The Cook County Board is exploring getting back into the cemetery business. Commissioner John Fritchey has proposed resuming operations near the former Oak Forest Hospital. The county operated its own cemetery there from 1854 to 1971.

Read a Sun-Times editorial here.

Read a Cook County Cemetery Fact Sheet.doc here.

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Barack Obama will not be the only 2012 presidential candidate visiting Chicago for the NATO Summit this weekend.

Jill Stein, the Green Party's presumptive nominee, will be here too. Like Obama, she has strong ties to the Chicago area. She grew up in Highland Park, and her first political victory was for student council at Highland Park High School in 1968. She now lives in Massachusetts and ran against Mitt Romney for governor there in 2002.

Two of the things she will be talking about while she is here are her party's "Green New Deal" and the need to stop being spooked by the results of the 2000 vote in Florida, when Ralph Nader was seen as drawing enough votes from Al Gore to deny Gore a clearcut win in that state -- and an Electoral College win in the national race.

Gov. Pat Quinn is missing a chance for comprehensive pension reform, according to a University of Illinois Institute of Government and Public Affairs analysis published today.

Read the analysis here.

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A legacy of Cook County corruption also means a legacy of expensive problems.

Part of the reason Cook County is struggling with high-maintenance unincorporated areas is that corrupt former officials looked the other way or took bribes to allow substandard development.

Chicago author Richard Lindberg says corruption has a long history in Cook County, dating back to the 1800s, when boodle was the favorite pastime for "a whole raft of Cook County commissioners."

"Wherever they saw a chance to make money, they did," Lindberg says.

As recounted in Lindberg's The Gambler King of Clark Street and other books, a 10-year period of rampant graft culminated in the appointment of Harry A. "Prince Hal" Varnell as warden of the Cook County Insane Asylum and Alms House at Irving Park and Narragansett, which then was out in the country. Varnell's qualifications amounted to being Chicago Democratic boss Mike
Richard Lindberg
McDonald's pool room and saloon lackey.

In another example of blatant graft, Cook County Hospital had a tool shed with 42 lightning rods because the lightning rod manufacturer had the right connections to county officials, Lindberg says.

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Illinois requires permits for new oil pipeline construction, but only two other Great Lakes states (Michigan and Minnesota) do, and that's a problem, according to a new report,

Other Great Lakes states should approve their own rules to protect the lakes' basin from oil pollution because federal laws aren't adequate, says the report released Monday by the National Wildlife Federation and University of Michigan Law School.

A worker monitors water in Talmadge Creek in Marshall Township, Mich., near the Kalamazoo River as oil from a ruptured pipeline, owned by Enbridge Inc, is attempted to be trapped by booms Thursday, July 29, 2010. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)

The volunteers who make various boards run in Chicago and the suburbs were shocked to learn Friday that library board members in Cicero in 1998 awarded themselves free health insurance for life (the benefit has was discontinued in 2010 for new board members).

But something else got under the skin of those volunteer board members, too: A comment from a former Cicero library trustee: "it was a meeting once a month. You'd just show up. It was no big deal. It was a piece of cake."

The meetings, the former trustee said, typically lasted just an hour or so.

Volunteers who take the job seriously spend a lot more time than that. They spend hours preparing for board meetings and take piles of documents home to study afterward. They get up to speed on whatever issue suddenly is engaging the citizenry. If complicated issues arise, their meetings stretch on for hours. If an administrator leaves, they devote lots of time to hiring a replacement.

That grumbling sound you hear today is from board members who suddenly feel under-appreciated.

Read the Sun-Times story here.

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American tech firms and advanced manufacturers have a new problem, a labor economist says: China and India want their workers.

Edward E. Gordon, author of Winning the Global Talent Showdown and seven other books about jobs and looming shortages of skilled workers here and abroad, says the United States can't count anymore on importing foreign talent to make up for shortages here. Instead, he says, China and India, who face growing shortages of their own, are competing for those workers.

The vanishing species in Illinois state parks that is perhaps of most concern to the Department of Natural Resources is the conservation police officer.

The number of Conservation Police officers is at an all-time low, the DNR says.  As of February, there were only 125 sworn law enforcement personnel statewide. More retirements are expected before the end of the fiscal year.

A search party team leader, Eric Behr (right),
discusses coordinates with Officer W. Bergland
of the Illinois Conservation Police during a search
for evidence concerning Lisa Stebic at Silver Springs
State Park in Kendall County on July 7, 2007.
(Beck Diefenbach~Naperville Sun)

When Pat Comstock came to Chicago last week, she paid $199 (plus tax) for a hotel room: "a place to sleep and take a shower."

By comparison, the Medicaid reimbursement rate in 2011 for one day in a nursing home was $120.30, the executive director of the Illinois Health Care Council says.

Not surprisingly, Comstock says the reimbursement is not enough. And that's before Gov. Pat Quinn's proposed $2.7 billion of Medicaid cuts are factored in.

Illinois has the lowest Medicaid reimbursement level of any state, Comstock says. And, she says, it's not easy for nursing homes to adjust to that.

"A hospital [facing budget cuts] can say: we are not going to do cardiac care, for example," Comstock told the Chicago Sun-Times Editorial Board. "Nursing homes can't do that. We have mandated services.
Pat Comstock

The Illinois Hospital Association today released its own position paper on Medicaid. The hospitals think Gov. Pat Quinn's proposed $350 million cut goes too far, and they are offering an alternative.

Maryjane Wurth, president of the IHA, calls the changes in Medicaid "a very, very critical issue."

"When you look at what are the drivers of cost for Medicaid in Illinois, the growth in the program has been primarily due to increased individuals, the number of individuals who are now eligible for Medicaid ... for a whole series of reasons," Wurth told the Chicago Sun-Times Editorial Board earlier this month. "Everybody is potentially just one job loss away from being on Medicaid."
Maryjane Wurth
(John H. White~Sun-Times)