O’Hare International Airport is getting some much-needed landscaping from some surprising workers: a herd of goats, sheep, llamas, alpacas and burros that tend to six acres on the other side of the fence from where the planes land.

The Sustainable Vegetation Management Initiative, now in its third year, has been quite a success.

The landscaping program is an efficient way of removing hard-to-access vegetation, which in turn eliminates the habitat for wildlife that could interfere with airport operations (including birds, which can be prove dangerous to planes, especially when concentrated in large numbers). It provides an alternative to simply spraying with toxic herbicides, and reduces soil erosion by eliminating the need for heavy equipment in the area. Plus, it reduces both the cost and pollution associated with gas-powered mowers, trimmers and other lawn equipment.

By having a mixed herd of over 40 grazers, including several types of animals with different tastes, almost all the different types of invasive plants are eaten. Even poison ivy can be cleared with no ill effects on the grazers.

The animals take plenty of breaks, human workers have confirmed. The four-legged workers seem content, and there haven’t been any demands for wage hikes.

“They don’t charge any overtime,” Aviation Commissioner Ginger Evans, visiting the herd on Aug. 4, told ABC News. “No, they just nibble away.”

Are these hooved landscapers poised to take over the jobs of the 888,426 people working for the nation’s approximately 401,473 landscaping businesses? It’s unlikely. But more and more management teams of both private spaces and municipal areas are seeing the benefit of involving four-legged friends in clearing efforts. The Boston Globe reported earlier this summer that Boston, too, would be expanding its use of goat-driven landscaping — noting that last year, the goats “didn’t do such a baaa-d job” of clearing overgrown city land.

Missouri and Illinois have seen substantial flooding in what has turned out to be a wet summer, and for homeowners, the weather has presented some serious problems. For one man in Madison County, IL, flooding has caused an estimated $30,000 in damage to his home, and he’s left footing the bill.

Jim Guthrie of Hartford Township says that the town failed to pump the low-lying area where his home sits along Illinois Route 3. Because of the numerous storms this season, Guthrie’s home became flooded on June 25, when more rains arrived.

The water seeped into his finished basement, producing mold along the edges of the room.

Guthrie explained that the home is in a flood-prone area, and his family tried to add sandbags around the basement’s sliding glass door. But after the storm, the basement nevertheless had three inches of standing water, which pushed Guthrie to approach the town about the problem.

Neighbors had also approached the town as early as June 22, saying that the township needed to pump the water in the ditch.

But Village Trustee Bernie Caldwell said there was no pump available, leaving area residents with flooding and Guthrie with a $30,000 bill for his moldy basement.

Typically, a flooded basement may be fixed with basement dewatering systems and other services for homeowners with damp or waterlogged basements. But for recurring problems with drainage, other solutions may be necessary.

As for those in Hartford Township, residents and village trustees alike want to find more permanent environmental solutions to prevent the area from being affected by the flooding.

At this time, flood warnings are still in effect for Madison County, IL, along with several counties in Missouri, including St. Louis County. The National Weather Service has warned that more rain could flood rivers in Missouri, including the Mississippi River, and levee breaks have flooded parts of Greene County, IL, near Madison County.

Hartford Township officials won’t admit fault for the incident, but they are working with Madison County and the Illinois Department of Transportation, along with other resources, to find new drainage solutions. Guthrie, meanwhile, has consulted with a lawyer about the issue.

On July 15, Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner brought happiness back to the Prairie State, signing a new law that allows happy hour alcoholic drink specials to return.

Back in 1989, Illinois law banned happy hour drink specials over concerns about drunk driving. Now, restaurants and bars can start offering drink specials for a specific number of hours, thanks to Rauner’s signature.

There are restrictions, though. Illinois law will now allow discounts on alcohol for up to fours each day, and up to 15 hours a week, just so long as the discounts are advertised a week in advance, and aren’t offered after 10 p.m. Volume specials, such as buy-one-get-one, remain prohibited.

Advocates of the new law celebrated the victory as a way to level the playing field for Illinois, and increase tourism to Chicago.

“This is an effort to recognize the fact that Illinois has become a culinary destination,” said state Rep. Sara Feigenholtz. “From heads in beds to butts in seats, food is really driving tourism in Illinois.”

Opponents, however, continued expressing fears that with the return of the dreaded happy hour would mean excessive drinking and drunken driving.

That being said, alcohol-related fatal crashes accounted for 49.6% of all fatal crashes in Illinois in 1988, according to The Chicago Tribune. In 2012, 41% of all fatal crashes in Illinois were alcohol-related.

Nevertheless, Illinois has also included several other restrictions, just to be safe. After all, state courts have looked to evidence of legislative intent in construing state law for over 100 years.

First, drinks can’t be given away as prizes, and games can’t involve consuming alcohol. Second, there can’t be any open bars — bars can’t offer unlimited drinks for a fixed price — unless it’s for a private function, such as a party. Third, violating the law could lead to the suspension or revocation of a license, or a fine.

The governor also approved bans on two powdered substances. One makes the sale of powdered alcohol a misdemeanor, and the other makes the sale of powdered caffeine to a minor a misdemeanor.

Residents of the city of Houston are feeling especially cocky this summer. Space City’s main newspaper, the Houston Chronicle boldly declared in June, “The question isn’t whether we’ll be the nation’s third-largest city. It’s when.”

According to statistics recently released by the U.S. Census Bureau, Chicago’s population growth slowed considerably in 2014, while the city of Houston continued a long-running surge in population growth. In 2014, most of Chicago’s biggest neighborhoods lost population overall, including a 34% decline in the south-side neighborhood of Riverdale.

Almost 40% of U.S. citizens never leave the city in which they were born; however, for Americans who do move, a new job is overwhelmingly the most popular reason. And Houston has consistently been ranked as one of the best U.S. cities for young professionals to find work in recent years. According to a Pew survey, 44% of Americans who moved said they did so because of a new job opportunity.

But for Windy City natives proud of their status as America’s third largest city, and the largest in the Midwest, there’s reason for hope. Many demographic experts are urging at least a little skepticism over Houston’s ambitious claims. University of Southern California demographer Dowell Myers said that Houston’s chances of overtaking Chicago were merely “probable,” not certain.

If Houston and Chicago both maintain the population growth rates seen so far this decade, then Houston will become the third largest American city in 2030, possibly even sooner.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Illinois and Chicago did have a disproportionate number of Generation X members living within their borders. That’s the generation of Americans that came of age in the John Hughes film era, with its Chicago-obsessed imagery and locales.

According to the Census Bureau figures, Millennials now outnumber Baby Boomers nationwide, at 83.1 million and 75.4 million respectively. The nation is also becoming increasingly racially diverse.

Whether the Windy City retains its crown as America’s third largest city remains to be seen.

Scamming is an unfortunate reality that strikes many people when they think their luck is finally turning around. Scammers often target the elderly, young people living on their own for the first time, and people desperate for a good deal. It was no different in the case of a Woodridge, IL man.

David L. Briggs, 29, is facing two counts of felony theft by deception after charging an elderly man $117,000 for remodels that he never finished. One count is for the charges exceeding $100,000, and the other is for the victim being over the age of 60. Police were notified by the victim’s family after they were notified by the 79-year-old’s bank about the numerous payments going to Briggs.

The family’s statement says that the victim was told that Briggs owned a remodeling company. Briggs offered to complete numerous projects at the man’s Villa Park home, but then never completed them.

After interviewing Briggs and completing criminal subpoenas for his bank account, authorities found that the total cash amount came to about $117,000. Briggs had spent all of it without completing any of the remodels promised. He is now being held on $500,000 bail at the DuPage County Jail, and police encourage anyone else who may have similar dealings to contact them.

It is unfortunate incidents like this which overshadow a booming home remodel industry. The annual Cost vs. Value Report from Remodeling shows most remodel projects on the rise, many making large jumps from last year. In fact, a simple bathroom remodel has a return on investment of 63.6%, placing it at number 10 on the list of top home remodels.

But scammers such as Briggs plant a seed of doubt in homeowners’ minds. The last thing anyone needs is to have tens of thousands of dollars worth of hard-earned money taken from them. The answer is simple, however: do your research. If something seems too good to be true, it likely is. Follow your instincts and ask around before hiring anyone. Homeowners can also check with the Better Business Bureau, and read reviews on websites such as Angie’s List.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has detailed the fallout he attributes to Chicago Public Schools making good on a $634 million pension payment: 1,050 workers will lose their jobs, 350 vacant positions will be eliminated, and several education programs will be discontinued as a result of $200 million in budget cuts.

The plan also includes $175 million property tax increase to help pay for teacher pensions — but that can only happen if the state and Chicago’s teachers invest in what the mayor described as a “grand bargain” to end the district’s perennial money woes. Much of this plan requires approval from state legislators, who remain stuck with their own budget problems.

“In my view, these cuts are intolerable, they’re unacceptable and they’re totally unconscionable,” Emanuel said. “They’re a result of a political system that’s sprung a leak and now it’s a geyser. There’s a series of political compromises and patchwork over the years that can no longer continue.”

According to the Chicago Tribune, CPS interim Chief Executive Jesse Ruiz has stated that the budget cuts will not affect the length of the school day, although classes will start and end 45 minutes later to “reduce transportation costs.”

Cutting out 1,400 faculty jobs will also mean that extracurricular programs, such as athletics, will be downsized. This means that from the time children are placed in public education programs — possibly as early as four years old, for the average preschool program — they won’t have as many opportunities to cultivate creativity and teamwork-focused mindsets. Most preschools serve three-, four-, and five-year-olds — a time when creativity and expression are of utmost importance.

District officials say that this time, they tapped into borrowed money, which included $200 million of tax anticipation notes to make the pension payment. A bill was recently passed which aims to ease pension pressures at CPS, while giving Governor Bruce Rauner the tax freeze he has been pushing for. Any solid plans on fixing the problem in the long term have yet to be released.

A new analysis from Zillow has concluded that Chicago has more “underwater” mortgages than any other real estate market in the country, meaning there are more homeowners in Chicago than anywhere else whose houses are worth less than they still owe on their mortgage.

The total figure for the Chicago metro area, according to Zillow, is 413,690. That’s far and away the highest number of total underwater loans; New York comes in a distant second with 307,573.

According to the first-quarter data, Chicago also has the second-highest overall rate of homeowners with underwater mortgages, a concept referred to as negative equity. Nearly 24% of Chicago mortgages were underwater as of the first quarter. That’s actually a significant year-over-year improvement, down from 28.1% in the first quarter of 2014, but the market still trails only Las Vegas, which has a 25% negative equity rate.

Zillow calculated that rate by comparing the estimated values of each home to “all outstanding mortgage debt and lines of credit associated with the home,” meaning the analysis took into account home equity lines of credit and home equity loans, as well as traditional mortgages. Home values can, of course, be difficult to pinpoint (since something as simple as landscaping can increase home value by between 7% and 15%), but estimates can still act as valuable indicators of the overall condition of a market.

The national negative equity rate now sits at 15.4%, more than a three-point drop from this time last year. At the lowest point of the real estate crisis, more than 15 million American homeowners held underwater mortgages; that figure has now decreased to around 7.9 million.

But those homeowners are quite deeply underwater. “It’s great news that the level of negative equity is falling, but what really worries me is the depth of negative equity,” Zillow Chief Economist Stan Humphries commented in a news release, explaining that it could take up to a decade for many of those homeowners to build enough equity to get their mortgages right-side-up again.

He also explained that these underwater mortgages affect the entire market, especially with lower-end houses, because they prevent would-be first-time homebuyers from finding affordable entry-level properties.

“The logjam at the bottom is having ripple effects throughout the market, and as home value growth slows, it will be years before it gets cleared up,” Humphries predicted. “In the meantime, we’ll be left with volatile prices, limited inventory, tepid demand, elevated foreclosures and a whole lot of frustration.”

Northwest Community Healthcare, which serves suburbs to the northwest of Chicago, is embracing technological advances to offer more convenience and better care to its patients.

The group just finished the implementation of a new electronic health record system, a project that has been in the works since late 2013.

The system “helps improve communication between clinicians, allows patient data to be readily available across all units and saves time for clinicians who no longer chase down patient charts,” CEO Steve Scogna said in a statement.

It also allows patients to access their own information through a 24-hour online portal so they can request or schedule appointments, view their test results, request refills on prescriptions, keep track of immunization and medications, and even securely communicate with healthcare providers directly.

Electronic Health Records in the U.S.
Despite their undeniable promise, electronic health records have become a fraught issue in the United States, largely because of government programs that first incentivized and have now essentially mandated their use for providers accepting Medicare or Medicaid payments.

There’s no doubt that the market for EHR systems is growing; the industry is projected to reach nearly $30 billion by 2022, according to the latest projections. Data for last year is still being collected, but adoption of basic EHR systems by office-based physicians went up by 21% in just one year between 2012 and 2013 (bringing the total figure to about 78%). Critics say, however, that doctors have had very little choice in whether to implement those systems and in how they are implemented.

Federal regulators are now having to back off on some requirements in order to give doctors, hospitals and medical software systems more time to comply with government requirements.

The next big challenge, those in the industry say, will be to bridge the gaps among various EHR software systems so that both providers and patients can reap all the benefits that EHRs can — at least in theory — offer.

Increasingly overwhelmed by the city’s population, aging infrastructure systems throughout Chicago could begin to threaten the environment in the coming years if nothing is done to fix them.

According to The DePaulia, evidence of sewer system overload is already apparent throughout much of the city. When last summer brought heavy rains and flash flooding, Chicago’s century-old sewer lines — buried 12 to 24 inches below the city streets — weren’t equipped to cope with the extra storm water.

When Chicago’s sewer systems and water treatment plants can’t handle these intense storms, this water overflow goes into the Chicago River. But to keep the river from rising onto city streets, Metropolitan Water Reclamation District officials are often forced to release extra sewage and rain water into Lake Michigan. Last summer, the city released 525 million gallons of sewage and storm water into Lake Michigan.

And with climate experts and city officials predicting that these storms will only get more intense and unpredictable as time goes on, current sewer line repair projects might be another case of too little, too late.

“There is a new kind of storm hitting Chicago in recent years — heavy rains that can be very local, very intense and hard to predict,” a city website that pushes for preventative flood programs said. “They dump two inches or more per hour on a given neighborhood. This volume quickly overwhelms local sewers, which were not designed for such intense rainfall. Sewer mains fill up, and additional water pushes into basements through our private drains.”

Chicago’s sewer system overflow isn’t all that threatens the local ecosystem. According to a June 4 report from The Chicagoist, methane leaks from natural gas pipelines around the city pose a risk to the climate. In the city’s older neighborhoods, especially, these leaks are most prominent, indicating a clear need to upgrade and fix these leaks.

In fact, 40% of Chicago’s gas pipelines are more than half a century old, the Environmental Defense Fund found. And while these methane leaks don’t necessarily create an immediate threat to the environment, it’s clear Chicago’s leadership will need to prioritize pipeline upgrades in the near future.

A West Side man who had been charged with misdemeanor animal cruelty after posting an online video of him blowing marijuana smoke into a pet chameleon’s mouth has been acquitted by a Cook County judge.

Bruce Blunt, 40 (whose last name has been met with amusement by many online audiences), said that the marijuana seemed to calm the sometimes aggressive behavior of his chameleon, Binna. But the video prompted a complaint from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals to Chicago authorities.

Prosecutors argued that Blunt had abused the pet, since marijuana can cause quite a bit of harm to small animals.

But after watching the video, Judge Robert Kuzas said that while Blunt’s actions were “really, really uncalled for and immature,” they didn’t actually appear to cause suffering.

Blunt is now hoping he can get Binna back from city care. “The [PETA] people, they really did a number on me, calling me a jerk … and saying I’m abusing animals,” Blunt told the media after the trial. “Man, if they only knew. I’ve never hurt an animal in my life — I take in stray cats and dogs. I love animals, man.”

Marijuana Policy in Illinois
Illinois currently has a fledgling medical marijuana program in place, and on May 22, the state senate passed a bill that would decriminalize marijuana possession. It will probably be heading to Gov. Bruce Rauner’s desk for a signature after the language in the bill has been slightly adjusted.

If signed into law, the bill would make possession of less than 15 grams of marijuana punishable by a simple fine, rather than arrest.

To date, 17 other states have decriminalized possession of similarly small amounts. Only four states — Alaska, Colorado, Oregon and Washington — have actually legalized retail marijuana approved for recreational use.

Sen. Michael Noland (D-Elgin), a sponsor of the latest bill, says that he doesn’t personally condone marijuana use, but he is concerned about criminal records ruining people’s personal and employment prospects for their entire lives.

“I would encourage the children of this state and my own children to abstain from the use of the substance, but people do use this, and it should not be something that ruins social lives and professional lives as well,” he was quoted as saying by the Chicago Tribune.