All too often, our elected officials and government employees are simply doing their jobs and serving the public without anyone ever saying thank-you. In the past couple of weeks, I observed some positive actions by our public servants that simply warrant a thank you. Yes, this is their job, but the extra effort was noted and appreciated.

The DeWitt County Board held an outdoor meeting to accommodate the public’s desire to be present on the wind farm vote. Just for that meeting to be held took a lot of effort by several entities.

The xounty had to set up the audio and the meeting format itself as I don’t ever recall a county board meeting being held outdoors involving public comments and votes.

The City of Clinton, through its street department and police, had to close the streets to the public square and then maintain that closure during the meeting. Both the City of Clinton and the county board had to work together for the meeting to be held and the public accommodated. That effort served the public, and it was noticed by many.

The Farmer City ambulance situation was in dire straits with its contract for ambulance service about to expire and without a new service provider.

One can certainly note that Farmer City chose not to be part of the DeWitt County ambulance service years ago, but that does not solve the problem. The eastern part of the county was going to be without services. That was a huge problem to anyone who would need an ambulance in Farmer City.

Lance Reece, the county board committee chairman, oversees ambulance services for the county. To everyone’s credit, the county, the DeWitt County EMS and Farmer City put their heads together and worked out a solution to provide the Farmer City area with ambulance services for the next several years.

Reaching that solution took a lot of effort and cooperation by all parties. This was multiple governmental units and a private company seeing a problem, working out a multitude of differences and then resolving the problem to the benefit and satisfaction of all. No easy task.

The next time you see officials from Farmer City, the county and the ambulance service, it would be nice to tell them their efforts on behalf of all residents of DeWitt County are appreciated.

IDOT crews can be seen working on the highways and mowing the right of ways. They are not normally in the business of trash collectors. That changed last week.

I live in rural DeWitt County near DeWitt. Last week some unknown individual decided that Route 54 was his private garbage dump. Trash, including rugs and just plain garbage was dumped  for over half a mile on the north side of the highway just east of DeWitt.

It was a total mess.

The next morning at 8 a.m., an IDOT crew was out there picking up the trash. That crew and its efforts were appreciated by all of us who travel that highway.

The only thing that could have made the situation better was if whoever the idiot was who dumped the trash was the individual picking up his mess and IDOT simply supervised him.

We are inundated with the news of riots across the country. COVID has simply taken over the minds of most Americans. And then we have an election coming in 90 days, which has almost become farcical.

It was simply good to see our local public servants doing their jobs and putting the public first. Tell them thanks and have a great week.