An effort to restore a sedge meadow is underway at Nahant Marsh. The Friends of Nahant, along with landscape designer Alec Schorg (of Aunt Rhodie's Landscaping & Design Studio) and several community volunteers counted plants two Sundays in July and August. The counting is the first step in a vegetation survey in a meadow located at the northern edge of the marsh. The sedge is a rare reed-like grass with a solid stem. There are at least three species of sedge in the meadow. The sedges are competing with reed canary grass, an invasive plant that is taking over much of the four-acre meadow. The survey is designed to help decide which management techniques (mowing, burning, spraying) will work best to manage this land. The meadow restoration is part of a revised management plan at the marsh. In addition to the meadow, efforts are moving forward to extend the trail, hire a naturalist, and enclose the observation deck as a handicapped-accessible observation blind.

It's nearly college football season, which means Iowa fans can look forward to another Top 25 squad, and Illinois fans can pray for respectability and then look forward to basketball season.

But maybe avid boosters ought to consider their own critical role in the ills of college athletics. Namely, they ought to recognize that they're supporting of the exploitation of college-sports stars. (Full disclosure: As a University of Illinois graduate and fan, I'm part of the problem.)

Stu Levine has flipped. Things are gonna get crazy real soon.

Levine was a big Republican insider with very close ties to Jim Ryan, Governor Rod Blagojevich's 2002 opponent. Some saw fair-minded bipartisanship when Governor Blagojevich reappointed Levine to both the Teachers Retirement System (TRS) board of directors and the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board. As we soon discovered, the appointments may have been made for entirely different reasons. And now Levine is in a position to create some truly serious trouble for the governor.

The idea has immediate appeal. Anybody would be able to use a laptop computer anywhere in the city, making it attractive for tech-savvy (or tech-dependent) people and businesses who might want to visit or relocate there.

That was an idea that Dick Klein brought earlier this year to the Bettendorf City Council, which then formed a task force to look into the concept. That six-member task force has met twice already, and is expected to report back to the council in the next few months.

Klein said his vision was for the city to use a wireless network to make city services more efficient, with the savings underwriting free wireless Internet access for citizens.

But don't expect Bettendorf to become the Quad Cities "most wireless" city. Although it has reached no conclusions, several members of the task force said that private-sector initiatives in the area of wireless networks would make any municipal effort redundant.