Two people were killed in a plane crash on Saturday afternoon in Boone County, reported WREX, the NBC affiliate in Rockford.

The crash was reported after 3:20 p.m. near Blaine and Capron roads north of Capron, which is around 20 miles northeast of Rockford. Information about the plane and the circumstances surrounding the crash were unclear.

The Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board responded to the scene to conduct an investigation. Additional information wasn’t immediately available.

State Rep. Charlie Meier shows clover growing in a field on his Washington County farm in 2022. In 2009, Meier was cited with the award for the State of Illinois Conservation Farm Family of the Year.
Capitol News Illinois

Three main factors contribute to the formation of Midwest dust storms: strong winds, dry soil in farm fields and large amounts of loose soil.

That’s according to Andy Taylor, the Science and Operations officer at the National Weather Service’s office in Lincoln. He said these are key ingredients that meteorologists, farmers and experts in the agricultural community have found cause dust storms when they converge.

On May 16, Chicago saw its first major dust storm since the Dust Bowl, which stretched from Texas to New York in the early 1930s and deposited 300 million tons of soil across the nation — 12 million tons of which settled in the Chicago region, according to the Bill of Rights Institute. The storm in May dropped visibility in the city to near zero as wind gusts blew over 60 mph at times, according to the National Weather Service.

Taylor said the atmospheric environment that day was more characteristic of the dry environments in the High Plains or Southwest U.S., not the Midwest. As rain began to fall near Bloomington, it quickly evaporated and cooled the atmosphere, creating strong pockets of wind that began to move North. And as winds sped up, the storm began to pick up and move dry and loose soil from fields it passed over, which created the dust storm.

“The type of dust storm event that we had that affected the Chicago area, I wouldn’t necessarily take that occurrence as saying we’re going to see an increase in those type of events from this point on,” he said. “Although, anytime you see all those ingredients come together, we certainly could see that again.”

While there were no deaths due to the storm in Chicago, a major dust storm that occurred in central Illinois on a portion of I-55 resulted in a multi-car pileup that took the lives of eight people and injured dozens more in May 2023.

That dust storm also dropped visibility to zero on the stretch of the interstate between Farmersville and Divernon, and was again caused by dry, loose soil being picked up and moved by winds.

Although Taylor said dust storms are not new to Illinois — as his office has documented events back to the 80s — most of the storms don’t move across vast expanses of the state. Instead, he said they often occur in more localized areas, like the storm near Divernon in 2023.

“When we’re seeing the right weather-related factors coming together and the ground is fairly dry, which matches up with loose soil so we know we’re going to be more prone to blowing dust, we coordinate with partners in the agricultural community to determine when we might anticipate those blowing dusts events,” Taylor said.

The Association of Illinois Soil and Water Conservation Districts has been lobbying for increased funding for additional district employees. This year’s state budget allows for each district to staff one full-time employee, which AISWCD Executive Director Eliot Clay called “wildly inadequate” as he said each district needs at least two.

“I really, honestly think conservation funding has been deprioritized,” he said.

Soil and water conservation districts began to crop up across the U.S. in the late 1930s as a response to the Dust Bowl and Congress’ subsequent declaration of soil and water conservation as a national priority. According to the Association of Illinois Soil and Water Conservation Districts, that declaration prompted then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt to recommend legislation to state lawmakers that would enact districts in every state.

Illinois has 97 districts, or nearly one district for every county in the state. Employees of the districts are responsible for a variety of tasks — including assessing farmland, educating farmers about conservation practices and connecting farmers with grants from the state and federal government. These all play a key role in the association’s mission of protecting Illinois’ natural resources.

“Unlike a group like the Department of Natural Resources or the EPA or even the Department of Agriculture, SWCDs are not a regulatory body,” Clay said. “We are not going out there and enforcing rules and laws on people, we’re just trying to help farmers do better. And that’s the reason a lot of farmers rely on SWCDs, is because they do not see us as like, the ‘government’ coming in and telling them, ‘this is how you’re going to do your operation.’”

The fiscal year 2026 budget signed by Gov. JB Pritzker last week allots $7.5 million to the state’s SWCDs — that’s a $1 million overall cut from the previous year, although funding for operations remained level. Funding had already been cut by $4 million total in fiscal year 2025.

Of that $7.5 million, $3 million will go to cost-share grants, which act as reimbursements to farmers for the costs of implementing both state and federal conservation policies, such as cover crops. The remaining $4.5 million will go to administrative costs.

Clay said the breakdown of that $4.5 million provides $40,000 to each Soil and Water Conservation district — meaning that every district will have enough funds to pay one full-time employee. He called the salary “wildly inadequate” for the district employees, most of whom have college degrees.

“$40,000 — and that’s supposed to include benefits, so their take-home is less than that — is barely enough, I mean I would say it’s not enough even for one person” Clay said. “And it’s hard to keep people and incentivize people to come to work when there’s not the kind of money there that there should be.”

In addition, Clay said each district needs two full-time employees to be fully-staffed — one to make on-site visits to farms and one to coordinate schedules, receive phone calls and emails, and staff the office.

He said in recent years, the association was told by both the Department of Agriculture and the governor’s office that if they wanted more funding, they would have to advocate for the money to individual lawmakers outside of budget negotiations.

“I don’t know of any other agency or subsect of an agency that has to, on their own, go to the Capitol and get money,” he said. “That’s very peculiar to me and is something I’ve been trying to wrap my head around, and I have not gotten a good explanation from anybody.”

The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Over the past two years, Clay said the association unsuccessfully lobbied for $10.5 million in annual funding.

“The bigger question I’m left with after being the executive director over the past six months and witnessing it from this angle is, what does the legislature and the administration value?” Clay said. “It really gets to bigger questions about how the state has dealt with conservation funding in general for the last 20-plus years.”

Kevin Brooks, a commercial agriculture educator at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said the agriculture community has identified practices farmers can use to reduce the amount of dry, loose topsoil in their fields.

“Measuring the humidity level as a cause is not the issue,” Brooks said in an interview with Capitol News Illinois. “I won’t say it’s not 100% not about the weather, but this is primarily about tillage.”

One suggestion he made was for farmers to till their fields less frequently and instead resort to strip-tilling or using no-till strategies whenever possible to reduce the amount of loose topsoil in fields.

Strip-till is a tilling practice where only narrow rows of a field where seeds will be planted are tilled, leaving the rest of the field untouched. While there are many short- and long-term benefits to strip-tilling, no-till practices often don’t seem to benefit farmers right away but do often have long-term advantages, Brooks said.

Rep. Charles Meier, an Okawville Republican, farms 1,500 acres in southern Illinois with his family, including corn, wheat, beans, hay, and beef cattle. He said most crops are already minimally tilled by farmers.

“I’m 66 years old and we never no-tilled when I was a kid,” he told Capitol News Illinois. “All of our conventional soybeans are no-tilled now, all of our wheat is done by minimal-till, and our corn is all by minimal-till now.”

He said he’s in frequent contact with his SWCD, including a call on Monday with his district’s employee, and criticized Democratic leadership’s funding priorities, such as subsidies for renewable energy.

“They’re not funding the nuts and bolts of Illinois conservation,” Meier said. “I’m not against wind and solar but they don’t pay for themselves and they’re making us taxpayers pay for them.”

Another main practice Brooks recommended farmers employ was planting cover crops, which are crops planted after harvest not for their produce, but for their benefits to the soil. Cover crops can be planted after a fall harvest for a variety of benefits, including to preserve topsoil through the winter, increase organic matter in the soil and dry the field earlier in the spring.

Brooks also attributed recent dust storms to the invention of high-speed discs — a tillage attachment with many more disks than normal tillage attachments, which tills at faster rates. He said these disks have taken tillage speeds from around 4 mph to over 10, and that farmers in Illinois quickly amassed these machines during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, due to the pandemic relief funds they received.

“In theory, they’re supposed to be a kind of conservation because they don’t go into the ground very deep,” Brooks said. “But they literally turn the top several inches of a farm field into powder.”

J.B. Pritzker wants a third term as Illinois governor, but based on his history of boosting taxes and creating spending records, can Illinois afford him for four more years? Will the state grow even smaller as Illinoisans get fed up and leave?

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker recently announced his plans to seek a third term, but can Illinoisans really afford another four years of him?

With the signing of Pritzker’s seventh budget, he paused his near-daily Trump bashing to declare, “After decades of mismanagement, Illinois is balancing our budgets, and the results are clear.” He framed the budget as a continuation of his administration’s commitment to fiscal responsibility and strategic investment.

Really, Gov. Pritznocchio?

Pritzker’s leadership has produced tax hikes, spending scandals and population loss – all of which are threats now and to Illinois’ future. “The results are clear,” all right, and here they are.

Tax, spending increases

Since taking office, Pritzker has increased state spending by more than $15 billion, far higher than previous Democratic or Republican governors, while burning through nearly $14 billion in one-time federal pandemic relief funds and hiking taxes and fees 49 times.

This represents a 37% jump since 2019.

Illinoisans already bear the highest combined state and local tax burden in the nation – averaging 16.5% of a family’s income. Despite these heavy burdens, Illinois ranks dead last in economic equity between Black and white residents, starkly contradicting Pritzker’s claim Illinois is a national leader in equity.

Pritzker tried to blame his multiple tax increases in this year’s budget as a precaution against the impact of Trump’s cuts. His relentless attacks on Trump, whether deserved or not, will ensure that at best the state and city will receive little help from the Trump administration, and at worst invite retaliation – which is the last thing Illinois needs.

Despite these record tax increases, the state is projecting a growing deficit, expected to hit $5.2 billion by fiscal year 2029. Illinois also holds the nation’s highest per capita debt, with government pension liabilities at $144 billion, although independent actuaries say the actual cost might be more than double that.

Combined state and local pension debt is twice the total of all neighboring states combined. Instead of reversing decades of mismanagement, Pritzker has aggressively used short-term gimmicks and chronic underfunding to make it worse. Pension contributions are $5.1 billion short of what experts said is needed to stay even.

Fiscal mishaps

Two scandals further encapsulate the fiscal recklessness of Pritzker’s tenure.

First, the Illinois Auditor General found the state overpaid $5.2 billion in fraudulent unemployment benefits in the first 18 months of the pandemic. Pritzker blamed the Trump administration, but the report found his Department of Employment Security delayed implementing anti-fraud safeguards recommended by the U.S. Department of Labor.

Additionally, the Health Benefits for Immigrant Seniors program cost $1.6 billion through July 2024, which was over eight times the original estimate. Pritzker increased funding without legislative approval, continuing a pattern of executive overreach. He similarly ruled by executive order during the COVID-19 pandemic, issuing over 100 orders, including 40 disaster declarations which prolonged shutdowns of schools and the economy, inflicting unnecessary, lasting damage on children and businesses alike.

Job loss and exodus

The state’s May unemployment rate stood at 4.8%, well above the national average of 4.2%. More concerning, however, is Illinois’ post-COVID job growth is driven almost entirely by government hiring, not by private-sector job creation. Illinois added roughly 32,000 government jobs while losing a disturbing 16,200 professional and business service jobs.

More people dependent on taxes for their pay, fewer taxable jobs and more taxpayers are moving out.

Since 2010, Illinois has lost 1.6 million residents, ranking third nationally in population loss behind only California and New York. The exodus is not just retirees seeking warmer weather: Indiana and Wisconsin are now top destinations. A recent survey found 54% of participants cited high taxes as the No. 1 reason for wanting to leave Illinois, outpacing crime and school problems.

What’s worse, those leaving Illinois earn significantly more than those arriving. In 2022, the average taxpayers who left made $124,000 per year, while the average taxpayer who entered Illinois earned $86,000 per year. Since 2010, the difference in income between those departing and arriving to the state has grown from $5,519 to $37,922.

While research shows Illinois’ net loss of households to other states occurs in every single income and age bracket, the most alarming is the exodus of high-income young professionals, ages 26–35 and earning over $200,000. This demographic is most critical to future tax revenues and has the biggest immediate and long-term impact on Illinois’ tax base.

Illinois leaders are, whether by incompetence or design, driving out wealthier, tax-contributing residents while attracting lower-income, often government-dependent populations – including large numbers of undocumented immigrants. Under Pritzker’s leadership Illinois has spent over $2.5 billion in state and local funds on migrant support, not including education costs.

Illinoisans can’t afford another Pritzker term. His continuous spending and taxing spree leaves little room for optimism. Worse, the next term would lack any federal COVID relief.

With budget deficits mounting, residents should brace for even higher taxes and fees – further accelerating the departure of both individuals and businesses.

Pritzker is leading Illinois toward a financial death spiral, driven by over-taxation, overspending and political self-interest. He keeps calling it progress, but ignores that it is in a swirling, downward direction.