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The Putnam County
Volume 146 No. 24
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Wednesday, February 12, 2014
Back to Square 1 for Granville Borio: ‘We’re the dog at the table begging for scraps’ By Ken Schroeder kschroeder@putnamcountyrecord.com
GRANVILLE — The Granville Village Board is back to Square 1 on the long-awaited grant for work on the salt storage shed. The village had applied for the grant
from the Community Development Assistance Program (CDAP) of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) nearly a year ago, but it just recently received official confirmation the grant was not coming.
“They had applications for grants for $40 million, and they only had $9 million available for the state,” village President Doug Gimbal said. Hope is not completely gone with CDAP. Gimbal said the application process was already open for Fiscal Year 2014. Applications are due on June 2 for the year. In addition, there will be a workshop
on March 11 in Springfield to assist groups seeking grants with the application process. “I think we need to find out what we can do, if anything, to improve our ranking because it’s obviously very competitive,” village engineer Larry Good said. “We need to maximize our potential.” “My only question is, why do some communi-
ties seem to have buckets full of money dumped out in front of city hall and the village of Granville can’t get a nickel,” board member Randy Borio said. “Smaller towns just can’t seem to get any money. It seems like you go home and open up the paper, and this city just got $50,000 here and $200,000 there, and somebody got $7
million, and here we are. We’re the dog at the table begging for scraps, and it’s getting very frustrating.” Board member Lucian Verda agreed, noting that much of the money going to other cities was for “pet projects.” The board also agreed to send a donation of $150 to the Special Olympics of Illinois.
The battle over minimum wage By Ken Schroeder
kschroeder@putnamcountyrecord.com
The debate over the minimum wage in Illinois continues. President Barack Obama has put the call out to raise the federal minimum wage across the board to $10.10 an hour for contracted workers on government contracts. In his State of the Union address, Obama has declared this a year of action and has pledged to do all he can to help Americans who are in the lower half of the nation’s economy. “Those at the top have never done better,” he said. “But average wages have barely budged. Inequality has deepened. Upward mobility has stalled.” Closer to home, Gov. Pat Quinn is continuing his drive to raise the minimum wage to $10 an hour. Quinn, in a speech on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in January, commented on the debate. “We can continue (King’s) mission to eliminate poverty by raising the minimum wage to at least $10 an hour, which will give hundreds of thousands of Illinois workers more dignity while boosting the local economy,” Quinn said. Illinois currently has the fourth highest minimum wage in the country, tied with Connecticut and Washington, D.C., at $8.25 an hour. But even with the proposed increase in the Vol. 146 No. 24
minimum wage, many Americans are not able to make ends meet by working jobs that earn this pay. Arguments range back and forth on whether the bump in the minimum wage would help the economy by putting money into the average consumer’s pocket or hurt the small business person who has to pay this wage. “This won’t have any effect here,” Valerie Keeney, human resources for Mennie Machine said. “All of our employees make enough over minimum wage that we don’t feel this is a problem. It’s not that we don’t want our employees to make more money, but it’s a trickle-down effect. Higher wages translates to higher prices.” According to the Center on Policy and Budget Priorities, the poverty line in federal Fiscal Year 2014 for a family of three is listed at $1,628 a month or about $19,536 a year. The poverty level is higher for bigger families and lower for smaller ones. The federal minimum wage was last updated five years ago. According to the Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress, it was aimed at a buying power of just $7.80 in inflation-adjusted 2013 dollars. The minimum wage laws set at the federal level were designed to give the minimum
See Wage Page 2
Putnam County Record photo/Dixie Schroeder
Putnam County Primary celebrates 100 days of school Members of Anne Downey’s kindergarten glass Jacob Dove (left) and Jackson Delhotel display the class sign that stands for kindergarten, Section C, 100 days of school. Student in the kindergarten classes exercised to 100 count, went on a hunt for the 100 Hershey Kisses and participated in other activities to celebrate the 100th day of school in the Putnam County Primary School.
Unemployment higher in Illinois Valley By Ken Schroeder news@tonicanews.com
CHICAGO — The Illinois Department of Employment Security (IDES) has released the unemployment rates for December 2013, and the news is good – if you live in Chicago or the Quad Cities. Chicago posted an unemploy-
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ment rate of 8.2 percent, a decrease of 0.4 since December 2012 and the lowest figure for the city since December 2008. The decrease was propelled by the addition of more than 54,000 new jobs. The rest of the state gets the bad news with unemployment rising as much as 1.9 percent in sections of Illinois. The state average sits
at approximately 8.6 percent with much of the state in double-digit unemployment. Those numbers are offset by the increase in jobs in Chicago. The area hardest hit is the Illinois Valley with a jump in unemployment between .4 and .7 percent in each of the three counties.
See Unemployment Page 2
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Putnam County Clerk and reCorder Paid for by Chauntelle Biagi-Bruer.