Karyn Smith

The Uptown underpass project, first proposed 10 years ago, was approved Monday night by the Normal Town Council with a sunset provision on tax increases needed to complete financing.

To get the decade-old Uptown underpass project over the finish line will require increases in food and beverage and hotel-motel taxes. That staff recommendation emerged at a special town council meeting on Wednesday evening.

The Town of Normal on Monday approved a new Records Management System ahead of McLean County government, and soon after the Bloomington City Council took the same action last month.

As new proposals to ease the Bloomington-Normal housing shortage move forward this spring and summer, city and town council members will weigh in on what they think. There’s already diversity of thought among council members on the issue.

Normal Town Council incumbents Kathleen Lorenz and Karyn Smith, along with newcomer Andy Byars, defeated the opposition ticket of incumbent Stan Nord, Marc Tiritilli and Karl Sila in Tuesday's election.

The Normal Town Council election next month might sound a lot like the election in 2021, or the one in 2019, or even the one in 2017. The issues are similar and some of the faces are the same.

Town of Normal Finance Director Andrew Huhn said during a daylong budget workshop for the town council that a lot of the increase will be funded by projected double-digit revenue growth, mainly in sales and income tax receipts.

Some of the more than 1,300 residents of the Town of Normal who are way behind on water and sewer utility payments, potentially because of the pandemic, have begun to take care of the problem.

The Illinois attorney general has ruled the Town of Normal should not have barred citizen comment on an issue back in 2019. It's the second such ruling in…

At the Normal Town Council’s Monday meeting, Mayor Chris Koos and others responded to a return to stricter crowd limits because of a surge in COVID-19…