Amtrak thru the Hackmatack

Local gun-toters who were looking forward to a train-ride thru the Hackmatack National Wildlife Refuge and shooting some wild game, Buffalo Bill style, are going to have to wait. A new Amtrak train line will not be stopping, as hoped, in McHenry County. The proposed Chicago-Rockford-Dubuque line will stop in the more temperate municipality of Elgin, instead.

The Northwest Herald not surprisingly is not pleased:

Before the election, Gov. Pat Quinn told us a new Amtrak route connecting Dubuque, Iowa, and Chicago would run through McHenry County, Belvidere, and Rockford on its way westward. The state had the money, Quinn said, and would pay the $62.3 million it would cost to run the line through Huntley and Marengo. Last week, the Illinois Department of Transportation, no doubt with Quinn's tacit approval, reversed course. Now the line will skirt McHenry County and Belvidere altogether, instead running through South Elgin and Genoa before curving north toward Rockford. Chalk up another loss for McHenry County, a place rarely visited by most of our statewide politicians.
State snubs county again

Sharp-eyed operatives will observe that the same Northwest Herald, only a week earlier, was not-pleased over plans to create a Hackmatack National Wildlife Refuge. The details were reported on this blog by senior cyber-analyst, Mr Redtail ...

Attack on the Hackmatack

The Northwest Herald is quite happy to see money spent to build an Amtrak line in McHenry County. But dollars (and considerably less than 62.3 million of them) for a Wildlife Refuge is a government expense we can't afford. In other words: why isn't big government -- which has no business managing any property in McHenry County -- appropriating property in McHenry County for a railway corridor?

When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter? Nope -- that would be the sound of your LakeCountyEye's head exploding.

Note to operatives at the Northwest Herald: those statewide politicians may all be snubbing McHenry County because they are tired of having to listen to the LOL Libertarianism.