State Farm, Rivian and Illinois State University are Bloomington-Normal’s largest employers. And stories about these big local institutions again topped WGLT’s most-read story list for 2023.
ISU athletics director Kyle Brennan resigned in April following questions raised by WGLT about spending during a December 2021 donor trip to Indianapolis for the Big Ten football championship game. Brennan and another Athletics administrator reportedly spent over $23,000 on the trip, partly aimed at landing a big donation from COVID testing giant Aaron Rossi from Reditus Labs.
ISU acknowledged spending that “appeared to be inconsistent with the University’s mission and values,” and a full financial review of Athletics is underway. An interim athletics director is now in place. Rossi faces pending criminal and civil legal issues.
A January episode of “Saturday Night Live” featured a faux commercial sketch spoofing Jake from State Farm, the friendly character who personifies the Bloomington-based insurer’s “Good Neighbor” sales pitch. The Jake from State Farm character was rebooted in 2020 for a new campaign with a new actor in the role. In the "SNL" commercial, actor and host Michael B. Jordan plays Jake, and is perhaps a little too neighborly, fracturing a marriage and driving the husband to madness, eventually leading him to consider other insurance companies.
Mike Baker, the senior pastor at Eastview Christian Church in Bloomington-Normal, resigned in February following allegations of abusive power dynamics and a cover-up by church leaders related to sexual misconduct by Baker’s adult son while employed at Eastview. A subsequent report prepared by an outside legal firm recommended 10 changes to how Eastview is governed and how personnel issues are managed, including addressing how women are treated.
State Farm ate a record $13.2 billion in underwriting losses in 2022 — in part because of costlier auto insurance claims driven by inflation. Issues with the supply chain and rising numbers of catastrophic claims are putting pressure on the personal auto insurance industry as a whole. State Farm remains the largest home and auto insurer in the U.S.
Yet another State Farm headline made the list. State Farm said in January that it planned to outsource some of its IT operations to an Indian IT services company, called HCLTech. HCLTech would assume State Farm’s day-to-day IT Help Desk and infrastructure services work. In a joint statement, the companies said the cost-cutting move would “enable State Farm to focus on critical technology priorities while elevating IT support experiences for its customers, agents and employees," and that it would help address recruiting and retention challenges.
This story is the first on our list, written by a WGLT student reporter Braden Fogerson. In the wake of a Supreme Court ruling against a Biden administration plan for student loan debt relief, WGLT gathered reaction from young people in Bloomington-Normal who are most affected by that decision.
“When the Supreme Court decision came through, I just really felt stupid for having that much hope,” said Rebekah Mangels, a graduate student at Illinois State, who was one of millions who had applied for loan forgiveness.
WGLT’s live blog from the April election largely focused on the community’s vote in favor of the controversial Unit 5 tax referendum that previously had failed. Unit 5 leaders said the voters’ decision avoided painful budget cuts. Turnout across McLean County jumped to 25% in the non-mayoral local election, buoyed in part by high interest in the Unit 5 referendum and local school board races. More than 29,000 people cast ballots.
State Farm was back in the news when it was named as a defendant in a proposed class-action lawsuit by five plaintiffs who were all injured in accidents involving State Farm-insured motorists and who had their private medical records shared with Insurance Services Office Inc., a company that performs risk-management analyses. Federal HIPAA laws and the Illinois constitution prevent entities from being able to share private medical information without permission. State Farm said the lawsuit was “without merit.” The case is still playing out in federal court.
At a summer conference, Rivian’s founder and CEO RJ Scaringe spoke about the benefits of building his company independently, rather than doing so under another brand’s umbrella. He acknowledged the challenge of building production capacity at its plant in Normal that now has more than 8,000 employees. But he said the benefits of staying independent outweighed that challenge. “We get to design a digital-first, digitally native transaction platform, and that extends into thinking about the customer model in a very different way,” Scaringe said.
A video of a February arrest that took place at the Normal Police Department caused a social media furor. Online reaction to the video was harsh and negative toward police. The person who was arrested filed a federal lawsuit against several officers and the department alleging they violated her civil rights.
Two experts interviewed by WGLT shared conflicting views over police conduct during the incident. What civilian eyes may see as an injustice, though, can look perfectly reasonable to those familiar with law enforcement. Police Chief Steve Petrilli said his department is trying to foster a healthy, trusting relationship with the community “so if an incident does come up, the trust and transparency is already there.”
