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Herald and Review from Decatur, Illinois • Page 3
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Herald and Review from Decatur, Illinois • Page 3

Publication:
Herald and Reviewi
Location:
Decatur, Illinois
Issue Date:
Page:
3
Extracted Article Text (OCR)

i Decatur, Illinois, Sunday, February 20, 1983 I Community Central Illinois Page A3 Young artists in jazz 1 jsmm I speak Br By ALDEN SOLOVY Herald A Review Staff Writer You can see the rhythm in their feet. You can hear it in the air. The music is jazz, and the musicians are high school students. Millikin University's annual jazz festival was at the Kirkland Fine Arts Center Saturday. High school jazz bands from across the state mainly from Central Illinois came to the university to compete.

Kirkland was a flurry of activity. There were three locations for performances. And there were separate locations for rehearsing before performances. While area bands dominated the auditorium stage all morning, Kirkland's gallery became a showcase for Decatur bands. That morning, the three Decatur public high school jazz bands performed back-o-back.

While the Stephen Decatur High School band was on stage in the gallery, MacArthur High School's jazz band warmed up in another location. MacArthur's band had done some rehearsing at the school before arriving at Millikin. Even so, the band took the opportunity to warm up further just before going on. The band seemed at ease in spite of competition, perhaps because for three years in a row, the MacArthur band has won the prestigious Oak Lawn Jazz Festival. Or perhaps it was because the past two years the band placed among the top five high school jazz bands in judging by Down Beat Magazine.

"We work our tails off," said Jim Culbertson, the band's director. He said that the hour-long' daily rehearsals are accompanied by individual practicing and listening to music at home. "It's a very high-powered musical group," he said. Culbertson said he tries to keep the competitive side of high school jazz low-key. "We're just playing good music," Culbertson said.

MacArthur's band played to a packed gallery. At the appropriate moments, soloists moved front and center to perform, while Culbertson who was di-; recting stepped aside to make i room for the soloists. In the end, cheers came from the audience. Culbertson took a brief, but formal, bow. Roger Schueler, director of the Millikin University Jazz Band and the day-long festival, explained that jazz teaches music students the creative process of music.

"When you play Beethoven, you have to play Beethoven. Jazz, you can say, is the art of the performer. Classical is the art of the composer," Schueler said. He said there are nine categories on which the bands are judged: blend and balance, interpretation, precision, soloists, rhythm, ensemble, dynamics, musical arrangement and intonation. Schueler said the most important category is the performance of the soloists, stressing the need for a soloist to be able to improvise with the music.

Jazz Festival Monday The Decatur School District will hold its second Middle School Jazz Festival 7 p.m. Monday in the Mound Middle School gymnasium. The festival, which is free and open to the public, will feature performances by bands from all four of the city's public middle schools. Also performing will be the district's All-Star Middle School Jazz Band, a faculty combo and Dick Garretson, a professional jazz trumpeter and composer. Photos by Herb Slodounik left, Mike Shefter, Clarence McClendon, Scott Peters, Doug Spoonamore, Steve Peters.

Nick Malleos MacArthur wins again Along with the best of festival award, MacArthur was named the best of the AA class and won the best band at sight reading music. Only three individual scholarships were given at the festival and all went to MacAr-' thur students. Scholarship winners ate: Jon Chalden, son of Mr. and Mrs. Don Robinson of 1577 W.

Forest; Clarence McClendon, son of the Rev. and Mrs. H.L. McClendon and Mike Sheffer, son of Mr. and Mrs.

Donald Sheffer of 1540 W. William St. The students were given $1,000 scholarships to attend Berklee School of Music in Boston. Cost impact on ADM of sewer bonds mix About $25 million in bonds will be issued 40 60 General 40 1 SCPIfflMlffii Revenue Bonds qnly and Staley 20 General Obligation 80 Revenue General Obligation 60 Revenue $8 million Obligation Revenue $5.75 million $3.5 million 80 General Obligation 20 Revenue MacArthur Jazz Band from Jon Chalden, rp By JIM LUDWICK Herald Review FarmBusiness Writer To the average person, it may not seem to make any difference whether a sewer project is paid for with revenue bonds or with general-obligation bonds. But to A.E.

Staley Mfg. Co. and Archer Daniels Midland that difference can mean millions of dollars. And the rest of the community also has a lot at stake, according to a spokesman for ADM, who said that depending too heavily on the use of revenue bonds could prove to be devastating to the Decatur economy. At issue is an upcoming decision i'by the Decatur Sanitary District about how to finance the local share of an estimated $107.4 million in improvements to the community's sewer system.

The district's board of trustees will meet at 7:30 a.m. March 3 in the board room of the First National Bank of Decatur to discuss how much they will be depending on rev-' enue bonds and how much they will be using general-obligation bonds in raising about $25.1 million for the sewer system work. A federal court already has authorized the trustees to issue bonds without the public vote that" otherwise would have been required. The rest of the cost of the $107.4 million undertaking will be borne by the tate and federal government. Staley and ADM enter the picture M4K.

The Chris Is- r-T-r For the third year in a row, the MacArthur High School Jazz Band won the Oak Lawn Jazz Festival Feb. 12. Mac Arthur's, band was named best band of the festival. Roosevelt Middle School's Jazz Band was named the best band of the junior high school class. And both bands were selected to be among 10 to perform in the festival concert, featuring 10 of the finest jazz groups in the Midwest.

The Oak Lawn festival is the largest in Illinois and one of the most prestigious in the Midwest. More than 100 jazz groups participated, including small combos, big bands and show choirs. cent with property taxes and 40 percent with user fees. They argue that for some of the planned work, user fees would be appropriate. But they also say some other aspects of the project such as the handling of runoff from rainfall should be paid for by the community as a whole, through property taxes rather than user fees.

Staley and ADM have not been without representation in the discussion of those issues. At the Chamber of Commerce, for example, the sewer problem has been under consideration for the past year by an advisory committee whose membership has included William P. Hagen-bach, director of environmental sciences at Staley, and Richard E. Bur-ket, vice president and assistant to the chairman at ADM. Staley spokesmen have been unavailable for comment, but Burket said the 60-40 split between property taxes and user fees is a reasonable way to finance the work.

If too much expense were charged directly to users, rather than financed through property taxes, the cost of sewer service could become high enough that it would affect the area's ability to attract and keep industry, he said. "If you went to where you tried to put more on the user side, it would tend to discourage expansion of industries that use water, and it would mean that other industries near Newton. 1 I vS $1.25 million It. 4 tf General Obligation Bonds only that use water just wouldn't come here. They would go elsewhere," he said.

A decision to finance the entire project with user fees would be fatal to Decatur's economy according to Burket. "You could do that, but it would dry up the City of Decatur. No one can price himself out of business," he said. "You have to take something that's fair and equitable for all, and live with it." If the district adopts the recom A mendation made by Meurlot and the Chamber of Commerce, user fees in Decatur still would be higher than those in other locations where ADM has plants, Burket said, but "not so high that it would be prohibitive. "It wouldn't make us want to pull out or anything," he said.

"I think-it's reasonable, the way it's presented." Meanwhile, Meurlot is pushing for the board of trustees to come to a quick decision about what proportion of the two types of bonds will be scholarship winner when the source of repaying the two types of bonds is considered. General-obligation bonds would be repaid through property taxes, while revenue bonds are repaid with the income the district would receive from fees it would charge to its customers. Half of all the district's user fees come from Staley and ADM, who are by far the biggest users of the sewer system. But only about 5 percent of the district's property taxes come from those to companies, according to Karl Meurlot, lead administrator of the district. In effect, this means that if the project were financed totally through revenue bonds repaid through user fees Staley and ADM would be underwriting about $12.5 million of the cost.

But if it were financed totally through general-obligation bonds repaid through property taxes the bill to those "companies would drop to $1.25 million. If some mixture of the two types of bonds is used, a 10-percentage-point difference in dependence on revenue bonds would mean a difference of more than $1 million to Staley and ADM. Meurlot and the Metro. Decatur Chamber of Commerce each have presented separate recommendations to the district's trustees. Both reports said that the project should be financed through a combination of the two types of bonds 60 per Correll family at underground home meg $12.5 million $10.25 million DM used.

He told the trustees during a meeting last week that he hopes they will quickly give him direction, and that they will approve the issuance by mid-June of some or all of the bonds. Richard J. Lutovsky, president of the Chamber of Commerce, also encouraged the trustees to make a firm decision about how much of the cost will be borne by property taxes and user fees. He said area companies need this information to help them with their business planning. ground cost about $40,000 in 1979, Correll says.

1 If someone hired carpenters and bought materials to build the same home today, he says, "It would cost at least $55,000 to $60,000, I'd guess." Construction costs today probably would be about the same as for a conventional home, Correll says. When he built his home, concrete prices were lower and an underground home was less expensive than a conventional building, he says. It was the first underground home that Correll has built. "I drew up my" own plans," he says. This was after he looked at a similar house near Dieterich.

"The difficult thing is finding the right kind of hill," Correll says. "You want a south or east exposure." This allows the most sunlight to come into the home, he says. About 340 people visited the Correll home Dec. 5 when it was one of four residences on a tour of homes sponsored by the Newton Junior Women's Club. tt Hard part is finding right hill Family Text and photo By STEVE CAHALAN Herald Review Staff Writer NEWTON Gophers and the Chris Correll family have something in common.

Both live below ground level. The rural Newton carpenter built the underground home which he and his family live in-Constructed in 1979, the home is built into a hillside with three 10-inch-thick concrete walls which are totally underground. The ground serves as insulation. Only the roof and the front of the house are exposed. The front faces east-southeast to take advantage of sunlight.

A wood-burning stove with a backup gas furnace heats the house. Correll and his wife, Linda, have two children 5-year-old Nathan and 2-year-old Emily. The single-story home has enough room 2,000 square feet of living space for the family of four. It has a living room, dining room, kitchen, three bedrooms, full bath, three-quarter bath, utility room and one-car garage. "The main advantages are heat and sound," Correll says of the underground home.

The heating bill averages $250 a year, although will be less this year because of thev mild winter. Also, air-conditioning bills are lower than they would be in a conventional home. "It's very quiet," Mrs. Correll says. "You don't hear it when the wind's blowing or it's raining real hard." Another advantage is that the exteriors of the three concrete walls do not have to be painted or otherwise maintained.

Also, the windowless bedrooms allow for sound sleep. When the doors are closed, no sunlight enters the bedrooms. The Corrells say they have found no disadvantages to having an underground home. The three concrete walls have expansion joints and have not cracked. Water does not leak into the home.

It is the first home the couple have owned. Construction materials.

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