Glancing Back for Sept. 29: Board hears plans for electric generation plant

MATTOON — In the initial football game of the season played on Kinzel field Saturday afternoon, Hillsboro High defeated Mattoon High by a score of 7 to zero. The game looked to be a hard-fought contest, with neither side showing any signs of scoring, until Hillsboro recovered a fluke pass behind Mattoon's goal. The attendance was large, for an opening game...TUSCOLA — Harry R. Rathbone, congressman-at-large from Illinois, will broadcast an address on Abraham Lincoln at noon Friday, October 3, from station WDZ in Tuscola. Mr. Rathbone's granddaughter was Ira Harris, United States senator from New York during the Civil War and was one of President Lincoln's staunchest supporters. His father and mother were also intimate friends of President and Mrs. Lincoln...MATTOON — The fire department was called at 7:20 p.m. Saturday evening to the Association of Commerce on account of a slight blaze in an automobile belonging to O.W. Albin of Trilla, which was in front of the building. The blaze is said to have been caused by someone having a lighted a match and was making an inspection of the engine with the machine with the hood lifted. There was no property damage. The fire department answered a call to put out a blaze caused by backfiring of a large automobile in front of the Byers hotel this morning at 8:30 a.m. The car was owned by P.A. Erlach. The damage was slight.

If you're hoping the tax assessor will lose your property tax records when the county enters the new millennium on Jan. 1, 2000, forget it — it's not going to happen. Offices at the Coles County Courthouse are more than ready to enter the new year. The Coles County Board's computer and internship committee began looking at the Y2K problem in 1998. "We knew it was going to be a problem, so we began addressing it then. We turned to Steve Pamperin in the Coles County Regional Planning and Development Commission office, who had the expertise to help us," said Tim Yow, chairman of the computer committee and the Regional Planning Commission. Pamperin prepared an in-depth questionnaire to send to all Coles County offices asking about computers and other equipment that are date-sensitive or that may have embedded chips that are not Y2K compliant...CHARLESTON — In what's likely the first case of its kind in Coles County, a Charleston man has been charged with hate crimes for allegedly kicking a black woman. William Riley, 27, is accused of making racial comments toward the woman and kicking her in the neck after she rejected his sexual advances. The offense of hate crime is a felony that carries a possible prison sentence of one to three years upon conviction. Assistant State's Attorney John Longwell, who drafted the charges against Riley, said there has been a hate crime law in Illinois since at least 1994. The incident took place during a party at an apartment on Seventh Street in Charleston on April 17. Neither Riley nor the alleged victim lived there...MATTOON — The water and sewer board on Tuesday heard plans for construction of a $150 million electric generation plant that would operate only four months a year. Representatives of Reliant Energy, a multinational, Houston-based company, said they are looking at potential 20-acre sites in the Mattoon area for a facility that would supply energy during the peak summer season. They asked if the city would or could supply up to 1 million gallons of water a day to the plant. The water could be either treated or raw water. The plant would be somewhere outside the city limits, and Reliant would pay costs to get the water to its facility from either the treatment plant or the lake...TUSCOLA — Expanded duties of overseeing development at the Amishland Country Village will be peacefully handed from one engineer to another. On Monday, the City Council approved a motion to have Tuscola City Engineer Mike Cline take over supervision of Amishland's infrastructure from an engineer employed by Amishland developers Jim and Margaret Stilwell. The country village, the first phase of the Amishland theme park, is currently under construction just east of the Tuscola Outlet Mall.