Last Tuesday, City of Champaign Township voters had the opportunity to vote on a referendum to ask the City of Champaign Township trustees to restore the level of general assistance funding by “any and all means available to them.” In the crazy patchwork of overlapping jurisdictions and taxing bodies that is Illinois local government, the townships are the ones who provide general assistance — a type of welfare for the poorest of the poor.

Driving west out of Champaign on Bloomington Road takes you past a 90-acre tract of land surrounded by chain link fence — the site of an old landfill owned by the City of Champaign. No one has dumped garbage at the site since 1975, but a number of groups have used the site for various purposes in the years since.

On Tuesday night, the Champaign Planning Department and the Champaign Park District held a public meeting at the Springer Cultural Center to discuss the future of the old landfill.

People are up in arms about parking.

Or, at least, about parking meters. And they measure their frustration in quarters and hours.

At the heart of the issue is the upcoming vote by the Champaign City Council on whether or not to increase parking rates in downtown Champaign, and to extend the hours that the meters are enforced. While the city stands to see a not-insubstantial windfall from these measures, it also hoists the burden into the pocketbooks of the people who park downtown.

Angles dominate the city. From ten-story buildings to six-inch curbs, human-built landscapes are mazes of interlocking planes. And no type of angle dominates more than that famous heavyweight from high-school geometry: the right angle.

Vertically, we see these angles everywhere: in the high corners of buildings and window frames and doors. But right angles are horizontal creatures as well, and on the ground level the quintessential right angle is the street corner.