A Profile of Wes Jarrell

It’s 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 9, and Wes Jarrell, a faculty member in the University of Illinois’ College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES), looks down from the podium at the half-filled auditorium of the Beckman Institute. In its second day, the Human Story of Climate Change (Planet U) conference hosted by UI, is coming to a close. Following the conference agenda, Jarrell is to give a 15-minute presentation on the Environmental Change Institute (ECI).

Sporting a corduroy blazer and a red tie, the 60-year-old Jarrell stands before the podium and introduces himself as an educator, an environmentalist and farmer. What is not visible to the audience is how this man’s life story, starting as a boy growing up on the family farm in Bend, Ore., and shaped by a career straddling between academia and agriculture, has defined the man standing before them; a man who is on crusade to save the planet.

 Along with his appointment in ACES, Jarrell is also the interim director of ECI, which was established to raise awareness and to inform public policy on matters related to climate change. In order to achieve this mission ECI seeks to engage the public through research, teaching and public engagement, Jarrell said. Although he smiled, and he conveyed a relaxed tone, a sense of urgency was present in Jarrell’s message.

“Very importantly, a lot of us are near the end of our careers, shall we say, and (climate change) is a problem that is going to go a long way into the future. So, we need (to develop) highly motivated, broadly trained, ethical leaders for the 21st century and we want to do our part to make that happen.”

In order to cultivate future leaders equipped to address climate change issues, Jarrell used the ECI platform to develop a course in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences (NRES). The course titled NRES 199, was offered for the first time during the spring semester and is held on Thursdays from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. The students range from freshmen to graduate students and the goal of the course is to develop a carbon registry and a business plan to address how UI can reduce its carbon footprint. The class will present findings to the campus administration on May 7.

To prepare themselves for this presentation, the students rehearsed during class last Thursday. The clean-shaven Jarrell was seated at a table with arm sleeves rolled up to his elbows, listening as students reported on group projects. This was a rehearsal for the upcoming presentation to the administration.  Jarrell served as co-facilitator for the meeting and gestered with his hands as he offered solutions to research problems identified by students. Each suggestion Jarrell posed was usually accompanied with a smile and slight chuckle.

Freshman Matt Rundquist said he "he enrolled in the  class because it looked like a good way to learn about carbon trading and that side of environmental economics in a real-world kind of way." Regarding Jarrell's teaching style he added, "He's been more of a manager than a teacher on this project, and really let us take the this thing where we wanted to."

During his tenure at UI Jarrell has not always been as at peace with his work as he appears to be now. From 2003 until 2007, he served as the director of NRES and faced what he described as a difficult time, as a result of his efforts to change the department’s culture. “I don’t see boundaries where other people see boundaries. And I didn’t appreciate how impenetrable some of these boundaries were, in terms of how people (viewed) what they did and what they thought their jobs were.”

Jarrell said that one of the major challenges in academia is related to the unwillingness by many professors to engage in collaborative endeavors that are not directly aligned with their particular scholarship.

 “Many people in academia are more loyal to their disciplines than they are to society and societal needs, in general.”

He added, “(Some people) tie up their identity so much with the discipline they got their degree in, that they have an enormous amount of trouble breaking free of it. I’m not that way, so that made for a disconnect (in my department),” he said.

Jarrell’s vision for how the department should function involved stripping away discipline boundaries that hindered collaborative research efforts and it encouraged the restructuring of certain course curriculum in order to better serve the needs of students.

One of the biggest challenges with NRES is that it consists of faculty from different disciplines, including horticulture, forestry, soil sciences, and human dimensions, among others, said Interim Director Bruce Branham.

“I think what got to Wes was trying to get everybody to buy into his vision of what the department should be because a lot of people felt they were comfortable with the old vision of how they were and did not want to change.”

After fours years of departmental turmoil, Jarrell resigned in 2007.

“My psychological makeup just wasn’t able to accept that, I guess, and just go with the flow, so I stepped down,” Jarrell said.

After he resigned, Jarrell spent more than three months away from academia and focused his energy on the 39-acre certified-organic farm that he owns with his wife Leslie Cooperband. Located about ten miles from downtown Urbana on North Lincoln Avenue, Prairie Fruits Farm and Creamery is home to a herd of goats that includes 50 milkers and 350 fruit trees.

His wife describes a typical 12-hour day on the farm. “So, the day would (begin at) 6 a.m. or 6:30 a.m. and go until 6:30 p.m. or 7:30 p.m., depending on what type of cheese we were making,” Cooperband said.

The farm produce is primarily sold to customers through the Urbana and Chicago farmer’s markets, she said.

Prior to purchasing the farm land in 2003, the couple lived in Madison, Wis., where both were faculty members at the University of Wisconsin in the soil sciences department. Cooperband described herself and Jarrell as “two soil nerds” that met in Las Vegas at an agronomy conference.

“We’re both kind of dreamers and schemers,” Coooperhand said. “We were interested in applying science to good ends and not just doing science for science’s sake, but applying it to pressing needs of the day. I think that’s what attracted us to each other initially.”

Jarrell’s appreciation for the natural world stems from growing up on the family farm in Central Oregon, with a view of the Cascade Mountains, where he and his two sisters assisted with the chores.

“One of his responsibilities, when he was 11 or 12, was to get out and pick berries,” said Jarrell’s mother, Edith. “He was noted for the rows he picked (because) they were very clean – he picked the good berries and left the bad ones.”

Reflecting on her son's behavior as a boy, Edith stated, “He did what he was told. He was a very obedient kid (and) he didn’t need to be corrected more than once, if there was something he did wrong,” she said.

Among Jarrell’s earliest memories was attending Peter Boscow Elementary School located in Hillsboro, Ore. This is the same school that his mother attended, he said. Jarrell remembered that his mother taught him and his sisters to count by making flash cards from “old shredded wheat boxes.”

In high school Jarrell excelled in the classroom and in extra curricular activities. He was the student body president during his senior year, a member of the wrestling team and played the clarinet as a member of the band, he said.

            After graduating from high school, Jarrell attended Stanford University on a merit scholarship. As a freshman, Jarrell was interested in pursuing a law degree but Ms. Kinsella, his English teaching assistant, encouraged him to pursue another field, he said.

            “I came in as a pre-law (major) but discovered I didn’t write as well as I needed to.”

The switch from his rural community to the life of a college student surrounded by seemingly sophisticated peers, was a transformative moment for Jarrell, he said.

            “(Going) from the backwoods of Oregon to downtown Stanford, there were quite a few rich kids from cities. That was my first real jarring experience of rural meets urban.”

            While recognizing that students from urban areas dealt well with people, he also discovered that not many of his peers knew as much as he did about farm life, he said. Jarrell enjoyed the time he spent in the woods and in fields and decided to become a biological science major, he said.

Another transformative moment occurred for Jarrell when he realized he was more interested in focusing his energies toward a discipline that had practical applications. Intent on joining the Peace Corps and saving the world, Jarrell enrolled in a course titled “Physical Resources of the Tropics,” which was a course in soil science, he said.

            Reflecting back on the course, he recalled, “I was just blown away because as a kid I had worked in (soil) all this time and I knew nothing about it. And then I found out a lot about it was really fascinating.”

His mother Edith recalled that once Jarrell focused his studies on soil science, some of his dorm mates nicknamed him the “dirt doctor,” she said.

After graduating from Stanford, Jarrell took a job for one year delivering metal shelving in the San Francisco Bay area before attending graduate school at Oregon State University. There he received a master’s and a doctorate degree in soil science, he said.

As a professor, Jarrell worked for 12 years at UC Riverside before giving up his tenured position and moving back to Oregon, where he taught for 10 years at the Oregon Graduate Institute, he said. Jarrell decided to leave the security of his tenured position because he had grown tired of being in an environment where many colleagues abused the tenure system, he said.

“I grew up blue collar and I figured that if you weren’t carrying your weight, you should not be paid,” Jarrell said.

Jarrell’s journey would lead him to Madison, Wisconsin, where he joined the UW soil sciences faculty after spending a few years exploring business ideas, he said.

 In 2007, Jarrell met Joel Friedman, president of the Alvin H. Baum Family Fund based in Chicago. At the time, Friedman had contacted members from the UI Law and Business Schools and had expressed and interest in funding a collaborative project that would assist the current administration to establish policy to address climate change, Friedman said.

Friedman recalled being “impressed with Jarrell’s leadership” and with the contacts Jarrell had developed both within the University and the broader communities, he said.

Before Friedman would agree to allocate foundation funds for the project, he demanded that a collaborative team form that would include the Law School, the Business School and the College of ACES, he said.

“Lawyers can do some but they can’t solve the problem; The Business School could do some things, but they can’t solve the problem; The folks at ACES could potentially solve the problem, but communicated poorly with the broader community,” Friedman said.

Once the three entities agreed to work together and had showed initial progress, the foundation awarded ECI a $ 300,000 grant in 2007 and committed an additional $300,000 for the next two years. The College of ACES also contributed $100,000 to the organization. With the seed funding it has received, ECI has five years to raise a $5 million dollar endowment to sustain itself, Jarrell said.

Beyond the carbon registry course, ECI will host the Chicago Cap and Trade Summit May 28^th.  The conference will feature discussions about how to achieve an 80 percent reduction in U.S. carbon emissions by 2050. Among the presenters, students from NRES 199 will share the research they are conducting on how UI can reduce its emissions. To learn more about the conference and other ECI initiatives, log onto www.eci.edu.

  Back inside the auditorium, Jarrell’s 15-minute presentation is over and he collects his materials and prepares to exit the podium to make room for the next presenter. Pleased with the presentation, he will soon enjoy a silent moment as he drives north on Lincoln Avenue, where the urban landscape will quickly dissolve into open fields. Several years removed from the country boy of his freshman year at Stanford, Wes Jarrell the man, has become comfortable traversing between rural and urban settings.

Miss Nora

It's 5 p.m. and there's not a clean spot on her two and a half foot body -- the pigtails are speckled with sand and the tiny hands are painted black with dried mud. Nora offers a "hello" to passers-by, gripping my hand on the way to the car. Soon, the two-year-old's tiny voice will pierce the silence with questions: "Where's my sweater, can I watch a show?" But for now, I enjoy the moment as we walk hand in hand to the car.

I'm exploring the idea of writing about the famous stalled campus wind turbine project. I've been advised to follow the $ trail, so if you happen to come across a suitcase stuffed with cash and a note attached that reads: "wind turbine funds,"let me know. Or, if you come across any random wind turbine parts that look out of place, please let me know. Also, I'd appreciate any other ideas you might have.

A Garden to Come

Behind the Catholic Worker House located at 317 S. Randolph St. near downtown Champaign, lies a patch of dark soil that will be transformed into a community garden this spring. Produce from the garden will be used to prepare meals in the Catholic Worker House’s soup kitchen, said student volunteer Craig Kreutzer.

“Planting a garden is the best thing you can do to address the ills of the world,” Kreutzer said, as he surveyed the space.

A similar belief in the capacity of gardening has inspired a local eco-ecumenical organization to partner with the Catholic Worker House to start the garden. Group member Emily Laugesen sees gardening as a connection between their faith and the environment, she said.
Participating in this project will provide the group with a tangible way to “foster a sense of caring about the planet” and to also develop “a social outreach plan (to) benefit people who would otherwise not have access to fresh produce,” Laugesen said.

According to the American Community Garden’s Web site, there are18,000 community gardens in the United States and Canada. And there are signs that interest is growing, said UI Landscape Architecture Professor Laura Lawson, who dose research on community gardening.
“In the last eight months there has been an escalation in the number of calls and emails that I (have gotten) from people interested in community gardening,” Lawson said.

More people have turned to community gardening to strengthen their connection to the environment as well as to address social justice concerns such as access to affordable and fresh vegetables, she said.
In 2005 Lawson published “City Bountiful: A Century of Community Gardening in America,” which traces the origins of community gardening back to the 1890s and through phases of popular interest that include the War Gardens of World War I, the Victory Gardens of World War II, and up to today’s urban gardening movement.

Lawson credits the renewed interests in community garden to the economic crisis and to food security concerns brought on by the recent recall of peanut butter, among other items. But to Lawson, this period of renewed interests also exemplifies a cyclical trend.
“My research shows that, historically, whenever our nation has been confronted by some sort of social or economic crisis, people turn to gardening -- in particularly they turn to community gardening because it satisfies so many things simultaneously.”

The benefits of gardening include a renewed sense of self-reliance that comes from “the ability to grow your own food,” a feeling of “community building” through interactions with fellow gardeners and “link(s) between the environmental, ecological and sustainable” movements, she said.

While the eco-ecumenical group is excited about the potential of the community garden project, they will need to help establish the garden.

“Ideally we would a have on a volunteer basis someone who is really knowledgeable about gardening who could provide expertise and practical advice,” Laugesen said.

When offering gardening advice, Lawson recommends groups to visit the ACGA Web site because it offers “a nice mix of hands on and practical” tips about how to operate a garden as well as how to manage the “people aspect of gardening,” she said.

“Garden(ing) is not just about growing food, it’s about organizing people to run the garden and to work together in common interests. And so, to build that community focus is something that the ACGA has looked into and they really support that concept,” Lawson said.

According to their Web site, ACGA’s mission is to “build community by increasing and enhancing community gardening and greening across the United States and Canada.”

Vicki Garrett, project coordinator for ACGA, fields calls at the Columbus, Ohio, office from people seeking gardening advice. Garrett cautions new garden groups to develop strong community partnerships before breaking ground on a garden.

“I get people calling here asking for a garden in their city because they’re desperate to plant something and can’t find one near them. And then, I get calls from the same city telling me that they can’t get anyone interested in community gardening. So, if you’re not reaching the people who want to garden it’s not going to work. And you also have to make (people) feel ownership,” she said.

For local people who are interested in renting an individual garden plot, there are two primary sites in the Champaign-Urbana community that supports community gardening. The sites are managed by the cities parks districts. In Urbana, for example, Meadowbrook Park, located in south Urbana along Windsor Road and Race Street, has provided organic garden spaces for community residents since 1974, said Park Coordinator Erica Schneider. Individual garden plot rentals range in price from $30 to $60 depending on the size of the space and require deposit of $15. Currently, there is a waiting list for spaces, Schneider said.

The Champaign Park District also offers garden plots at Dodds Park located at 1501 N. Mattis Ave. and as of April 1, there were 21 plots available. A plot rental ranges from $20 to $25 depending on the size of the space, said staff member Quandra Clarke.

Before the eco-ecumenical group begins gardening at the Catholic Worker House, it will conduct a planning meeting on April 7. The meeting will begin at 6:30 p.m. and will be held at the Wesley-United Methodist Church located at 1203 W. Greene St. in Urbana. A member of the Illinois Agriculture Extension Master Gardeners’ program will be there to answer gardening-related questions and to help the group map out an action plan for the upcoming growing season.

The eco-ecumenical gardeners are “an inner-faith religious group and people from any religious institution who want to get involved are welcomed,” Luagesen said.

“We envision this (project) beyond just putting some seeds in and getting food out of the ground. We think it’s more about nurturing respect for the land and what it provides us and (realizing) that we are not the only creatures that depend on it for survival.”

A response to the New York Times Portrait of Grief Series

The profiles of Edelmino Abad, Paul Acquaviva and Donald Adams were the three profiles that stood out to me from the series. The details and imagery presented in the descriptions provided a snap shot of how these men lived.

Beginning with Abad, he was portrayed as a man who adored his wife and children and who also treated his coworkers as a second family. The opening line provides you with an image of Abad—the proud father—attending his children’s dance recitals, and then we hear from one of his daughters about how he supported her dream to become a dance instructor. I felt like I knew this man by the way he was described.

The profile of Paul Acquaviva was moving because beyond stating all of his achievements, it offered a snap shot of a man who married his childhood sweetheart and cried at the birth of his first child. These are the details that give you a sense of the way Acquaviva lived.

Lastly, I was struck by the profile of Donald Adams. The piece had strong imagery of the connection Adam had with his wife and daughter. There was a scene of Adams walking toward his house and spotting “his girls” waiting on the porch for him. But my favorite aspect of the piece was how Adam’s wife, Heda, described their relationship. "I was H. He was D. Just the first letters. That's all we needed."

E-Waste Solutions

Paul Cade, a sophomore in urban planning, scrambled to maintain order as he sorted an array of electronic waste that poured into Lincoln Hall on Saturday, February 21. The southeast entrance to the building was converted into a makeshift recycling center where local residents brought old computers and computer accessories, including monitors and printers. During the five hour period, student volunteers received more than five tons of e-waste - enough to fill a semi-truck.
The group collected old computers to be used in the upcoming Sustainable E-waste Design Competition, Cade said.

Registration for the competition opened on January 29 and will run until March 16. Teams consisting of up to five students will choose from the donated e-waste and present their re-imagined designs to be judged by a committee on April 16. The juried competition will be held on the UI quad and will be preceded by a sustainable design conference hosted by the UI Environmental Council April 8 – 10 that will be held in the Illini Union.

The Cade family is playing a key role in the production of the event. Paul’s sister, Amy Cade, a senior in industrial design, initially proposed a project using recycled e-waste to Art and Design professor William Bullock. Amy explained that her father, Willie Cade, rehabs electronic equipment and provides it to schools and civic organizations.

After learning about Willie Cade’s company, PC Rebuilders and Recyclers, professor Bullock went to see the operation and was excited to witness old electronic equipment being prepped for reuse because “in industrial design we are part of the problem,” he said.

“E-waste is a huge problem that is creeping upward and upward,” Bullock said. The end-of-life of (electronics) is not good and much of it we’re exporting overseas and, essentially, dumping our trash on foreign shores and it’s really tragic because (toxins) are leaching into the soil, air, water and affecting the environment adversely and the people who are around those things.”

And the problem of e-waste is growing. The Electronics TakeBack Coalition, citing Environmental Protection Agency data, released a report stating that in 2006 Americans generated 2.9 million tons of e-waste, of which 11 percent was recycled. Those findings were supported by Allen Hershkowitz, a scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who said in a Nov. 9, 2008, interview on 60 Minutes that, “We throw out about 130,000 computers every day in the United States.”

Energized by his visit to Willie Cade’s company, Bullock helped develop ARTD 391/351, a sustainable e-waste course, he said. According to the course description, the class covers relevant topics such as history and theory of sustainable design and e-waste design techniques. Course enrollment is not mandatory in order to enter the competition and participants may attend course lectures and seminars without enrolling.

Amy Cade enrolled in the class and she and her classmates conducted research and developed a report that will be presented to the University, which will highlight how it can play a role in e-waste reduction, she said.

One of the primary goals of this effort is to stimulate support for a new research institute at UI called the I-Care Center, which will work with the University as well as electronic manufacturers to reduce e-waste, Bullock said.
“(E-waste) has become a global problem and we just wanted to take a positive step (toward) doing something about it,” Bullock said.
The Office of Sustainability helped fund ARTD 391/591 and supports the effort to develop the I-Care Center.

“We think UI could be a real leader in this area,” said Office of Sustainability Director Dick Warner.

“The collection of e-waste is a sticky issue these days. But it will be much easier come January 1, 2010,” Willie Cade said. He is referring to a new law called the Illinois Electronic Recycling & Reuse Act. The law’s key sponsors are Rep. Elaine Nekritz and Sen. Susan Garrett. According to a published description of the law, “manufacturers of televisions, computers, monitors and printers are required to set up and pay for the collection, transportation, recycling and or reuse of obsolete products.” The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency will monitor compliance of the law, which also bans e-waste from landfills.

“The really good part about the Illinois law is that it gives manufacturers double credit for reusing the equipment. And that’s what we really want to focus on here is the reuse of this equipment – not just taking it and throwing it away and making (silicone sand) out of it,” Willie Cade said.

Manufacturers such as Apple also seem to be taking notice of this issue. In its latest advertising campaign, Apple is touting the new MacBook “as not only the greenest notebook Apple has produced, but the greenest family of notebooks.”

According to Apple, the new MacBooks contain “materials that are highly recyclable and free of many of the harmful substances found in other computers.”
Apple’s new advertising campaign would be welcomed by local residents like Gisela Kraus, 55, of Champaign. Krauss was one of the people who participated in the e-waste drive.

“We saw the article in the News-Gazette and I thought it was time to get rid of the broken laptop. It broke recently and I didn't want to fix it because (it would) cost more than buying a new one and it was old anyway."

The Electronics TakeBack Coalition reported that 68 percent of consumers stockpile used or unwanted computer equipment in their homes.

“There are about 100 million computers being stored in homes right now. That’s about 1 per home,” said Willie Cade.

Kraus said she held on to the broken computer for two months. “Recycling is the best thing you can do right now, isn't it? Anything you can recycle, you should recycle – plastics, paper, cardboard, cans.”

After gathering a computer and five monitors, Paul Cade headed to a first-floor room in Lincoln Hall that his team will use for the next month to develop their design idea.

“We want to make a hydroponic farm, which is a farming system that uses no dirt, just water. (We hope) the computer will be able to control the nutrients that the plants will get. Then we will use computer monitors to give the plants light.”
Cade hopes the project will benefit from the five-member team that includes students from industrial design, international studies, urban planning and architecture, he said.

Supporting e-waste recycling efforts will offer many benefits to the local community, Willie Cade said.

"Eighty percent of the energy in the life cycle of a computer is used to manufacture it. So if we could reuse the silicon (contained in it), as opposed to grinding it up, we've done a much better (job for the) environmental process,” Willie Cade said. “Also, too, we've created local jobs. The whole notion of reuse and refurbishment is educational -- it creates local jobs. It's green and it's cost effective. Those are really the highlights of this (effort)."

On Tuesday night a marked silence fell inside the chambers of the Champaign City Council meeting. Prior to this moment, the proceedings proved to be uneventful as Council members voted unanimously to approve all but one agenda item.

The last item before adjournment was the public comment session. After Mayor Schweighart invited comments from the audience, Claudia Lennhoff, executive director of Champaign County Healthcare Consumers addressed the council.

Lennhoff, there to speak on behalf of the 5th and Hill Neighborhood Rights Campaign, informed the Council about the Ameren Open House meeting that will take place at City Hall on Wednesday, March 11, 2009.

“I am here because we just read Ameren’s report last week. And there is some new and important – and I would say – some shocking information from our prospective,” she said.

Lennhoff was referring to an ongoing battle between residents of Champaign’s 5th and Hill neighborhood and the utility company Ameren. The neighborhood is located near the site of contaminated property owned by Ameren, according to Lennhoff.

“Ameren, for the first time—after all their reports and after all their testing – identified large sections of the property that pose a (health) threat because of vaporization from toxins.

This risk of exposure to poisonous substances has been “a long-standing concern” for 5th and Hill residents, Lennhoff said.

“Ameren found that the test results exceed the safety standards for residential property. In other words, if there was residential property there it would be unsafe (for people living near the site). Of course, there is residential property 40 or 50 feet away (from the site) and they didn’t test outside the boundaries of their (property). But there is no reason to think that the vaporization stops at the boundaries of the fenced-in area,” she said.

According to Lennhoff, the report also stated that “the ground water is far more contaminated than we had ever been told or led to believe.”

“One of the water test wells showed the presence of benzene, a highly toxic substance in the ground water. Now the safety standards are five parts per billion, in other words, you don’t want a test result that exceeds five parts per billion. Well, from Ameren’s on documents, the test results for that particular well show a 1000 parts per billion.”

Council members sat quietly as Lennhoff continued to build a case against Ameren, eventually highlighting the City’s ground water restriction ordinance passed in 2007,which she said, exempts Ameren form having to clean up the contaminated area.

“On the surface the ordinance seems benign. It basically prohibits people from putting in wells to (access) water for potable purposes. It is important to understand that the only thing this ordinance accomplishes for the people of the City of Champaign is that it prohibits them from drinking contaminated water, which they have not been doing.”

The ordinance only protects people from exposure to toxins if they drink the water. “However, that is only one of three ways that people can be exposed,” she said. The other ways include “touching or tactile exposure and inhalation.”

“This ordinance only addresses one pathway for exposure – the ingestion pathway, which really has not been an issue because residents were not digging wells for drinking water and they were not hauling water in buckets from their flooded basements for drinking purposes. The ordinance does not prevent (contaminated) water from flooding their basements or from flowing into Boneyard Creek, or onto other people’s properties.”

Lennhoff said that the city ordinance allows Ameren to get away with not cleaning up the toxins because it claims that it is using the suing the ordinance to address the issue.

Regarding the ordinance Lenhhoff stated, “This is what amounts to an administrative slight of hand that allows Ameren to have the appearance that it is addressing contaminated ground water.”

Lennhoff hopes that the City Council members will not only attend Ameren’s open house meeting, but will also amend the ordinance that she said is allowing Ameren to avoid cleaning up toxins that are located in the 5th and Hill neighborhood.
In other Council news, the executive director of the Boys and Girls Club and 7 of program participants, presented Council members with commemorative plates as a token of appreciation for financial support.

Ideas for stories:
1. Cover the Ameren Open House Meeting
2. Follow up interview with Claudia Lennhoff
3. Interview Council members regarding Ameren issue