* The Daily Egyptian…

Southern Illinois University administrators and trustees donned Saluki-branded hard hats as the bucket of an excavator tore through the old student housing of Greek Row on Aug. 6, 2025. […]

But a year later, the project has ground to a halt: Eight of the 14 buildings are still standing, filled with water and trash. The SIU Foundation paid $2.2 million to walk away from an agreement with a Georgia-based real estate developer for the new housing, and the future of the project remains in limbo. […]

SIU’s top administrators all insisted that it made sense to halt the project while the university completed a facilities master plan that the SIU Board of Trustees is expected to consider for approval this December. But when it came to why the demolition was left unfinished, or why the SIU Foundation canceled its pre-development agreement and lost $2.2 million in the process, getting answers proved elusive. University officials said those answers could only come from SIU Foundation CEO

Kupec said some of the lost funds could be recovered, but didn’t detail how. He stressed that none of the money expended came from state dollars or tuition — only from private donations made to the SIU Foundation.

*** Statehouse News ***

* Press release | Buckner Appointed to National Conference of State Legislatures Executive Committee: State Rep. Kam Buckner, D-Chicago, has been appointed to the Executive Committee of the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), one of the organization’s highest leadership bodies, responsible for guiding its strategic direction, governance, and finances. The Executive Committee is composed of 63 members, including legislators and legislative staff from across the country. It oversees NCSL’s operations and helps shape the organization’s work on behalf of America’s state legislatures.

*** Chicago ***

* Crain’s | Landmark Loop office building takes step toward data center conversion: The plan is part of a wave of office building conversions sweeping across downtown as landlords and developers adapt to weakened demand for workspace. While dozens of properties downtown are poised to be turned into apartments, the owner of the Adams Street property sees a path forward in housing servers and technology that stores and processes data — betting that intense demand for artificial intelligence computing capacity is the building’s best path to stability. Transforming outmoded office space is key to restoring the property tax base downtown, where billions of dollars of lost office property values since the COVID-19 pandemic led to city homeowners enduring the highest property tax hike in at least 30 years.

* Crain’s | Elizabeth Warren questions Compass deal with Chicago-area home listing service: Sen. Elizabeth Warren is the latest in Congress to question a deal the Chicago area’s multiple-listing service made with real estate mega-brokerage Compass in April, claiming in a letter to the two firms that their arrangement will harm consumers and potentially lead to civil rights violations. The deal to take Lisle-based Midwest Real Estate Data’s private listing network national with a financial boost from Compass “threatens to create a two-tiered housing market where insiders pay for exclusive access to housing inventory and market data, while everyone else is shut out,” Warren, D-Mass., wrote.

* Block Club | Bud Billiken Parade, South Side Tradition For 97 Years, Steps Off Saturday In Bronzeville: AstronautFlee Dance Company and the King College Prep Marching Band are two of the nearly 300 participants who are scheduled to appear when the parade kicks off 10 a.m. Saturday from the intersection of 39th Street and South King Drive. It’ll march south through Bronzeville before finishing at Washington Park. More than 500,000 spectators are expected to attend, according to Chicago Defender Charities. AstronautFlee Founder Doncell “Chum” Richard has been preparing his team for weeks ahead of its seventh appearance in the parade, his dancers practicing five hours each day in the lot behind the University of Chicago Charter School’s Woodlawn campus. Such is the task of defending back-to-back Bud Billiken dance competition titles.

* WTTW | From Bike Repair to Welding, Teens Are Learning Trades and Building Confidence in Summer Programs: Francisco Rubio is the instructor for Bikes N’ Roses, a free program under Communities United’s Workbench Project. Rubio teaches Chicago teens how to repair and build bicycles, but the real lesson goes beyond mechanics. “Teaching them how to empower themselves through cycling, through the mechanics of, like, ‘I don’t know how to do this.’ … ‘No, you don’t know how to do it yet,’” Rubio said. “Being able to install that thought process in them — it’s all I really look for.”

*** Cook County and Suburbs ***

* Daily Herald | Critics of Grayslake data center plan sue to stop construction: Opponents of a planned data center in Grayslake have gone to court to stop the multibillion-dollar project. They claim data centers aren’t expressly permitted under Grayslake’s zoning rules and that Grayslake officials violated the Illinois Open Meetings Act by improperly deliberating the proposal and negotiating or deciding terms of the deal in closed-door meetings and by discussing the agreement in emails and other private channels.

* Courier-News | Proposed East Dundee annexation deal would allow future data center: The agreement for the eastern portion of the land is similar to the one for the western portion approved in 2025 — with a few additional provisions, Assistant Village Attorney Stew Weiss said at a public hearing for the deal held as part of a recent village board meeting. One provision would require the village to provide financial incentives for the development of the full 253 acres, Weiss said. A “qualifying development,” or any development of 100,000 square feet or larger, could receive a 25% reimbursement for TIF-eligible expenses, an electricity tax rebate of 25% and an electricity tax freeze for a 20-year term, according to the agreement under discussion.

* Tribune | Business booms for Hollywood Casino Aurora during first full month at new $360 million facility: The former riverboat operator generated $17.4 million in revenue, welcomed nearly 156,000 visitors and catapulted to No. 3 among the state’s 17 casinos in July, according to monthly data released Friday by the Illinois Gaming Board. The move to dry land doubled revenue and admissions over the same month last year, when the Hollywood Casino Aurora was still just a moored barge floating on the Fox River.

* Daily Herald | No second bananas: How Chicago Snowballs combine baseball with a ‘traveling circus’ show: This, plus more, was the scene on a recent Sunday afternoon at Wintrust Field in Schaumburg, where, yes, a baseball game happened to break out in the middle of it all, too. The Chicago Snowballs — the local answer to the antics of the Savannah Bananas — are on an inaugural season tour to bring family-friendly “sportstainment” to baseball stadiums throughout the Midwest.

*** Downstate ***

* WAND | Central Illinois Regional Airport awarded $3M by IL Dept. of Commerce and Economic Opportunity: The grant funds will be combined with federal grant and existing airport capital funds to design and construct the extension of Airport Road across Illinois Route 9/East Empire Street onto airport property and connecting to the airport’s air cargo facilities. This will open a 51-acre site of airport property for expanded

* WAND | Budzinski hears from Illinois farmers facing tough economy: Fourth-generation farmer and Rep. Wayne Rosenthal has never seen the farm economy this bad. “It’s really a tough economy right now; it’s a struggle all the way through, you know, so we try to get as many bushels as we can because the price isn’t there to help support you,” Rosenthal said.

* KFVS | Family resource center opens at Carbondale Middle School: A family resource center is now open at Carbondale Middle School thanks to a $5 million grant and support from the local community. Carbondale School District 95 held a ribbon cutting on Thursday morning, August 6 to celebrate. The center will offer needed services such as medical, a food bank, clothes and laundry.

*** National ***

* NewsGuard | RFK Jr. Pumps Up COVID Mortality Rate: Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is falsely claiming that the U.S. had the highest COVID-19 mortality rate compared to all other countries, citing the inaccuracy to criticize Dr. Anthony Fauci, who helped lead the U.S.’s COVID-19 response. […] According to data collected by Johns Hopkins University, from January 2020 to March 2023, Peru had the highest COVID mortality rate of any nation, with 665.84 deaths per 100,000 people, while the U.S. COVID mortality rate was 341.11 deaths per 100,000, placing the U.S. in 14th place for that metric.

* ABC | NOAA maintains prediction for below-normal Atlantic hurricane season: NOAA dropped the number of predicted named storms to seven to 13 (the previous prediction was eight to 14 storms). Two to six of those could become hurricanes, according to the agency, a drop of one from its forecast in late May. NOAA is now predicting zero to two major hurricanes, a drop from late May when the agency predicted one to three. NOAA is now predicting a 75% chance of below-normal activity; that’s up significantly from its previous forecast of a 55% chance.