The River Cities' Reader begins its 25th year of publishing this Fall. With the domination of big social media, independent publishers like the Reader must establish a direct transactional relationship with its readership, or perish.

Over the decades, our readers and advertisers have repeatedly told us how important the locally-owned Reader, and its coverage, are to the Quad Cities' vitality and culture.

It's often what has kept us going.

Using non-farm jobs data from the Illinois Department of Employment Security, over 120,000 net jobs have been added in Illinois since February of 2015, the first full month of Rauner's term in office.

But most of those jobs were gained in 2015, when 83,400 jobs were added

Chicago has vast property wealth and the largest population by far in Illinois. But it also has a large amount of that property wealth locked up in Tax Increment Financing districts.

The education-funding-reform bill that passed the House and Senate in May and was finally sent to Governor Bruce Rauner on July 31 was the product of four years of research, endless listening tours, and lots of hard bargaining.

But when Rauner issued his amendatory veto of Senate Bill 1 last week, he introduced a bunch of new ideas that had never been on the table, including during endless discussions among members of his own education-funding-reform commission.