Smile Politely. Speak Directly. A Champaign-Urbana Culture Blog

(This is the second in a two-part series regarding retaliatory eviction issues relating to tenants and landlords in the greater Champaign-Urbana area. The previous part is featured here on Smile Politely.)

Lindsay Bever spent last winter trying to heat her apartment in Champaign with her oven. Her heat stopped working. She had complained to her landlord, who Bever said, did nothing about it.

Four years prior to Bever’s experience with her landlord, the Illinois General Assembly had passed the Residential Tenants’ Right to Repair Act, which was meant to give tenants a way to sidestep inept landlords.

However, tenants like Bever still have little recourse.

Last night at the Cunningham Town Board meeting, proponents of instant runoff voting, a controversial method of election where voters are able to rank their preference of candidates on the ballot, scored a small victory when the board deferred a move that could have quashed their efforts to have an advisory referendum placed on the November ballot.

During the last few years activists have used the Cunningham Town meeting, where citizens are able to place to place advisory referendum on the November ballot largely free of elected officials, to push issues ranging from the withdrawal of troops from Iraq to the impeachment of President Bush.

(This is the first in a two-part series regarding retaliatory eviction issues relating to tenants and landlords in the greater Champaign-Urbana area. The second part will appear next Tuesday at the same time.)

In downstate Illinois, a law aimed at protecting tenants from landlords who might retaliate against them for calling in a building inspector is almost never used.

Does this mean that landlord-tenant relations are just peachy in the land south of Chicago?

Downtown Champaign's oldest bar--as old as the end of Prohibition — is throwing itself a party, with bands, birthday presents and, of course, cheap beer.

Three dollars gets you in to see Dottie and the Rail (a ragtag country band fronted by a smoky-voiced singer whose beau, Foty Backey, is the 'Rail's owner) and The Golden Quality (a rock band with a Brass Rail bartender in the lineup).

Urbana City Council voted down an ordinance Monday night to make Urbana's Lincoln Hotel a historic landmark, a measure that would have secured the original 1923 structure built by local architect Joseph W. Royer.

Built in the Tudor-style, the downtown Urbana hotel has seen considerable ups and downs in its 85-year history along with a major addition constructed in a Bavarian-style aesthetic in the early 1980s by the Jumer's hotel brand.

On Sunday afternoon, a few dozen people gathered at Champaign’s West Side Park to send a clear message to Rep. Tim Johnson, the Republican congressman who represents Illinois’s 15th Congressional District. The message: It’s time to prioritize legislation that addresses the causes and effects of global warming.