Editor’s note

While refiling our archives, we revisited some Illinois Times issues from 1990, reminding us that we’ve been working on some stories for a good long while. On June 21, 1990, the cover story by Don Sevener was “Clinton calamity: Illinois Power used to be a profitable company. Then it built a nuclear power plant.” Illinois Power is now defunct but its nuclear plant lives on. When we last revisited Clinton after its post-Fukushima inspection, regulators found it is operating safely. But the cost of all that safety, plus the impossible task of resolving nuclear waste issues, keeps nuclear power on the back burner. On July 26 we explored the U. S. Supreme Court’s new “Rutan” patronage ruling, won by Springfield attorney Mary Lee Leahy: “The end of patronage? The Supreme Court has outlawed hiring-as-usual in Illinois. But few expect political jobs will disappear from state government.” Early this year, after Mary Lee Leahy died last December, we looked back on patronage, noting that governors have made more bureaucrats policy managers to get around the ruling, but the system is better than before. On Aug. 2, 1990, the cover story was “Better ideas for downtown,” noting that big crowds came out of office buildings for lunch on the south Old Capitol Plaza, but other parts of downtown, like the north plaza and Union Square Park, were pretty dead most of the time. What’s different now is that most of that lunch crowd has disappeared. –Fletcher Farrar, editor and publisher