- Addo Elephant Park

- Graaff-Reinet

The ongoing $6.3 billion lane-widening project will culminate with the installation of bioswales, depressed patches of land planted with native grasses that help control pollution and flooding from highway runoff.

The bioswales will be installed by the Illinois Tollway along the roadside stretch of tollway running north from O’Hare International Airport to the state line after the existing road is rebuilt.

“When you lift up the entire road, a new drainage system is being put into place and these bioswales are integrated into that,” said Joelle McGinnis, spokeswoman for the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority.

The tollway authority worked with the Forest Preserve District of Cook County to gain access to about 13 different strips of land ranging in widths up to 75 feet along the length of the highway between Touhy and Milwaukee Avenues with an additional piece just south of Lake-Cook Road. Altogether, the areas make up about 16 acres.

While the total area sounds small, “nothing has ever been done on this large of a scale before,” said Angela LaPorte, an environmental planner with the Toll Highway Authority.

This is the largest project of this kind to be completed in the U.S., LaPorte explained. Bioswales have been frequently used in commercial and some residential developments.

But this use for a roadway is fairly unique, said Patrick Kelsey, vice president of the natural sciences division of Christopher B. Burke Engineering West, a natural environmental engineering business.

The bioswales are expected to help filter out pollutants, including lead, zinc and iron, from the roadway runoff.

“It will have an impact on metals and there are plenty of metals in roadside runoff,” Kelsey said. “Where the tollway will get the biggest bang for their buck is in control of metals.”

On the surface, a bioswale looks simply like grass or other vegetation but, below the ground, is a complex layering of sand, soil and drainage system that mimics the natural ground and its filtering capabilities.

Bioswales have three main functions, said Jenny Molloy, of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. They control water flow and flooding, pollution and soil erosion. They work by trapping suspended solids, like metals, on the vegetation and in the soil.

“[Bioswales] are designed to essentially trap the total suspended solids and some of those sediments that are coming off of the roadway,” LaPorte said. “The pollutants tend to get attached to some of those sediments.”

In addition to trapping pollutants, the swales help reduce flooding and slow water flow from the road, which will reduce soil erosion. In addition, the patches of native grasses will add an aesthetic element to the roadside.

But the bioswales won’t help with the worst component of highway pollution – deicing salt.

“[Bioswales] won’t help with chloride,” Kelsey said. “”In any region that needs to use deicing salt, and highway safety has to come first, we just don’t have good mechanisms to deal with chlorides.”

Unfortunately, chloride doesn’t accumulate anywhere but in the lowest areas because it remains dissolved in water. This saltwater can have a dire influence on local environments accustomed to fresh water. “It’s not good for fresh water systems. It’s not good for fresh water wetlands. It’s not good for terrestrial systems, typically, that aren’t adapted to salty environments,” Kelsey said.

The bioswales won’t be installed until the tail end of the construction project, which is planned for 2010. Until then, the tollway will be conducting the Tollway Runoff Monitoring Project to look at the characteristics of the runoff.

“It fluctuates seasonally as you could imagine, so what we’re trying to do is study that,” LaPorte said.

The decision to install the bioswales came about after a number of discussions between the tollway, several state and federal environmental agencies and advocacy groups.

As part of each roadway project the tollway submits permits to the federal and state environmental agencies, LaPorte said. “Sometimes, as part of those initial discussions or as a result of a permit application, we look for ways to try new things, to incorporate demonstration projects, to really address the concerns of those agencies.”

“This may be an opportunity on large scale to address large infrastructure like the tollway to try something new,” Laporte said.

The scientists are developing a way to use fluorescence in laundry detergents that flow into the lake after heavy storms to identify the presence of E. coli bacteria and the need for a swim ban.

The new testing, in theory, would take a matter of one or two hours instead of the 24-hour period needed now.

Chicago area beaches officially open over the Memorial Day weekend so the two-year study won’t help this summer.

Illinois’s Great Lakes’ beaches had 591 closings in 2006 due to high levels of E. coli, up slightly from 585 in 2005, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.

A quicker approach to detecting sewage would impact both swimmers and those who depend on the beach visitors for revenue. With the current testing it is likely that, if E. coli is present, swimmers are exposed long before a swim ban is put into effect. And while the Chicago Park District does not close the beach during a swim ban, the number of visitors is dramatically reduced, which has a ripple effect.

“If you look at all the people who live off the revenue from the beach — the concession stands and all that operate are essentially being denied revenue because of a beach closure that really is probably false,” said Kizhanipuram Vinodgopal, one of the Sea Grant researchers who teaches chemistry at Indiana University Northwest.

The problem, say many critics, is not that the people aren’t able to swim because of contaminated water, but that beach closures and swim bans are based on day-old data.

“Typically it takes between 24 and 36 hours before that determination is made because E. coli measurements are done through microbiological culture processes,” said Vinodgopal, “In essence the closure is probably too late, and probably by the time it happens irrelevant because the sewage discharge has probably been dispersed out into the lake itself.”

Vinodgopal along with Julie Peller, who also teaches at Indiana University Northwest, were given $80,000 by Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant in mid-March to develop a fast way of detecting sewage in swimming water.

The Chicago Park District, which manages and operates all the beaches in Chicago, conducts the water testing in accordance with guidelines of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Ellen Sargent, deputy director for the park district’s department of natural resources, explained that the testing the park district does is the only test now approved by the EPA.

“Unfortunately, this is the national protocol,” Sargent said. “That is the realm or the boundaries that we work with in.”

Escherichia coli, more commonly known as E. coli, comprises a large group of bacteria. Most strains are harmless but some can cause health problems that include diarrhea, respiratory illness and pneumonia, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Though E. coli is not the only microorganism found in the lake, it is one that can cause health problems and is considered an indicator for others.

The most likely reason E. coli enters the lake, according to Vinodgopal, is sewage overflow. Chicago, like many older cities, has a combined sewer system, which allows storm water runoff from roofs, parking lots and streets to empty into the same system that carries household waste to sewage treatment plants.

While this system generally takes both types of sewage to the treatment facility with no problems, when there is are heavy rains the system becomes backed up. The Deep Tunnel system, an artificial underground reservoir of tunnels to store storm and wastewater, takes on the overload after a storm. But additional overflow after storms is sometimes pushed into the lake.

Vinodgopal and Peller are looking at a way to test for E. coli without actually testing for the bacteria.

If you look at sewage discharges there are always a lot of chemicals that are discharged in the process, Vinodgopal said. “What we are proposing is to look at one subsection, mainly laundry detergents, because we believe that they constitute a substantial part of a discharge.”

Because the laundry detergents have whitening agents, or optical brighteners, they fluoresce. The researchers hope to detect the brighteners after storms and correlate their presence with E. coli measurements, which will be taken at the same time. Testing for optical brighteners, unlike tests for E. coli, take between one and two hours and would allow targeted beach closures.

Phil Mankin, interim associate director and research coordinator for the Sea Grant program, said that the research had several compelling aspects that the organization considered. “As far as we know bacteria, come partly from wildlife and the environment and some from human waste,” Mankin said. “[Vinodgopal’s] idea is to fine tune and deliver a way to distinguish between the two.”

The Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant is one of 32 programs constituting the National Sea Grant network administered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It concentrates on the 104 miles of heavily urbanized and industrialized shoreline in Illinois and Indiana and focuses resources on local issues. The Illinois-Indiana program funded Vinodgopal and Peller’s research because it has strong local and environmental implications, according to Mankin.

The EPA provides the guidelines on reasonable levels of E. coli and when beaches must be closed. The required testing, however, is slow leaving potentially clean beaches closed.

Vinodgopal and Peller have two years to develop the quicker testing method. They will be meeting with beach managers to discuss the potential of the study’s results. In the meantime, Sargent said that the park district is looking into rapid testing methods to be used along with the EPA mandated protocol.

Published by: Medill News Service, Media News Wire

Winzeler, a third generation manufacturer, is proud of the company he inherited.

“[Manufacturing] was what my father did, what my grandfather did. They seemed to enjoy it. They made a reasonable living at it, and I just kind of fell in line,” he said. “It’s the only job I’ve ever had.”

The family tradition began with Johnny Winzeler, Winzeler’s grandfather, who came to Chicago around 1910 and became an apprentice toolmaker, later opening a metal stamping and tooling company on the near northwest side of Chicago. Though financial hardships eventually forced the company to close its doors, Winzeler’s father began Winzeler Gear in 1940.

To start, Winzeler Gear specialized in making very thin, stamped metal gears, which were used in everything from bomb fuses to animated dolls. In 1950, however, Winzeler’s father began to see a future in plastic and began making gears out of flexible material.

Today Winzeler Gear makes products mainly for clients in the automotive and appliance industries. Though Winzeler Gear still produces plastic gears, Winzeler explains that it is a much different business.

“Compared to how things used to be in the late ’50s,” Winzeler said, “I would think that being in Chicago and manufacturing was like being in China today – just no end to the opportunities, lots of regional business, and not the level of competition and challenges that we have today.”

Competition, Winzeler admits, is a huge challenge. Despite its roughly $10 million in sales last year, Winzeler says his company is too small to be a global player and at the same time too big to be a regional player.

“It takes a lot of scale to be viable today, and we don’t have that scale,” Winzeler explained.

The company, whose parts are used in products from windshield wiper motors to gear shifts, shipped 120 million gears last year alone. Yet the company employees only 40 people in one 42,000-square-foot facility.

Applying a powerboat racing strategy to his plant, Winzeler realized that automating the processes in his facility would produce the most reliable results in the shortest amount of time.

Winzeler Gear is what Deloitte Strategy & Operations Consulting Practice principal Darin Buelow calls a manufacturer of the future. Manufacturers across the country are transitioning to this environment in which employees “are not really touching the product anymore, but they’re watching the machines that produce the product.”

In addition to being technologically advanced, Winzeler Gear takes an innovative approach to resource management as well.

“How do we have an engineering department?” Winzerler asks. “How do we have a research lab? How do we have all the assets we need with not a lot of capital?”

The answer is partnerships.

Winzeler approached Bradley University, his almer mater, for assistance. Bradley, he said, “is a big part of our developing engineering skills, developing an engineering organization and of course doing applied research that we can turn into profitable programs or differentiating ourselves and our key customers from the competition.”

For $5,000 companies can access a group of Bradley University engineering seniors who dedicate an entire semester to an issue that the company is facing. Winzeler, who uses Bradley regularly, says the benefit of using the Bradley students far outweighs the cost.

“It allows us to do pure research where our customers are not doing research,” Winzeler explains. “So we can create a value proposition for some of our business clients and say that we make sense to them. Plus we’re growing an engineering staff.”

Also approached were suppliers. Winzeler met with DuPont Co., which had been a supplier to his father when he ran the company. DuPont is now Winzeler’s only plastic supplier.

“We have primarily one supplier for everything we do,” Winzeler said to a roomful of manufacturers at a recent conference. “As a small company, this has been an extremely important part to looking like and playing like a much larger company.”

Winzeler, an avid modern art collector, thinks art is part of what makes his company successful.

“We use our factory as a creative engine,” he explained. “We filled the building with art and creative ideas because we believe that in doing that we are a much more creative company.”

As the numbers of online users increase so do consumer requirements. In fact, according to CashEdge’s second annual Consumer Online Banking Survey, which was released late last year, 85 percent of respondents would never bank with an institution that didn’t offer online banking. Now, smaller community banks are finding that their online banking services are a way to keep customers.

“With all the new technology and our busier lifestyles as consumers, banks have to rely on technology to stay connected with their customers,” said Chuck Carr, product line manager for Checkfree, now part of Fiserv Inc., a provider of financial electronic commerce services and products.

While smaller community banks are unable to compete with large institutions in terms of geographic convenience, in a virtual world a smaller bank is just as viable as a larger one.

“Smaller institutions, in addition to having smaller information technology budgets, –they don’t have the bricks-and-mortar geographic reach that their competitors have so the online channel is even more important to the small institution than to the large,” Carr continues.

Smaller institutions are catching on. According to the Independent Community Bankers of America, the number of community banks offering online account access grew 80 percent between 2001 and 2006. Today, 83 percent of all community banks, which are locally owned and operated institutions, offer online banking.

“Online banking provides an additional channel to your customer,” said Cary Whaley, associate director of payments and technology policy for Independent Community Bankers of America. “It allows your customer to bank on their hours not your hours. It enables transactions that are not labor intensive for the bank. To not be handled during branch time, things like viewing account information, paying bills, even looking at check images. All this can be done on the customer’s schedule.”

Allowing the customer to do more on their schedule translates to savings for the bank.

Valley Community Bank, which operates in the western suburbs, offers its customers who sign up for online banking and paperless statements the highest interest rate because the bank doesn’t have to pay for paper and postage.

“The customers that sign up for internet banking are cutting costs because we don’t have to mail statements to them and we’re not getting as many phone calls about account inquiries,” said Eric Franck operations manager at Valley Community.

At a bricks-and-mortar establishment every transaction has multiple costs. “From the bank’s perspective it’s much less costly to process that application if you don’t have to involve branch personnel,” Carr explains. “It’s much more efficient and economically advantage to a bank when they don’t have to transfer funds via a branch visit.”

Different banks offer different services, but the all banks that offer online banking services provide online access to bank accounts. Many banks allow customers to transfer money between accounts held at the bank and external institutions. Many banks offer bill payment services, and some offer financial organization services where customers can view accounts held at numerous institutions simultaneously. The next service on the horizon is mobile banking where customers will be able to use their cell phones to conduct their financial business.

“For the second year in a row, consumers are telling us how much they value opening their accounts and conducting their ongoing banking business online,” stated Sanjeev Dheer, CEO of CashEdge, in a statement. “Banks that maximize their Web presence are beginning to quantify the competitive advantage, and I believe we are nearing the point where banks that underutilize the online channel will experience a backlash.”

For years manufacturing was admired as a pillar of the Illinois economy. And though manufacturing is still a powerful part of the state’s economy, every year it draws less and less attention, especially from potential future employees.

“The perception of manufacturing for most people based on the news media is, that’s stuff that’s going away,” said David Geller, the manufacturing technology coordinator for Oakton Community College in Des Plaines. “It’s low pay and you get laid off all the time.”

“There’s some truth in that,” Geller continued. “The low-tech, put-the-screw-into-the-bolt job, that’s going or has already gone. What hasn’t left though is the high-tech stuff. That’s still very viable. These are people that are getting paid 80-90,000 bucks a year. They’re not low-paid jobs. The whole persona that people have of manufacturing jobs just isn’t true anymore.”

In fact, between 1977 and 2005 the value of American manufacturing swelled from $1.3 trillion to an all-time record $4.5 trillion, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. And though the U.S. makes more manufactured goods than ever before, manufacturing employment has been steadily decreasing as productivity per employee grows.

After peaking in 1979 with 19 million workers, the latest report from the Commerce Department states, the workforce has dropped just below 13 million, lowest since 1950. Today only 12.9 percent of Illinois workers are in manufacturing.

According to Darin Buelow, a principal with Deloitte’s Strategy & Operations Consulting Practice, the decline is a result of two things. The first is that some manufacturers are moving their operations to places where production costs are less expensive, which is often overseas. The second is automation. In their efforts to cut costs, manufacturers that choose to stay in the United States strive to automate their processes because that reduces labor expense. While this helps manufacturers grow, it drives the traditional workers out of the workforce.

But, Buelow is quick to explain that while touch-manufacturing jobs, that is those where the employee is actually pushing the product, are declining, high-tech manufacturing jobs are growing every day.

“The kinds of projects that our practice that our practice in Deloitte is helping deploy,” Buelow said, “tend to be what I would call manufacturing of the future, where everybody in the manufacturing plant is fairly well-educated; it’s a white lab coat environment, they’re not really touching the product anymore, but they’re watching the machines that produce the product.”

With the change has come a change in salary. “We’ve got people that are making 60-70-80,000 dollars on our shop room floor,” Westlund-Deenihan said. “We’re not using a hammer and nail anymore, we’re using lasers to cut metal. We’re using numerical controls and robotics.”

Though the environment and pay scale have changed, the image that manufacturing is a dirty job has remained. “What guidance counselor recommends in high school that kids go into manufacturing?” Westlund-Deenihan asks. “The media has said ‘It’s dirty, dark and dead-end.’ Well, that’s not true anymore.”

Because public schools provide few manufacturing candidates, many manufacturers have partnered with community colleges to create training programs specialized for the company. Geller explains that Oakton Community College not only works with area manufacturers to develop courses, it has two-plus-two agreements with the Illinois Institute of Technology, Northern Illinois University and DeVry. Students in Oakton’s manufacturing programs may transfer all credits earned at Oakton to the partner schools and earn a bachelor’s degree.

In another educational twist, Harwood Heights-based Winzeler Gear has partnered with Bradley University, where for a relatively small investment of $5,000 the university allows the company to bring an issue to the table and students research it to find a solution as a senior class project.

Quality Float looks to a non-traditional workforce, which includes low-income adults, legal immigrants and veterans, and fast-tracks them. “It is my responsibility to take this nontraditional population and make a pipeline of workers,” Westlund-Deenihan said.

After assessment, Westlund-Deenihan pays entry-level job candidates $12 an hour while she trains them. “This fast-tracking program is a 12-week fast track of manufacturing 101, and then they go and get on-the-job training and they’re paid when they’re on the job and they get certifications that are national standard or company-specific where they can go anywhere. That way we are getting a quick labor market. It’s a payoff,” she said.

“If you can pull down $60,000 a year and not have to get a degree and take out a bunch of student loans, that’s not a bad life,” Buelow comments. “And they’re in very high demand,” he adds, suggesting that the potential to make even more money will grow.

Though there are a number of grass-roots organizations fighting to change the image of manufacturing in the United States, experts agree that a major shift has to take place. “I can’t wait for a task force to come up and talk about fill-the-skills- gap for another 10 years,” Westlund-Deenihan explained. “I need a workforce and I need it now. I am third generation with my son as fourth generation. I can prepare for the death tax, but if I don’t leave him a workforce, there’s no legacy.”

The manufacturers’ shipments, inventories and orders report, a mix of measurements on durable and nondurable manufactured goods released by the U.S. Commerce Department, showed that new orders for manufacturing industries were down $10.8 billion to $492.2 billion.

This drop followed a revised 2.0 percent increase in December, which was originally reported as a 2.3 percent increase.

“What we saw in January was the weakest level in 11 months,” said TimothyRogers, chief economist for Briefing.com. “So clearly we’re headed lower, but it’s a very modest trend lower. We’re slowing, but we certainly haven’t stalled altogether and it still looks like we’re running fairly well.”

Rogers added that the decline in factory orders was expected given the advance report on January orders for durable goods released last week.

New orders for manufactured durable goods decreased $12.0 billion, or 5.1 percent, to $213.2 billion in January, slightly less than the 5.3 percent increase reported last week by the Commerce Dept. Nondurable goods, on the other hand, increased $700 million, or 0.3 percent to $216.1 billion.

Shipments, however, increased $4.7 billion, or 1.1 percent, to $431.8, and unfilled orders increased $5.3 billion or 0.7 percent to $813.3 billion.

“Unfilled orders really come down when the economy is weak,” said Adolfo Laurenti, senior economist at Mesirow Financial Holdings Inc.

Manufacturers’ inventories increased $1.8 billion or 0.6 percent to $322.1 billion.

“For inventories, if producers expect demand to go up they tend to accumulate inventory,” Laurenti explained. “When they expect the demand to slow you expect inventories to go down as well.”

But “given the overall tone in the economy,” Laurenti said, “I am afraid that the spike in inventories that we have seen in this report is more of an unexpected accumulation of inventory.”

Orders for nondefense capital goods excluding aircraft – seen as a proxy for business capital spending – fell 1.5 percent in January after rising 5.2 percent in December.

A bright spot in the report is construction machinery, which increased $2.7 billion or 15.4 percent in January following strong increases in the last three months.

“That’s really telling a story of commercial real estate,” Laurenti said. “Residential [construction] has been off a cliff, but commercial construction has been very strong. I think that number suggests that people working in construction are still adding machinery.”

The rate was the lowest since February, 1995 and well below the 600,000 consensus estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg LP. Over the past year the nation’s new home sales have dropped 33.9 percent.

The median price of new homes sold declined 1.5 percent to $216,000 in January, though the average sales price rose 3.5 percent to $276,600.

In the Midwest, sales fell 7.6 percent in January from the previous month, second only to the Northeast. In the past year, Midwest home sales have plummeted 56.0 percent, the largest drop of the four regions in the country.

Economists expect the poor pace of sales to continue.

“This is still a very weak market,” said Mesirow Financial senior economist Adolofo Laurenti. “I don’t really see much movement in the near term.”

Playing major roles in the problem are the number of homes on the market and tightened requirements for mortgage applicants.

Though building construction has dropped 25 percent, Laurenti explained, sales have dropped 34 percent, leaving many more homes on the market than there are buyers.

The seasonally adjusted estimate of new houses for sale at the end of January was 482,000, which would take 9.9 months to clear at the current sales rate.

The vast number of homes on the market is pushing down prices. According to the Feb. 13 Illinois Association of Realtors report on fourth-quarter 2007 sales, the median sale price of single-family homes in Illinois was $191,000, down 4.5 percent from the fourth quarter of 2006. The Chicago area was a small exception. The median sale price rose a modest 1.2 percent to $248,000.

In addition to the surplus of homes on the market, tightened lending standards for mortgage applicants in the wake of the sub-prime crisis is affecting the number of potential buyers.

In the Federal Reserve Board’s Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey on Bank Lending Practices, released in January, 49 percent of the banks surveyed reported tightened standards for prime mortgage applicants.

The Fed has attempted to help the situation by cutting the key federal funds rate by 1.75 percentage points since September, and though future rate cuts are likely, Laurenti says this actually adds to the problem.

“This expectation that more cuts will come is creating a game of cat and mouse,” he said. Rather than shopping for homes, people are waiting for better rates.

“In order to get a revival in the market,” Laurenti said. “I need to see interest rates reduced. We need a little relenting on credit standards. We need to understand where the job market is going, and we still need to see an adjustment in inventory for sales.”