Ribfest Moving To Romeoville:
Naperville’s Ribfest will find a new home in Romeoville next year. The Exchange Club of Naperville’s board of directors voted to enter into final discussions with the Village of Romeoville to move the festival to a 35-acre location next to Romeoville Village Hall.
“To be able to continue to fund the various agencies that we do, we need the same type of footprint. And Romeoville gives us the same type of size and footprint to continue those operations,” said Bob Black, Chair of Ribfest 2020.
For the past 30 years, Ribfest has been held at Knoch Park, but planned softball field renovations there precipitated the search for a new home for the festival. That means 2019 will be Ribfest’s “last nights at Knoch,” with 2020 sending them “roaming to Romeoville.”
Troubleshooting Leaf Collection:
Naperville’s bulk curbside leaf collection program came up at last night’s Naperville City Council meeting, but change isn’t coming quite yet. City staff suggested cutting the program from a six-week cycle with three collections down to a four-week cycle with two collections. This would create a savings of about $45,000 for the city, and would also decrease the likelihood of conflict with winter operations. Naperville Public Works uses the same vehicles for leaf collection and winter ops, and an early snow last year caused difficulty in completing both jobs in a timely manner. Council members said, however, they receive more emails about this program than any other topic – showing that residents highly value curbside leaf collection and cutting down the program is a bad idea. They asked staff to come back with more proposals to solve the overlap with winter ops in four weeks.
Final Meeting for Outgoing Council Members:
And yesterday’s city council meeting was the last for council members Becky Anderson and Rebecca Boyd-Obarski. Newly elected Patrick Kelly and Theresa Sullivan will fill their seats. The new council will be sworn in on May 5.
Be The Match at COD:
College of DuPage partnered up with Be The Match in hopes of registering as many people as possible to be potential bone marrow donors in their COD Heroes Drive. COD Biology Professor Julie Gibbs helped put on the event, citing the campus as an ideal spot to bring in more diversity among donors, which can help more demographic groups have a better chance of finding a match. Those who signed up will be mailed a packet with a cheek swab kit, so they can send in a DNA sample to formally enter the registry. If you’d like to register, go to Be The Match.
