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PR’s 1st-year varsity QB Samson Evans named Northwest Herald Player of the Year / C1-2 NWHerald.com
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Village Board levies SSA
COMMUNITIES NATIONWIDE CUTTING VETERAN HOMELESS RATES
Algonquin seeks repayment of work on plaza By CAITLIN SWIECA cswieca@shawmedia.com
Sarah Nader – snader@shawmedia.com
Veteran Kurt Riedel talks with his neighbors Dec. 1 at New Horizons, a transitional-living center in Hebron for homeless veterans. Riedel, who served in the U.S. Navy for two years, has been living at New Horizons for a couple of months.
Stepping up to help County presents opportunities, challenges for homeless veterans By KEVIN P. CRAVER kcraver@shawmedia.com The percentage of homeless Americans who are veterans of the armed forces has decreased for a sixth straight year, according to new federal data. While McHenry County also is seeing a decline – as best as a transient and moving population can be counted – its economy presents
On the Net
leased last month by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development estimates that 47,725 Visit www.tlsveterans.org and www. veterans are homeless on any givpioneercenter.org to learn more about TLS en night, with one-third of them not Veterans and Pioneer Center for Human having shelter. That’s a 35 percent Services. decrease from the 73,367 estimated in 2009. Fifty-one of the homeless people both opportunities and challenges identified in January by a “point-into combating the problem. time” count by McHenry County’s The annual homeless report re- social service agencies identified
themselves as veterans, said Laura Franz, executive director of TLS Veterans, a county agency created in 1996 to get homeless service members off the streets and into housing and jobs. Although area employers have stepped up to help the agency find jobs for many homeless veterans, the cost of living in McHenry
See COUNTY, page A8
ALGONQUIN – Village officials are hoping the structure of Riverside Plaza’s special service area tax levy will help encourage the developer of the complex to convert its apartments into condominiums. The Village Board voted Tuesday to apply a levy to the SSA for the first time. Because the building only has a partial year assessment on the tax rolls right now, the board levied $17,000 rather than the initially planned amount of $70,000. But if the developer were to convert the building’s apartments into condos, the SSA would stop altogether, Community Development Director Russ Farnum said. “The sooner he converts it to condos, the sooner he can stop paying that back,” Farnum said. “The board’s end goal is to get it as condos.” The levy is meant to repay the village for $350,000 in streetscape investments around the building. The mixed-use building, which opened in June after a tumultuous decade-long planning process, had originally been planned as condos before the original developer Aspen Homebuilders went bankrupt.
See SSA, page A2
UN: ‘History will remember this day’ The ASSOCIATED PRESS LE BOURGET, France – Nearly 200 nations adopted the first global pact to fight climate change on Saturday, calling on the world to collectively cut and then eliminate greenhouse gas pollution but imposing no sanctions on countries that don’t. The “Paris agreement”
aims to keep global temperatures from rising another 1.8 Fahrenheit between now and 2100, a key demand of poor countries ravaged by rising sea levels and other effects of climate change. Loud applause erupted in the conference hall after French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius gaveled the agreement. Some delegates wept, others embraced. “It’s a victory for all of the planet and for future generations,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said, adding that the pact will “prevent the
LOCAL NEWS
worst most devastating consequences of climate change from ever happening.” Brazilian Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira added: “Today, we’ve proven that it’s possible for every country to come together, hand in hand, to do its part to fight climate change.” In the pact, the countries pledge to limit the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by human activity to the levels that trees, soil and oceans can absorb naturally, beginning at some point between 2050 and 2100.
In practical terms, achieving that goal means the world would have to stop emitting greenhouse gases – most of which come from the burning of oil, coal and gas for energy – altogether in the next half-century, scientists said. That’s because the less we pollute, the less pollution nature absorbs. Achieving such a reduction in emissions would involve a complete transformation of how people get energy, and many activists worry that
BUSINESS
Turnaround efforts pay off Granddaughter takes failing company and turns it into a 2015 Business Champion / D1 STYLE
Wreaths Across America More than 100 volunteers place wreaths on the graves of veterans in cemeteries in the McHenry, Johnsburg communities / A3
Hope in the midst of pain After tragedy, family opens church to those suffering from loss at the holidays / Style 8
See AGREEMENT, page A9
AP photo
French President Francois Hollande (right), French Foreign Minister and president of the COP21 Laurent Fabius (center) and United Nations Secretary General Ban ki-Moon applaud Saturday after the final conference at the COP21, the United Nations conference on climate change, in Le Bourget, France.
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Nearly 200 nations sign on to landmark climate agreement