University Baptist Church

Further commenting on the status of the University Baptist Church  building, Carbondale has a pretty poor track record of getting land lords to maintain the condition of larger buildings with no tenants. Cases in point, the Johnson Hotel on North Illinois is now a parking lot.  Once the Stage Company left the old bank building at the corner of Main and Washington due to the landlord not maintaining it, the building quickly deteriorated further and now there is a grassy area with a fountain.

Tuscan Lodge eventually needed several hundred thousand dollars worth of renovation to bring it up to code, so the owner surrendered it to the city, which razed it. There's a grassy area where the old high school, occupied for a time by the Boys and Girls' Club, stood on North Springer.

University Baptist Church has someone willing to take over use and maintenance of the building. Better to put it to some sort of use than to leave it sit empty in the hope that some other buyer might come along. Remember at the time it was built, the building was a school on the edge of Carbondale. The housing grew up around it, before the city ever put zoning into place. That is why the town has a converted National Guard armoury and a former Coca Cola distributorship at the intersection of Sycamore and Oakland.

Boys and Girls Club

 It looks as if the Boys and Girls club will reopen next month, the Marion club at its old site and the Carbondale one in the First United Methodist Church. $200, 000 raised which will not fund the organization for very long, especially once it hires an executive director.

Boys and Girls Club

 According to this, after 20 years the Boys and Girls Club of Southern Illinois will close up shop this Friday. Until 2021, it was the Boys and Girls Club of Carbondale then changed its name and opened up a facility in Marion. No details in the release but I would guess that there was not enough funding coming in to support both facilities and trying to keep them open drained enough resources that it proved infeasible to keep both open. Otherwise I could see shuttering the Marion location and consolidating operations back to Carbondale.

More on City Council Meeting

The DE has a good write up on last night's city council meeting. Councilwoman McDaniels, the only council member besides the mayor to speak in favor of the proposal, is being disingenuous when she compares the proposal funding the district 95 reading program to funding provided for organizations such as the Women's Center and Boys and Girls' Club:

For those organizations, did we say, ‘We want a guarantee from you that you are going to succeed,’” McDaniel said. “No, we don’t say, ‘We want a guarantee from you.’ We give them the money and we trust that they will make the best decision that they can.”

However, if you look at the list of social service organizations the city supports (thumbnail #179), you will notice the most any one gets is $48,000. The two the councilwoman cites, Women's Center and Boys and Girls Club, get $12,500 and $30,000 respectively. and have to reapply for them annually. The reading and math proposal provides $150,000 annually, maybe a bit more, over a 5 year period with no provision for termination in the effect the program performs poorly. Hardly the same thing.