The burgeoning corruption scandal that has spread from Chicago and the south suburbs to Springfield gives Gov. J.B. Pritzker a rare chance to implement ethics reforms that would have been unthinkable otherwise, former Mayor Rahm Emanuel said Friday.

“As somebody once said, and really crystallized it, `Never allow a good crisis to go to waste.’”

Emanuel was quoting himself.

Steinar Andersen, a disabled veteran living in Huntley, said during Monday’s Grafton Township Board meeting that he was “absolutely mortified” upon seeing a 106% increase to his 2019 property assessment from last year.

For the valuation of his two-story home – which was built in 1903 and sits on Mill Street, a road heavily traveled by semitrailers coming out of the Dean Foods transportation facility – to jump from about $22,500 to around $46,000 in one year, means Grafton Township Assessor Alan Zielinski could not have been doing his job properly, Andersen said.

A third Algonquin Township Highway Department employee terminated by Highway Commissioner Andrew Gasser will be rehired and entitled to back pay and benefits, an arbitrator ruled Friday.

Shortly after taking his oath of office in January 2018, Gasser fired Andrew Rosencrans, former road district foreman Derek Lee and former McHenry County Board member Nick Chirikos. This prompted the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 150 to file grievances for all three employees.

Two days after Gov. J.B. Pritzker ordered Illinois schools to immediately stop secluding children alone in timeout rooms, educators and parents tried to grasp the implications of the new prohibition on a practice that had been embedded in schools for decades.

School districts sent letters to parents saying they would no longer put children in locked rooms, while the head of the Illinois State Board of Education apologized to families and said the law that had been in effect “did not sufficiently regulate” isolated timeout, causing “lasting trauma.”