Dialogue Roundup: Data Center Debate, Champaign Youth Summer Job Program, and Dire Results of a Hospital Shutdown

// This is a machine generated transcript. Please report any transcription errors to will-help@illinois.edu.

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Curtis Beasley IV: From Illinois Soul, this is Dialogue. I'm Curtis Beasley the 4th, student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Dialogue summer intern. Dialogue is an exchange about culture straight from the soul.

Development of large scale data centers is booming across the Midwest and South. Analysis from Pew Research Center finds that the number of data centers in Illinois is set to nearly double. But water and energy usage are rallying some communities against data centers. As IPM's Abigail [Bottar] reports, local and state governments are rushing to regulate this growing industry.

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Abigail Bottar: More than 100 people packed into tight chambers for an Illinois County board meeting in April.

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Speaker 2: Uh, I'm going to call this meeting of the Champaign County Board to order.

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Abigail Bottar: They're here to support pressing pause on development of large scale data centers, a move many communities have made in recent months. Dozens of people voiced concerns about the massive amounts of water and energy data centers use, including 6th grader Samuel [Tamori]. We don't need the AI as we need our water. The board unanimously passed the 1 year moratorium.

These debates surrounding data centers are playing out in communities across the Midwest and Great Plains. Concerns from environmental impacts to noise [have fueled] efforts to block the new development in Missouri. One St. Louis suburb even voted out half of its city council after it approved a $6 billion data center deal. Newly elected Festus council member Rick Belleville says he decided to run for office to bring more transparency to the project.

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Rick Belleville: When somebody comes to town and says, Hey, we're going to give you millions of dollars and we're going to build a data center, they need to slow down and get a full understanding of how the whole thing's going to affect their community.

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Abigail Bottar: Now he's working to put limits on water use for any new industry, including data centers that want to come to Festus.

It's not just local governments. State lawmakers are also pondering how to regulate data centers. Legislators in more than 20 states, including Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Minnesota, and Oklahoma, introduced bills this year to add guardrails to [data] center development. I think people are trying to catch up.

That's Dave Owen, a law professor at the University of California San Francisco, who studies the energy impacts of data centers. He says this flurry of legislation stems from the outrage many communities feel when data center developers try to build in their backyard. I don't think really anybody foresaw how much of a popular backlash there would be against data centers. So even, you know, a year and a half ago, a lot of state and local governments were very eagerly trying to court data centers.

Analysis from the National Conference of State Legislatures found as of May 38 states currently offer dedicated incentives meant to attract data centers, but several states are reconsidering. Illinois is one of them. Governor JB Pritzker praised the passage of tax incentives in 2019, but at his state of the state speech this year, he sang a different tune in the face of rising demand and surging prices. I'm proposing a 2 year pause on authorization of new data center tax credits.

After the Illinois legislature failed to act, Pritzker announced he's implementing a tax incentive pause starting July 1st. Several other states, including Michigan, are considering a full repeal of their data center incentives, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Michigan's tax incentives for data centers went into effect just last year. State Representative Dylan [Weigella], a Democrat, is sponsoring legislation to repeal them, and it's co-sponsored by a Republican. As people especially have started to see the bipartisan local pushback, a lot of legislators have changed their mind on this, but Michigan's governor still supports data centers. That's one reason [Weigella] doesn't think his bills will pass, but he hopes communities will take up the effort and pass their own restrictions.

That's a heavy weight for individual communities to bear, according to Jonathan [Coppas]. He's the director of the [Gardiner] Agriculture Policy Program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. This isn't fair to put on a county board, he says. The federal government should step in, but I do think it's a, it's a really difficult thing even for states. Water flows, electricity flows across state lines.

Federal legislation to pause data center development has been introduced. The bill sponsored by minority party members is unlikely to pass in a Republican controlled Congress. That means for now, these decisions about water, energy, and large scale development will continue to be a patchwork of local and state laws. I'm Abigail Bottar, IPM News.

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Curtis Beasley IV: As the summer is coming to an end, about 200 Champaign students are wrapping up seasonal jobs. They got those jobs through an initiative at the [Champaign] Unit [4] school district. The program helps students learn everything from what to put on their resume to how to get comfortable in an interview. IPM's Emily Hayes talked with the high schoolers and has 5 tips for applying to jobs.

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Emily Hays: Sparks fly as Malachi Hyman fuses two pieces of metal. He's 15 and wants to go into the trades, but few jobs in his field hire those under 18. For kids like him, [Champaign] Unit 4 is offering a summer internship, welding a sculpture with a professional artist under teacher supervision. Hyman helped weld together the panels that make up the base underneath the main sculpture. So it starts with the cube, with the solid cube in the center, and then it's expanding out, showing that opportunity grows as you continue.

The series of frames and circles will be installed in downtown Champaign near the Humpty Dumpty statue later this summer after the internship wraps up. I'm sad. There was so much more we could have done. And it's just ending, which, oh well, that's what it was. It was a 5 week contract.

Hyman got the job through Unit 4's Youth Employment Services, or YES[S] program. The students attend lunches during the school year with guest speakers about different jobs and how to apply to them. Then there's a job fair where students interview with local employers, and that's where Hyman said he learned our first tip for applying to jobs, not to overthink the requirements. They had requirements that I couldn't have done or something, and there were people who said after, oh, we would have hired you anyway. For example, he learned that most trade jobs don't hire those under 18, but he might be an exception because he has certifications in fire and workplace safety. So that's tip number 1.

Tip number 2 comes from rising sophomore Reggie Jones. He says he wasn't sure how to apply for jobs until the Y[E]S[S] program.

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Reggie Jones: Before you write your resume for that job, you want to take a good 30, 30, 40 minutes to look at the job and what they look for and find certain keywords to put into your resume that makes them go, oh, they read our thing. They know what they know what to look for.

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Emily Hays: Jones attends Centennial High School. He wants to be either a professional athlete or a mechanical engineer. [This] summer he got a position painting a mural at his own school through YES[S].

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Reggie Jones: I'll be like, oh yeah, I helped paint this. I did like the majority of the horses in the front.

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Emily Hays: Jose Vasquez is the artist behind the mural. His realistic and colorful portraits cover the sides of the Champaign-Urbana Public Health district, as well as the former 10,000 Villages store in downtown Champaign. He spent a week brainstorming with the students selected for the mural project.

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Jose Vasquez: At the bottom of the staircase you have a like a young, young kid pretty much starting his, his path to, you know, in high school and then you have, you know, another kid reaching out kind of like inviting them upward, you know, to, to this experience.

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Emily Hays: Josiah Clark is a rising sophomore at Centennial. She helped sketch out the face of one of the girls in the mural. Whenever the paint was like, I guess a little messed up, I would come over and clean up as good as I can.

She brings us to tip number 3. Find a job you can enjoy. Find a job you can be yourself in because I feel like that that would be the job that you can best perform in and that's what this job did for me.

It's because of students like Clark the Unit 4 summer employment program has been growing. Amanda Danowitz has been the YES[S] program supervisor for 2 years now. She said there were about 60 students in the program the year before she started.

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Amanda Danowitz: And then last summer I was able to get jobs for 152 students. And this summer we are over 200.

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Emily Hays: Danowitz says it helps that so many students know her from when she was an art teacher at [Franklin's DAM Academy], but that high demand has also meant she needs to find lots of jobs. The YES[S] program partners with a variety of employers around town from Walmart to Curtis Orchard to Land of Lincoln Legal Aid.

Our fourth tip comes from a student working with a new employer this year, Champaign County. Gri Orana graduated this summer from Central High School. She was nervous about her interview, but had some advice to guide her. Ms. Danowitz always reminded us to smile, so that's a key thing I do a lot. I'm already known for smiling, but I think smiling just gives it a better mood and you also get more comfortable with the person.

Orana wants to pursue a career in HR and is working in the county's HR office. She and other students have gained confidence through the experience. It sounded like a very authoritative type of job, so it felt nice to have that kind of feeling. And then especially getting out of high school, it's even better.

Rising junior Jade Wolf navigated her own challenge. She was the only female member on the welding team this summer. So it's kind of awkward at the beginning, but I feel like I've gotten to get closer with everyone. She expects to continue being one of the only women as she pursues a career in welding and carpentry, but she hopes to encourage others, and she brings us to our fifth and final tip that there is a job out there for you. No matter how many times you get rejected, there's always going to be one. I'm Emily Hayes with IPM News.

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Curtis Beasley IV: You're listening to Dialogue from Illinois Soul. I'm Curtis Beasley the 4th. It's been more than 3 months since West Suburban Medical Center in Oak Park suddenly closed. Now patients nearby on Chicago's West Side are traveling farther for care and ending up in crowded emergency departments at other hospitals. These are the unintended consequences when a community hospital shuts down. Doctors worry more hospitals like West Suburban could close, those that treat people who can expect to die younger compared to Chicagoans in other parts of the city. Kristen Schorsch of Chicago's WBEZ has more.

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Kristen Schorsch: It's a hot afternoon in Austin on Chicago's West Side, about 3 miles from West Suburban. Chantis Johnson sits on her couch and gently touches her large round belly. She's due in August with twins. She wishes she could deliver them at West Suburban, where her other kids were born. Once you know home is home. In West Suburban was home to me. I've been going there for a long time, so it's like they know you.

What Johnson worries about the most is what happens if there's an emergency. She and her kids use the ER and the walk-in clinic at West Suburban several times a year. Johnson has chronic asthma. She says she once drove herself to the hospital while struggling to breathe because it was close. She's not a fan of the other hospitals she's gone to. What if people should start dying because they can't get to the hospital in town? That's my biggest fear.

Doctors worry patients who relied on West Suburban are falling through the cracks. The hospital is across the street from Austin. It's more common here for people to die of cancer and heart disease, or from being shot, compared to other parts of the city.

Before West Suburban closed, Megan Nolan knew what to do for her patients. She's director of reproductive services with a large group of clinics that was closely intertwined with West Suburban for years. For instance, if a pregnant patient needed an ultrasound the same day, I used to call Larry, radiology and ask Larry to pencil a patient in. They would see them and Larry would call me back and tell me what was going on.

Now Nolan asks, where do those patients go? But she's good in a crisis. So she leans in, tapping her running list of resources. She has to consider a lot more to help her patients. How would they get to another hospital? Is it accessible by public transit? Do they take a patient's insurance, if they have any? It's this like, you know, like a chess game of where do they go? How do they get there? You know, I've worked in Austin for almost 11 years, and like most of my patients could walk to West [Suburban].

Several doctors who spent decades at West Suburban question if the state is doing enough. They want Governor JB Pritzker and others in power to hold hospitals more accountable for the taxpayer money they get. More than a dozen hospitals owe the state at least $650 million. Most are known as safety nets, treating low-income people who have public health insurance, or none at all. West Suburban CEO shut the doors and closed another hospital last year, owing the state more than $100 million.

Dr. George Naratam is a kidney specialist. He worked at West Suburban for about 16 years. Why are these various governing bodies concerned about what happened to the money? You know what I mean? That's what bothers me.

Pritzker and leaders of state agencies overseeing hospitals declined interviews. Next year, the pressure on hospitals will get worse. Big cuts to Medicaid public health insurance kick in. More than 400,000 people across Illinois could lose coverage. That's less money flowing to hospitals already stretched thin. The doctors worry, what if another suddenly closes?

One hospital absorbing West Suburban's patients, Community First Medical Center in Portage Park, is slammed. Margaret Polico is a nurse there in the ER. We've gone to not having enough patients to within 2 weeks of West Sub closing. We don't have enough staff.

Community First was already struggling. The hospital owes the state a ton of money. Polico says some really sick patients are stuck in the ER, some on breathing machines, waiting to go to the intensive care unit because there aren't enough nurses upstairs. She says some patients who traveled from the West Side are shocked at conditions in the ER. Two patients to a room, broken beds, sinks without running water. The stuff that we just accept and live with is, is really ridiculous. She equates it to MASH, the TV show where a surgical team works in a war zone.

The doctors from West Suburban say the state needs to create a plan to fill the void the hospital's closure created, and for other communities where this could happen next. Kristen Schorsch, WBEZ News.