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Small Towns, Big Pipes
You turn on the tap and clean water comes out. You flush and it goes away. Rain falls and the street drains. Three systems, all buried, all older than most of us, all wearing out at the same time.
We present here a plain-language series on what that means for small towns like ours across Illinois, why it costs so much to fix and what a village our size can actually do about it. Every fact comes with a source you can check yourself.
None of this is exclusive to Kansas Illinois. Small municipalities across Illinois and the Country are experiencing the exact same failing infrastructure. Understanding how these systems reached this point will hopefully help us figure out how to find a solution.
Nobody Left to Run It
Every article in this series so far has been about things: pipes, tanks, plants, drains, dollars. But none of those things run themselves. Behind every small-town water system is a person who knows which valve [...]
Nowhere to Put the Water
Picture a village sitting flat on the Illinois prairie. No creek runs through it. No lake sits at the edge of town. In every direction, right up to the last row of houses, there is [...]
The Problem in the Solutions
If you've read this far in the series, you've probably had the same reaction most people have. Surely somebody is helping with all this. Surely there are programs. There are. That's the trap. Illinois small [...]
Construction of the new Water Tower for the Village of Kansas Illinois is financed by the Clean Water State Revolving Fund (SRF). The SRF program is administered by the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency and receives a portion of its money to fund these types of projects from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
This project includes a new water tower. Once complete, it will improve water quality for area residents and businesses in Kansas Illinois by replacing the aging water tower. SRF programs operate in each state to provide communities the resources necessary to build, maintain, and improve the infrastructure that protects one of our most valuable resources: water.
