When the lights go down in the city...

By James Fuller
03/28/2009

People around the world, including in the suburbs and in Chicago, will be asked if they are willing to live in the dark for one hour in order to shed light on the problem of global warming.

Judging by the list of local organizations already signed on to participate, belief in the human contribution to global warming is more than twice what it was just one year ago. Nearly 60 suburban communities, schools and businesses will switch off all nonessential electricity from 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 tonight. They'll be joined by iconic skylines and monuments from 80 nations stretching the globe from Albania to Zambia at exactly the same time. All told, the event, in only its third year, is expected to include about 1 billion participants in about 1,200 cities.

Locally, participating groups are getting involved for various reasons.

Benedictine University in Lisle will reverse the Biblical phrase, "Let there be light" for one hour as part of its three-year Go Green Initiative. Beyond that, Assistant Professor Jean-Marie Kauth said the university and its students have a religious obligation to be stewards of the planet. Benedictines have held that as a religious tenet for 400 years, she said. And, after all, even the Vatican has solar panels these days.

Benedictine will darken most of the outdoor lighting in parking lots, the library and the student center. Students are being asked to switch off dorm lights as well. Instead, a bonfire will light up the campus as students celebrate with music and a gathering.

University staff are asking people to use common sense in celebrating Earth Hour.

"For instance, we don't want people driving to campus to come celebrate with us," Kauth said. "That would be really counterproductive from an environmental aspect."

Indeed, the specific environmental impacts of Earth Hour will be measured by many participants in different ways. For instance, last year ComEd reported a 7 percent drop in power usage throughout northern Illinois during Earth Hour compared to the same hour the preceding week. That's the equivalent of saving about 72,000 gallons of gasoline.

This year, expect that total to be even more.

Jones Lang LaSalle manages or leases 1.4 billion square feet of office space around the globe. More than 60 million square feet of that office space is in the Chicagoland area, including the Aon Center and Boeing Building in Chicago, the East West Corporate Center in Naperville, the Woodfield Financial Centre in Schaumburg and the Waubonsee Corporate Center in Sugar Grove. But last year, barely half of the Chicago area properties they managed participated in Earth Hour. This year, spokeswoman Brooke Houghton said she expects 100 percent participation. That means cutting 40 tons of greenhouse gases those buildings would have otherwise spewed into the atmosphere, and reaping the financial rewards of a lower energy bill.

The number of Jones Lang LaSalle employees committing to observe Earth Hour at their own home has also more than doubled. Board games, star gazing, flashlight scavenger hunts and candlelit dinners are all popular plans with employees for the evening of Earth Hour, Houghton said.

"This year, it's definitely about practice what your preach," she said.

Ultimately, the World Wildlife Federation, which organizes Earth Hour, hopes this year's event will spark a very long-term impact at the end of this year. In December, world leaders are set to meet at the United Nations Climate Change Conference to potentially sign a new treaty for environmental standards. The wildlife federation believes every light switched off during Earth Hour is a symbolic vote for a unified, corrective global action on climate change.

Developmentally disabled adults tied to a system that doesn't work

By James Fuller
2/23/2009

When Chip Davis is left home alone he's likely to get in trouble.

It's not because the Sugar Grove resident is bad. It's because the 32-year-old doesn't know any better. Davis has an IQ of about 40, giving him the intellectual capacity of a 5- or 6-year-old. As a result, the trouble Davis gets into is almost always the result of him trying to help out in ways that are sweet gestures, but beyond his ability.

He'll polish the entire bathroom with toilet bowl cleaner. He'll try to cook dinner and end up with a frozen pizza that's been in the oven for three hours. He'll wash the windows with furniture polish.

Davis cannot live by himself, but he wants the freedom and responsibility of not living at home and having his mom around all the time.

Brad Torrence also gets into trouble when left alone. Only the Geneva man's problems are the result of spina bifida, confining him to life in a wheelchair. He'll never drive. He can't lift himself onto a toilet. He needs some help to take a bath. But he, too, yearns for days away from home, a place where he can grow and be with others who can relate to his everyday obstacles.

Behind both Davis and Torrence are parents who love them. They don't beat them. They don't forget to feed and bathe them. And they live in relatively nice homes in relatively upscale neighborhoods. For those reasons, Davis and Torrence are on a list they might never leave until their parents are too old and feeble to care for them, or dead.

There are more than 850 people in Kane County with developmental disabilities in situations similar to Davis and Torrence. Statewide, there are nearly 16,000 people with developmental disabilities needing help of some kind.

But only those with emergency situations may ever actually receive it. Those are the people with abusive or neglectful caregivers, caregivers too old to care for them or the developmentally disabled who are already homeless for a variety of reasons.

There are nearly 2,700 people with developmental disabilities who are also in one of those dire situations. Everyone else is part of a database, which now doubles as a waiting list where luck of the draw reigns supreme.

Lilia Teninty, director of the division of developmental disabilities of the Illinois Department of Human Services, did not respond to an interview request.

Do you feel lucky?

Pam Nass doesn't feel very lucky. She entered her son, Chip Davis, into the system to wait for a housing match when he was 18 - that was nearly 15 years ago. Davis has watched his siblings grow up, move out and begin their own families while he's been left behind.

"I have known all along that what I wanted for Chip was independence," Nass said. "You want the best for your children. And, even though you feel guilty saying it, you want a little independence for yourself."

Nass and husband, Dale, both work. So does Davis thanks to vocational training by the Association for Individual Development, or AID, in Aurora. Davis is training to perform tasks at local businesses that need help with packaging or labeling of goods, such as fitting cups into plastic sleeves.

Torrence also gets help from AID, but has also begun the quest for housing. His dad, Greg, is also among the many unlucky people waiting.

"They rejected us because I'm not an emergency case, which basically means I'm not dead," Greg Torrence said.

His hopes for his son, Brad, are the same as Nass' hopes for Chip. But both of their hopes dwindle each year they continue to wait.

"There comes a point in time where, living at home, their growth stops," Greg Torrence said. "He talks about going to a group home. He's ready to go, and he can't. All I can tell him is, 'I'm working on it.'"

For a time, Greg Torrence and his wife even considered getting a divorce just to be able to say their son lived in a single-parent household and had a greater need. Now Greg Torrence is battling melanoma and facing surgery on his elbow that would make it impossible for him to lift his son from his wheelchair and into bed or the bathtub. Most people would view those health problems as bad luck at best. For the Torrence family, they may be their son's best hope for a more "normal" life.

But there's a couple other obstacles they share with all the other parents of people with developmental disabilities.

A group home

The first problem is finding assisted housing. For families like Davis and Torrence's there's no guarantee that if their luck changed and they received a call about an opening in a state facility that it would be anywhere near where they currently live. Indeed, a good number of state facilities for people with developmental disabilities are located far south of I-80.

Does a person with a developmental disability who spent his whole life at home want to move someplace where his family could not come to his side within a couple hours notice? The answer for Torrence is no. He'd much rather stay in his hometown and live at the new group home Geneva has created.

That home took 20 years of planning and fundraising for Geneva to create. It will house between four to six residents when it is running at full capacity. It's quite possible none of the residents will be from Geneva. But local organizations that help place developmentally disabled people in such group homes say just the fact that it was built at all is quite an accomplishment,

Organizations such as AID are currently awaiting the results of their pleas to Kane County for help in establishing more group homes. The county is set to receive about $2.6 million from the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac bailout to assist communities with foreclosed properties. The establishment of new group homes would be one possible use of at least part of this money.

But Darlene Bakk, president of the League of Women Voters of Geneva-St. Charles, said history shows serious county funding for new group homes is a farce. The league conducted its own two-year study of the issue and found Kane County has not placed much of a priority on the issue.

"They tell you it's priority one, then you ask them, 'Well, who did you give money to?'" Bakk said. "They haven't given money to any of the projects."

Bakk pointed specifically to the $50,000 the county gave to help build the group home in Geneva compared to the $300,000 from the same pool of funds given to tear down the old Valley View Youth Center and build a park.

"So it's really the No. 1 priority?" Bakk said. "Build a park. Hurray, Hurray. Well, we were looking at that same property to do housing for people with disabilities. That's the type of thing that really infuriates me."

But that's only half the funding problem.

Other concerns

For Pam Nass and Greg Torrence, finding housing for their developmentally disabled sons is only half a victory. A year of care in a state home costs up to $150,000 a year. A local group home would cost significantly less, up to $60,000 a year, but that's still not affordable for many families.

"The biggest issue is getting people approved for funding and a rate established and having consistent funding at that amount," said Joyce Helander, executive director of the DayOne Network, which is an entry point for disability services in Kane, Kendall and part of Cook County. "The money has to follow the person."

Except there is no money. In fact, there's perhaps less money than ever as Illinois sinks further into the red. Even funding for the DayOne Network is an adventure. The cash flows in from the state on a month-to-month basis, leaving Helander biting her nails every time payroll comes around and the money hasn't arrived yet. So it's no surprise when even solid community efforts like the new group home in Geneva struggle to get started.

"They won the home, but that doesn't mean they have the program funding to staff it," Helander said. "To get help, you have to be in an emergency situation. Emergencies use up all the dollars out there. And to qualify as an emergency it really has to be such an exaggerated situation. There are a number of families who think, 'Well, gee, I think what I have is an emergency.' The number of people waiting for care is just ridiculous. We spend a whole lot of entitlements on education for the developmentally disabled up to age 21. Then what? All that just pours out of their ears because there isn't state funding to help these people continue on with meaningful programs."

That leaves people like Pam Nass waiting for only one scenario for her son to get the life she dreams of for him.

"I've always thought that my only hope was to just turn 75," she said. "Until then, we're just not what gets the help."

An emergency with no response

For the developmentally disabled, an emergency situation occurs when their caregiver is sick, hospitalized, suddenly disabled, dead or abandons or abuses them. Emergencies also include improper placement, such as in a homeless shelter or a hospital that is too expensive. These are the priority situations, but many more developmentally disabled individuals need help who don't quite reach that emergency level. Low state funding levels to address these needs have created waiting lists for help so long that often the only way to move up or off the list is to become an emergency.

Developmentally Disabled persons with Emergency Needs by County:

Cook (outside Chicago): 811

DuPage: 245

Kane: 126

Lake: 126

McHenry: 47

Total: 1,355

Total statewide: 2,671

Total number of developmentally disabled in Illinois who need service: 15,800

Source: Illinois Department of Human Services reports from Nov. 18, 2008

Obama rocks the mock vote

By James Fuller
11/3/2008

If it's true parents often impress their political views on their children, Illinois voters will paint their towns blue in a landslide win for Barack Obama next week.

However, if the path to a voter's heart is through the stomach, or reflected by their unmentionables, John McCain may make Illinois a closer state than most experts think.

Mock elections hosted by three major organizations (National Student/Parent Mock Election, ChannelOne and the National Youth Initiative) at schools throughout the country show Obama is the clear youth favorite. That includes a margin as wide as 79 percent to 21 percent in Chicago itself, according to the ChannelOne poll.

Even in Republican strongholds students showed a decided preference for Barack Obama. DuPage County, for instance, didn't have a single public school choose McCain in any of the mock election results. With results from 24 schools in 10 DuPage communities, the tally on Friday afternoon was Obama 12,956, McCain 5,000. That's a definitive margin of 72 percent of DuPage students in favor of Obama compared to 28 percent for McCain.

Phyllis Kidd teaches at Wheaton North High School, where students warned her Obama would easily win the mock election.

"I thought it was interesting that in DuPage County that there would be that much of an assumption for Obama," Kidd said. "DuPage is generally a Republican area, and if you count yard signs today it probably still is. In the past we just assumed that kids echoed what their parents were saying. We won't know if that's the case until next week. It's going to be very interesting to compare the results of the mock election to the real election."

Indeed, only one DuPage school in the reported results chose McCain. Immanuel Lutheran School in Elmhurst voted 16 to 9 in favor of McCain. While the vote total was small, it reflected of the overall trend of Christian schools favoring McCain.

The only public school in the area to choose McCain did so in a nailbiter. McCain edged Obama by only three votes, 472 to 469, at Thompson Middle School in St. Charles. Thompson school officials weren't available to explain the results, but ChannelOne exit polling showed the top factors driving student votes were the economy, war in Iraq, education and the environment.

McCain also won or made it close in many retail-based contests. For instance, Colonial Cafe has ice cream shops in seven locations including Elgin, Naperville and Algonquin. They created Ba-racky Road and McCandy Cain sundaes to poll voters, though customers get a ballot no matter what they order.

"We had people eating their particular presidential candidate sundae even though they may not like the flavoring just because they felt guilty eating anything else," said Director of Operations Clinton Anderson.

A seesaw battle had Obama winning for much of the poll, including a 58 percent lead at one point. But McCain nabbed his own 58 percent lead last week. Anderson said his polls usually lean Republican, but votes trended for Obama longer than he expected.

In Libertyville, the presidential race has torn voters walking down Milwaukee Avenue. That's the scene of a partisan showdown between the Marked For Dessert bakery and the Adrienne Clarisse Intimate Boutique. The bakery has special Obama and McCain cookies in the form of donkeys and elephants. It's part of a larger poll hosted by the Retail Bakery Association. There are five bakeries in Illinois tracking cookie ballots, including the Deerfield Bakery in Buffalo Grove and the Piece-A-Cake bakery in East Dundee. All the Illinois bakeries have McCain making it a much tighter race than the school elections. Donkeys are still proving tastier at Marked For Dessert, but the lingerie store across the street has a decidedly different outcome.

Adrienne Clarisse is selling white T-shirts and panties with Republican or Democrat spelled out in crystals on them. Republican garments have outsold Democrat items by 3 to 1. Clarisse said there is no bipartisanship in underwear purchases.

"It's always either all Republican or all Democrat," she said. "It's interesting to see the Democrat cookies outselling the Republican cookies across the street, but it's completely the opposite here. I guess Democrats like to eat and the Republicans like to, well, fill in the blank."

Mock the Vote

Mock election results from local schools by county show Obama is the clear favorite of students.

Northwest Cook: Obama 75.2%; McCain 24.8%*

DuPage: Obama 72.2%; McCain 27.8%**

Kane: Obama 69%; McCain 31%***

Lake: Obama 68%; McCain 32%****

McHenry: 71.8%; McCain 28.2%*****

*6,925 total votes, 12 schools

**17,956 total votes, 24 schools

***6,057 total votes, 10 schools

****1,921 total votes, 5 schools

*****543 total votes, 2 schools

Source: Illinois League of Women Voters

Economic crisis hits IMRF, tax increases might be needed

By James Fuller
10/29/2008

Illinois taxpayers may soon be called on to bail out what is arguably the best-funded public pension plan in the state thanks to $3.6 billion in fund losses caused by the spiraling economy.

The Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund covers about 177,000 active employees of local governments and about 85,000 retirees. The good news for them is their retirement benefits are guaranteed no matter what the economy does.

The same cannot be said for the contributions from the 2,900 units of local government who use local tax dollars to fund the majority of the IMRF benefits. All of those governments will be hit with a call to increase their contributions in 2010 to recapture IMRF's losses. Governments without the cash to handle an increase might turn to taxpayers to fill the IMRF collection bucket.

Even IMRF Executive Director Louis Kosiba expects an impact to his Downers Grove property taxes as a result of his agency's investment losses.

"I will see my real estate taxes go up," Kosiba said. "But we need to have rate increases in order to preserve fiscal responsibility. We don't want to be a burden on future generations."

IMRF began 2008 with one dollar in the fund for every dollar promised to present and future retirees in the system. By the end of September, it only had 79 cents for every dollar promised. That's a deficit IMRF hasn't experienced since 1990 and a more rapid loss than when the technology boom fizzled out and Sept. 11 hit.

"I would like employers to start appreciating what is happening and let their employees know," Kosiba said. "IMRF is not able to swim upstream any faster than the next guy."

IMRF has no rainy day fund to recoup losses. Thus, more tax dollars are needed. The questions are how much and when.

That decision won't be made until Dec. 31, but the proposal on the table now would see an employer with a IMRF contribution rate of 10 percent of the total payroll cost ratchet that rate up to 16 percent to cover IMRF's losses. That could mean millions of dollars of new contributions for the largest units of government.

"That'd be pretty painful," Kosiba said.

To ease that pain, IMRF is looking at phasing in the rate increase to help avoid the need to raise taxes. For that government with a contribution rate of 10 percent, the rate could jump to between 10.6 or 11.2 percent with the phase-in. That's still a hefty jump for local governments who have their own spiraling economy woes. It's unknown how long the phase-in would last.

Ironically, governments that have funded their employees' retirements the best in recent years might see the biggest rate jump. Kosiba said any surplus dollars those governments have put into IMRF are gone. At a minimum, all local governments will pay a rate of 8.37 percent to IMRF. Top IMRF contributors only pay 1 or 2 percent right now.

While all of that is bad news, Kosiba said tax increases are the only immediate pain. IMRF still has billions of dollars to pay benefits for the next couple of decades even if it didn't collect another cent until 2028, Kosiba said.

That said, delaying rate increases, and any possible tax increases resulting from them, until the economy rebounds is not an option.

"Come 2011 or 2012, you're still going to have other budget needs, and it's not necessarily going to be any easier to play catch-up," Kosiba said. "It's a very costly and debilitating practice to say we'll play catch-up. And, eventually, all these retirement benefits have to be paid out."

St. Charles woman loses her 'sunshine'

By James Fuller

When Mark McCormick was 2 years old, his family caught him on tape singing his favorite song, "You Are My Sunshine." His mother, Sheila, thought it was so good that she mailed the tape to her sister in England.

That song would later become intrinsically tied to McCormick's identity, but not before tragedy would strike.

McCormick was only 24 years old when it happened. He'd had a headache he just couldn't shake for at least a week when he sat down for dinner with his pizza parlor boss at a restaurant in Arlington Heights. McCormick went to the men's room. While there, he blacked out. McCormick fell, smacking his head on the tile floor.

The result was a traumatic brain injury, making McCormick one of the 1.4 million Americans a year who suffer similar blows to the head.

Most victims are treated and released from hospitals. In McCormick's case, he'd never be the same again. The former track star at Niles West High School awoke to a life in an assisted care facility. He couldn't walk. He couldn't talk. He had no memory of what happened.

That was the condition Mark McCormick was in when his relationship with his mother evolved. Sheila and Homer McCormick put their lives in Indiana behind them and moved to St. Charles to be close to Mark. They visited him daily, a routine that only increased for Sheila when her husband died.

She would arrive at Pine View Care Center every day at about 11 a.m. to perform Mark's therapy with him and have lunch. Then she'd tuck her son in for a nap and return around 5 p.m. for dinner and some time outside before she'd kiss him goodbye for the night.

Eventually, Mark McCormick learned to walk and talk again. He'd have some good days when he'd walk full hallways with a chair, but other days he'd just sleep. He was never the Mark of old.

"Some days I'd get there and we'd start with a 'Hi, mom'," Sheila McCormick recalled. "Other days it would be, 'Who are you?' "

Even 20 years later, Mark McCormick's mind was stuck. He still believed he lived in a Skokie apartment and worked at a pizza parlor.

The daily care he needed was expensive. It out-priced the family's insurance, Medicaid and savings. So the family created an annual fundraiser, a run in St. Charles that hearkened back to Mark McCormick's track days. It started with just 80 or so runners and grew into more than 400, providing up to $6,000 to help with medical bills.

But none of it helped with the emotional taxes the loss levied. Sheila McCormick would often sleep in fear of the telephone. Late night calls always meant Mark had suffered a seizure. Those calls usually came at 2 or 3 a.m., up to six times a year. Sheila would leave the warmth of her bed and trek into the night to her son's bedside to hold his hand while he calmed down.

The next day, the therapy would begin again. And Sheila would be there, looking for the son she remembered, but living with the impaired version he'd become.

And then that tape he made as a 2-year-old boy resurfaced.

"One day I brought that tape, put in on and said, 'This is you,' " Sheila McCormick said. "And he sang along. He remembered every word. So everyday we'd put that on. The girls there would come in and say, 'Who's my sunshine?' "

Mark would simply reply, "Me."

Last Saturday, Sheila McCormick received another one of those dreaded phone calls. Only this time, it wasn't just to let her know Mark was having a seizure.

"They just said, 'Sheila, get over here.' "

She was five minutes too late when she arrived. Mark McCormick died at the age of 44 having lived for 20 years with a brain injury he never fully recovered from.

There are currently 5.3 million Americans living with some level of disability as the result of similar brain injuries, according to the Centers for Disease Control. There are even more family members dealing with their own trauma as they care for their loved one.

The chances of recovery are somewhat unpredictable and vary according to the severity of the injury, said Dr. Keith D'Souza, associate medical director of the Brain Injury Program at Marianjoy Rehabilitation Hospital in Wheaton. The impact to the victim depends on what areas of the brain are injured and the ability of other parts of the brain to assume those mental functions. Younger people with no history of drug use have the best chances for recovery. But there are no hard rules that will tell how well or how quickly someone will recover, if at all, D'Souza said.

"With a brain injury we generally tell families they can expect a loved one to recover over a period of up to two years," D'Souza said. "That's 90 percent of the recovery. That 90 percent will be different from person to person. It may just be moving a hand. For another person that may be being able to walk. Some may progress, plateau, then progress again. It does make it very hard on families."

D'Souza said the unpredictable nature of recovery can result in up to 15 years of emotional distress and family problems for people associated with a victim. That's why there are multiple support groups and peer mentoring programs for such families at hospitals around the country.

For Sheila McCormick, her therapy will be moving back to Indiana to be with her daughter and granddaughter. This year's Mark McCormick Milers Fox River Run will be the last. It will serve as a tribute.

"I thought we'd all be together again," Sheila McCormick said of her move to Indiana. She'd planned the move even before Mark died, setting up his transfer to another care facility.

"Now he's going back in a different way," McCormick said. "He's up there now. He's running and happy again."