Petition Hearings

[Update 1/7/2011: I think I’ve been too subtle about my position on the municipal petition challenges and have corrected this in the comments today.] I was able to attend one of the election petition challenge hearings this morning, the one with Corey Kravitz as petitioner and First Ward Alderman Bertrand Simpson as respondent. Mr. Simpson…

2010 City of DeKalb Website Transparency Scores

The first task was to select a grading system. The Sunshine Review Transparency Checklist seemed like a good place to start, but its City Websites wiki page lists criteria that are different from the checklist used for rankings and awards. It was confusing, and left the impression that check registers and ethics were casualties of…

First 5 Things the Housing Task Force Should Do

1. Ask the City to find a little space on the front page of its website to advertise upcoming meetings. 2. Review the codes. 3. Request the City conduct public hearings to start a comprehensive evaluation of the fairness and effectiveness of code enforcement activities. 4. Direct the crafting of an electronic survey to incorporate…