As the Illinois House passed legislation to define the burning of tires in the poverty-stricken Ford Heights as green, renewable energy, an incinerator in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, defaulted on a bond payment of $425,000.

The legislative action on Senate Bill 380 will take subsidies away from wind mills, geothermal and solar power projects.

Here are some windmills we saw in Idaho last summer.

The incinerator is apparently already operating, but needs state taxpayer subsidies to stay afloat.

The incinerator not only has money problems, it pollutes the air.

If the facility closes, 17 jobs will be lost.

The bill passed 61-45.  I should have said “barely passed,” because bills need sixty votes to pass the House.

Locally, State Reps. Mark Beaubien and Jack Franks voted against the bill.  Mike Tryon was excused from voting on the bill.

Earlier all Illinois Senators supported the bill, which had no content.  It was what legislators call “a shell bill.”

I wonder how Pam Althoff and Dan Duffy will votes when there is substance to the bill, which, I would point out did not surface until the supposed last week of the legislative session, a time really sneaky ideas surface.

(That brings up the subject of what anyone would vote for such an obvious shell bill, knowing that you have no idea how it will end up.)

The Chicago Tribune article was written by Michael Hawthorne and Michelle Manchir.

This sounds like a similar bill I opposed in the 1990’s. It was one of those strange years when environmental and economic priorities merged. Voting against the ill-conceived idea of a South Suburban incinerator to burn shredded tires was a “two-for” for those rating systems. I think I ended up with the highest ranking from the Illinois Environmental Council that year.