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Janu ar y 16 , 2016 • $ 1 .0 0
GATORS RALLY
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Crystal Lake South boys basketball beats Huntley in Fox Valley Conference Valley Division game / C1
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Towns in county tie into GIS Crystal Lake, Huntley use consortium’s network By EMILY K. COLEMAN ecoleman@shawmedia.com
vich, a McHenry-based attorney who hears from between 100 and 200 patients and their families, but only ends up taking one or two cases each year. “Juries look upon doctors as being intelligent, hard working,” Popovich said. “Juries presume that doctors didn’t do anything wrong.”
CRYSTAL LAKE – The day the garbage trucks comes, where residents should go on election day and what the property is zoned. An interactive map that recently went live on the city of Crystal Lake’s website is designed to answer all these questions down to the address. The city joined GIS Consortium, an organization of Chicago-area communities that pool their resources, staffing and technology in the area of geographic information systems, and used the county’s base data as a jumping off point, said Michelle Rentzsch, the city’s community development director. The goal is to give residents and potential developers the ability to find the information they want any time of day – such as through the story maps for community events, businesses and hotels they’re in the process of building, she said. The first one could roll out in the next few months. “The biggest change that we see with their customers is that they want everything 24/7,” Rentzsch said. “They want to see it on their own now. People used to call city hall, but now a majority [of the] people look on the website first.” Crystal Lake isn’t the only town using GIS to make life easier for developers, residents and its own staff. Huntley’s system mostly serves internal purposes, identifying where utilities such as water and sewer lines are, which sidewalks are handicap accessible, where streetlights are located and where crime is happening, village engineer Tim Farrell said. The crime mapping is the only section that’s currently accessible to the public, but the plan is to make more – such as the village’s benchmark network – public in a year or two, Farrell said. “I just think it might be an easier place for the general public and developers, once they get used to it, to go to, to answer preliminary questions,” he said.
See MALPRACTICE, page A4
See MAPS, page A4
H. Rick Bamman – hbamman@shawmedia.com
Woman to Woman physician Dr. Neelam Gandhi checks a patient record Monday at the facility in Crystal Lake. Gandhi has gone through three malpractice lawsuits over the course of her career, stressful events that often lend themselves to self blame whether it’s deserved or not, she said. Physicians with her speciality, obstetrics and gynecology, account for more than 10 percent of the malpractice lawsuits filed each year, according to a 2011 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The average for all physicians was 7.4 percent.
Lawsuits against physicians often result in no payment By EMILY K. COLEMAN ecoleman@shawmedia.com CRYSTAL LAKE – Dr. Neelam Gandhi has gone through three medical malpractice lawsuits over the course of her career as an obstetrician and gynecologist. The cases are incredibly stressful and leave her wondering what she could have done differently, full of self-blame even if she knows
she didn’t do anything wrong. “You like to think there’s a line between the person and the professional,” Gandhi said. “Most people become physicians because they want to help people, and obviously if something goes wrong, you feel like it’s a personal attack.” Each year just more than 7 percent of physicians had a malpractice claim with 78 percent of those claims resulting in no payment,
according to a 2011 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The percent is higher for physicians who share Gandhi’s specialty, more than 10 percent, although physicians with specialties in neurosurgery, thoracic-cardiovascular surgery and general surgery were more at-risk, the study showed. Most of these lawsuits do not result in a payout, said Tom Popo-
Police unions push for destruction of old complaints By JASON KEYSER The Associated Press CHICAGO – Unions representing Chicago police officers are fighting for the destruction of tens of thousands of documents from disciplinary files dating back several decades, just as activists and community leaders are demanding more access and transparency from a department under intense scrutiny after several controversial police shootings. The two unions’ contracts
with the city stipulate that the records, including complaints alleging misconduct, be destroyed after five years in most cases if no litigation is ongoing. The city said it has had to keep the files because of federal court orders issued in litigation going back to the 1990s. But the unions said they only recently discovered they still existed when the city informed them it would release all documents as part of a massive public records request by several newspapers.
LOCAL NEWS
A judge who has kept the records in limbo for more than a year said at a hearing Friday that he would keep a union-requested injunction in place pending the outcome of more negotiations between the city and the unions. Arbitrators have sided with the unions, but in a decision this week it gave the sides until March 15 to work out a system for determining which of the documents are subject to destruction. Cook County Circuit Judge Peter Flynn said Friday that he
eventually will have to consider whether the state’s Freedom of Information Act requires the city to release material it shouldn’t have had in the first place. Those pushing for changes to the police force said the public has a right to see it all, especially in light of recent cases like the 2014 shooting death of Laquan McDonald. A white officer shot the black teenager 16 times while responding to a
See POLICE, page A4
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Petition opposing Turnberry Country Club expansion in Lakewood in works / A3 NEWS
Supporting the K-9s
Market volatility
Upcoming breakfast event to support Marengo police’s K-9 program / A3
Analysts advise investors to get used to vicious price drops in the short term / A5
Brian Jackson/Chicago Sun-Times via AP
Protesters, angry over Chicago police shootings, try to disrupt Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s annual breakfast Friday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. outside a hotel in Chicago.
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