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The Daily Illini
Monday February 18, 2013
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www.DailyIllini.com
The independent student newspaper at the University of Illinois since 1871
Vol. 142 Issue 103
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URBANA MAYOR
An icy relationship
Urbana mayoral candidates discuss top issues
LAUREL PRUSSING
LES STRATTON BY CORINNE RUFF STAFF WRITER
The Champaign County League of Women Voters hosted a question forum Friday night for candidates in the Urbana Democratic primary. Incumbent Mayor Laurel Prussing and candidate Les Stratton debated questions asked by residents in attendance on topics including crime in the Lierman neighborhoods, the Urbana Landmark Hotel and economic development. The primary election will take place Feb. 26.
Corinne can be reached at cruff2@dailyillini.com.
How will you decrease crime in Urbana, particularly in the Lierman neighborhoods and the Philo Road area?
BRIAN YU THE DAILY ILLINI
Jen Chen and Kyle Grob, students at Parkland College, skate together during the Skate with a Date event held at the Ice Arena on Saturday night. Hosted by the University of Illinois Service Committee, all proceeds from the event went to the American Cancer Society through Relay for Life.
“Urbana has used community policing for many years. ... We’ve cut crime 25 percent across the city. When we started condemning the homes at Urbana Townhomes the crime went down significantly. ... Our police department works very closely with our fire department and our building inspectors. We really crack down on slum landlords.”
“My suggestion is to put more police on the streets. I believe locating them in the area on a regular basis is the way to go. Looking at the budget, we’ve come across $380,000 in overtime for fire department. ... I would see capping that and using the balance to put additional police on the street.”
What are your thoughts on funding for the Urbana Landmark Hotel?
URBANA CITY COUNCIL
City council to discuss social service funding, early childhood education BY CORINNE RUFF STAFF WRITER
The Urbana City Council will discuss changes to social service funding and ways to increase efficiency in evaluating community need at their regular meeting Monday. Although the city does not foresee an increase in the $313,400 budget from the fiscal year of 2011-2012, council members will re-evaluate current need and consider additional programs that aid pre-K education and youth employment in terms of allocating the funds. “These are known to be extremely effective and to pay huge dividends to kids later in
life,” said Alderman Charlie Smyth, Ward 1. “Kids who get a few hours a week do better in school and graduate at higher rates. Those are the kinds of successes we are after.” Smyth said council members will also discuss ways to make the yearly application more efficient for agencies who continually receive funding, including Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Illinois and Crisis Nursery. “We need a way for them to quickly report on what they did with the money,” Smyth said. “We also want to evaluate the programs for their relationship to Urbana.” Although the city received 48 applications
from agencies last year, the city was only able to fund about 35 of them. Smyth said there are core programs the city funds every year, and they are unlikely to accept new programs unless there is an excess of funds. At last week’s meeting, Urbana Mayor Laurel Prussing and council members discussed the possibility of expanding Champaign’s Summer Youth Employment Program to Urbana if the city can come up with more funding. The program partners with Champaign businesses that offer summer jobs to high school students.
Corinne can be reached at cruff2@dailyillini.com.
“Well, the 45 rooms are filled and booked through May. The project was always going to be done in phases. The owner was not out of contract in the agreement because when he ran into problems, we amended the contract. I think it’s wrong to take a man who is investing $2 million and tell him he is a failure when he took on a very tough project and the hotel is beautiful.”
“It’s been managed improperly. The current administration overlooked that (the owner) was not ready. ... They should have sent him back to the table to get a proper construction plan. If he had that, we wouldn’t be in the situation we are now with only 45 rooms available.”
If you become mayor of Urbana, what do you expect to accomplish in the next four years? “I would like to see us continue attracting new businesses to Urbana. I’d like to see completion of the Boneyard project. I’d like to see us have cooperation with Champaign and the University on expanding early childhood education and housing for people and creating more jobs.”
“Sustainable environments in sustainable investments. Urbana needs to invest in things that we know we are going to get our money back. If we spend $5 million on Boneyard and it doesn’t attract anybody, we’re out $5 million.”
New RSO holds 2nd annual conference for ECE students Event included several student competitions, keynote speech by NASA deputy director BY AUSTIN KEATING STAFF WRITER
The new student organization ECE Pulse held its second annual conference, directed toward students in electrical and computer engineering, Friday and Saturday. The conference, which also has the same name as the RSO, was fi rst held last spring. This year about 350 people showed up to the keynote speech, and about 450, more than double the turnout of last year’s event, registered for the conference, said Shivani Singh , director of the conference and junior in computer engineering. “ECE Pulse is a conference that’s not just about holding tech talks and having a lot of students coming together to hear people talk,” Singh said. “It’s about
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them realizing that what they learn can be applied to a lot of fields.” The conference included talks on topics such as biotechnology, computing and aerospace engineering that attracted students from departments other than ECE. “We want them to come together and learn about all the different things they can do in a very casual environment,” Singh said. “This is where they get a chance to see what’s out there and envision their futures in the corporate world.” The keynote speaker of the event, Lt. Gen. Eugene L. Tattini , discussed how ECE alumni from the University worked on Curiosity, the rover NASA sent to Mars in August 2012. “He spoke about how a lot of
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the ECE graduates designed the antennae for Curiosity that helped it land safely on Mars, so he spoke about mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, ECE and showed how everything comes together,” Singh said. “It showed what we want to show to this conference: that all the engineers come together to make wonderful inventions.” Another part of the conference was a set of competitions. About 70 teams competed in eight categories, all of which presented a problem that needed to be completed within a set time limit. Prizes ranged from GTX480 graphic cards for winners in the harder categories to gift cards for winners in less diffi -
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FOLAKE OSIBODU THE DAILY ILLINI
Eshan Chittimalla, an employee of Schlumberger, speaks to students about the company's latest research and technologies in the NSCA building on Saturday as part of ECE Pulse's annual technical conference.
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