The above picture was taken by Kirk Allen, a resident of Kansas, Illinois, a community 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, it has been this way for 10 years. A local Facebook group regularly posts photos and comments about the putrid water that people 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 it won’t come close to fixing as significant a problem as Kansas has.
Interested in finding out more about what the grant would be used for and if a 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 its water problem. He told me every main in the community needed to be replaced and that the community alone could not afford to fix a problem this large that was neglected for decades. Much of Kansas’ water system has not been replaced since first installed in 1914.
Additionally, the town has no sewer system. It relies on septic tanks and leach fields, which often overflow, with excess seeping into nearby streams, which are tributaries to rivers.
Allen called me back a day later with the news that the $1.3 million was not going to replace the water main 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 for 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 $8-10 billion and 50 years, which tells you just how bad the problem has gotten from neglect by local officials.
Secondly, 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 spends officially nearly a billion dollars for illegal immigrant support, 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 the public should not fund:
There are thousands of these grants costing over one billion dollars in the budget.
Illinoisans should be outraged at the misallocation of resources. Taxpayers should be incensed that their money is being wasted on identitarian groups with no public purpose. Residents who have been suffering from a lack of clean water and modern sewer systems for years should ask every politician, from city council to state legislators, about funding priorities.
Wealthy communities would never tolerate this situation. This last session, the do-gooder environmentalists and virtue-signaling progressives were more concerned about CO2 pipeline legislation than the environmental hazards of sewage seeping into rivers and the lack of clean drinking water in poorer communities.
Governor Pritzker brags about Illinois’ trillion-dollar economy and the 5th highest GDP in America. In speech after speech, he mentions our world-class institutions in healthcare, education, and industry. He spends taxpayer money lavishly on his green energy fantasies, in in one year promising EV companies Gotion and Rivian a total of $1.3 billion of our tax money. He announced a year ago his plan to spend $41 billion on roads and bridges in the next 6 years. But, in parts of Illinois, thousands cannot turn on the tap and have clean, safe water come out. To add more insult, Democrats enshrined in state law a fundamental right to an abortion. Why isn’t it a fundamental right to have clean and affordable water?