Wednesday began as any typical Wednesday for St. Joseph’s Jon Arteaga . 

He woke up at his mom’s house, just sitting around.

But on this Wednesday, there was a spark inside him, suggesting that he needed to do something to show that people in St. Joseph support the Black Lives Matter movement.

“I had gone to the protest in Champaign on Monday,” Arteaga said. “I just thought that it was just such an important thing to have such a peaceful protest after the looting that happened on Sunday. The juxtaposition of the two was just so powerful.”

“I thought, why does it have to end in Champaign? It needs to go farther than that.”

Arteaga notified his parents that he would go out to the four way stop of IL-150 and Main Street to peacefully protest.

The 2014 graduate of St. Joseph-Ogden High School, where 96-percent of students were white, said that since returning home after being gone for five years sees changes happening in the community. According to the Illinois Report Card, the student population at SJ-O is more diverse than when Arteaga graduated: the student population is currently 93-percent white.

The five hours that Arteaga spent outside with a few of his classmates had its discouraging moments. Some people passing by held their hands out the window with a thumbs down. But, David said that the response was overwhelmingly positive.

“The support was just mind blowing to me,” Arteaga said. “I just really didn’t realize how many allies there are in this town. So I was just very overwhelmed with the amount of love that we got.”

“A ton of people just drove by to raise their fists in solidarity. They dropped off water and snacks. Many people were like, ‘I wish I could join you, but I have to go to work.’” It was very heartwarming for sure and getting that response on social media just immediately made me realize that people want to protest, they want to do these things, they just need somebody to organize them.”

A conversation in a local Facebook page, St. Joseph, IL-Information & Community Events showed Arteaga that there was a desire to have something more formal planned so that others could congregate for the same reasons.

The St. Joseph Peaceful Protest for Equality will be held on June 5  from 5 to 8 p.m. at the four-way stop on the side of the street that is owned by the St. Joseph-Ogden School District.

Being a white man organizing this protest has been difficult, though. 

“This isn’t about me,” he said.

Over the last 12 hours Arteaga has reached out to people of color to see if they wanted to join forces with him to organize the event or speak during the protest. 

“We’re currently in talks with trying to figure out who our speakers will be,” he said. “Of course, we want people of color, particularly black people to be our speakers because we don’t want to speak for them. 

“As it stands right now we don’t have anybody. We’ve been reaching out. People are very intimidated, they don’t want to, or they feel pressured, and we don’t want them to feel like that either.”

Arteaga said that he has found comfort, though, from the willingness of black residents encouraging him and helping him plan the event. 

“I’m not speaking for them,” he said. 

“That’s not my position. My position is to have my privilege be their weapon, to be their megaphone.”

“I value black voices above my own. And that’s something that I want to make sure is at this protest. I’m working so hard to find people (of color).”

A few of Arteaga ’s classmates who identify with more than two races are working behind the scenes.

“They’re giving us valuable insight. They’re helping to inform our decisions,” Arteaga said.

“They have told us that it would be okay for us to speak there, but only speak on how white people can do better.”

An African American woman, who wishes to remain anonymous, also connected with Arteaga to say that he is doing the right thing; the same thing she and others have worked on doing in St. Joseph for decades.

“Apparently a white male was what was required to break through this wall that she’s been trying to break so many times for 30 years,” Arteaga said. 

Although Arteaga is currently focused on the event that will take place in 24 hours, he also knows that any protest just needs to be a beginning point for real change. 

After leaving St. Joseph-Ogden, Arteaga went on to study literature at Illinois State University. He had his sights set on returning to his hometown to teach English. 

“When I started making this protest tomorrow so many people of color reached out to me personally and said that they just really really want us to address the school. They want to make sure that their kids are safe and that they are represented in the coursework.”

An avid reader, Arteaga believes that part of the answer can be found through literature.

“You don’t have to be reading all of these dead white authors all the time,” he said. “They can be substituted with all of these diverse authors with Queer authors,Black authors, Latino authors. We can diversify. I think changing that up will have a little bit of a ripple effect; that’ll open people’s minds.”

Friday’s event will include a poem by Langston Hughes, a Black American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist.

Arteaga believes that St. Joseph and Ogden residents working together towards changing the systemic racism that continues to be prevalent both nationwide and at the local level could be the next moves.

This afternoon Arteaga connected with St. Joseph Mayor Tami Fruhling-Voges to hear her thoughts and vision for the community. 

“There have been so many changes that have occurred since I’ve been gone, so I really want to know where she’s at,” he said. 

“Now that I moved back home and plan on living here for a while, I’m wanting to get a grasp on how the community is, where our leadership’s mind is at, and how they feel about the types of issues.”

He was also hoping that the conversation would put her mind at ease about his intentions with the protest. 

With fears that there may be looting and rioting like Sunday’s events in Champaign in rural towns and with rumors that groups from larger cities, like Chicago, would stop in small towns in East Central Illinois as they travel from Champaign to Danville, Arteaga wants the community to know that what he has planned will be peaceful.

St. Joseph Jim Page, who works for ILEAS (Illinois Law Enforcement Alert System), re-iterated that the rumors of Antifa coming to small communities are unwarranted.

“I can tell you that one of our biggest challenge is tracking down and separating false Internet rumors from actual intelligence. While anything is possible – as far as we know, it is not true,” Page wrote Monday.

“Having said that, in these challenging times it is always best to be prepared and watchful. Keep an eye on your neighbors, pay attention to your surroundings – all things that we should be doing every day anyway.”

Arteaga said his message is peace, though.

“Even in the detail of the event itself on Facebook I put, ‘If you see anybody acting violent or speaking violently, tell them to stop. Tell them that’s not okay.’

“We want this protest to be peaceful and impactful,” he said.

It is not lost on Arteaga that the world is also still in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

He has instructed everyone to wear masks and socially distance during the event. 

Currently, Arteaga is looking for donations of water, snacks, hand sanitizer and masks. He also asks that people bring signs, one for themselves and one for someone else.

“We need this to be loud,” he said.

Through this protest, Arteaga wants people of color to know that St. Joseph and Ogden are lifting them up. 

“We should be doing everything we can to make them feel they’re safe so that they can live the American dream that everybody wants to live.”

The post St. Joseph Peaceful Protest for Equality to be held on June 5 first appeared on SJO Daily.

Disasters are unpredictable.

But, it is imperative to have a select group of people who prepare for the unpredictable.

St. Joseph’s Jim Page is one who prepares.

Page has been one running to a disaster when everyone else wants to run away.

He’s not much of a “sitter,” anyway. That he has always known.

While Page entered Illinois State University (ISU) in 1972 not knowing what he wanted to study, his path was set for him on a snowy winter night in Springfield when he witnessed a cop car dashing toward an accident on I-55.

“I said, that’s what I want to do,” he recalled. “I went back to school after Christmas break and said, ‘Does ISU have a criminal justice or law enforcement program?’”

At the time, ISU did not.

Page picked up his world and moved to Northern Arizona University where he studied police science administration before becoming the assistant chief of a small part-time staff serving 1,200 people.

Within a few years, Page found his way back to Central Illinois, where he spent the next 29 years at the Urbana Police Department.

By the age of 50, Page was worn down in the day-to-day of response and discipline. He planned to retire as Deputy Chief in 2004.

But even after three decades of public service, Page knew there was still more to do.

After Sept. 11, 2001, he joined a 21-member board that supervised the $16 million budget of the Illinois Law Enforcement Alarm system (ILEAS) to be used in bringing first responders together in prevention, response, mitigation and recovery of disasters within the State of Illinois.

It was a vision on paper, really. Page’s law enforcement retirement gave ILEAS the perfect Senior Administrator candidate to turn that vision on paper into a reality.

“It was just me,” Page said. “These boxes here on the floor, they handed me those boxes and said, ‘that’s ILEAS.’ Get us an office. Get us an address. Get us a webpage. Get us a phone number.’”

Now the 31-member team with a $5 to $7 million budget funded mostly by Homeland Security grants, is stationed in an abandoned medical facility at 1701 E. Main St., Urbana.

“We’ve been here since 2007,” Page said. “I walked through it and said ‘I think we can do something with this.’ And people said ‘You’re crazy,’ Because it looked bad and smelled.”

Page began to build ILEAS by hiring accountants and bookkeepers to stay on top of the financial records that would come under scrutiny under the Grant Accountability and Transparency Act.

“We got a reputation early on as being a good grant compliance agency,” Page said.

That has led to ILEAS qualifying for grants that aren’t law-enforcement related. In 2019, they received money to buy stop-bleed tourniquet kits for every public school in Illinois.

“We got to buy about 7-8,000 of those kits, and then distributed them to the 4,000 school buildings in the state,” Page said.

“They gave us that because they know we can turn that around and get those bids, get that done, get that distributed, and account for the money appropriately.”

A $3 million building rehab revitalized the space into a training center by 2008 where emergency management training and planning takes place. The old hospital and nursing home facility provides the perfect area classroom education and tactical training to take place.

Page expanded his team, bringing on computer experts, emergency management personnel, facilities management and ex-police officers.

But those are just employees of ILEAS. The organization’s reach branches out to 1,024 law enforcement agencies in Illinois.

The ILEAS operation operates under the Mutual Aid Agreement, part of the Intergovernmental Cooperation Act, that allows two municipalities to work with a third agency.

With 11 retired law enforcement (Regional Planning Coordinators) stationed throughout the state to build relationships with local municipalities, ILEAS is able to strategically plan for the unthinkable when an emergency situation arises.

“The whole state is covered,” Page said.

ILEAS employees help collect information on what local agencies need as far as equipment and training, alongside making sure that their certification is current.

The network of public service not only provides an avenue to get tools or equipment in emergency situations, but also gives teams, both big and small, a way to problem solve and share stories about what has worked and what didn’t.

Page said he saw the benefits of every process and tool ILEAS had when a tornado ripped through Hillsboro in 2016. Because he had experienced being the command officer after a tornado ripped through Urbana in 1996, he knew what leaders in Hillsboro would be facing.

“There’s a line of people, you’re trying to manage this thing, your phone’s going off constantly, there’s a line of people coming at you and you get mired down in the details.”

To help local municipalities handle those chaotic situations, ILEAS employs a Regional Planning Coordinator who has helped community leaders process through the aftermath of tornadoes; not making operational decisions, but helping them know what will come next.

“Our guy comes down and says ‘Look, this is your first tornado; this is my 12th tornado. This is what you need to pay attention to.’”

Not only can the Regional Planning Coordinator help the community leaders delegate tasks, but also help them know what might happen next as any town immediately tries to supply aide and rebuild.

“It makes (the community leaders) more effective.”

With a vast network of resources, ILEAS is also able to get equipment and tools needed on-site.

“We know where every piece of law enforcement equipment is in Illinois,” Page said. “We have a database, and we have contact information for each one.”

Access to equipment like radios may seem trivial in the moment, but ILEAS has learned that one system cuts down on miscommunication when teams from around the state come in with different equipment.

“It’s all programmed and it solves the communications problem,” Page said. “When local comm towers are taken down, we have mobile towers on trucks and trailers, and we can haul and throw the antenna up. If a dispatch center gets hit by lightning, we have rack-mounted big transceivers.”

“It’s not like we go and take over during disasters,” Page said. “We go and support them.”

Working with 900 agencies, 25,000 police officers in the state — 36,000 if you count Chicago — ILEAS puts the programs, training and resources in place to get everyone going down the same road.

Many times, Illinois officers will go out-of-state to provide aide to other regions, too.

The training that ILEAS provides allows them, even if they are from different units, to operate cohesively.

“We’ve sent 287 officers to the NATO Summit in Chicago, 150 officers to Pittsburgh for the G20 Summit, 300 officers to Katrina, 100 officers to Minneapolis for the Republican National Convention,” Page said.

“None of those officers know each other, but they know the rules. They know the training, that we have a central command officer, each one of the eight officers has a sergeant, a squad leader, then there’s an assistant commander.”

The teams may not know each other, but they do know the equipment they are required to use.

“We really focus on sending our special teams to a lot of special events,” Page said.

“They’re practicing what you need to do. It’s not like buying a piece of equipment and saying don’t use that unless it’s a disaster. We buy equipment, they use it all the time. So when the disaster happens, they are prepared to use it.”

The group knows how to take care of its own, too.

A flood in Hardin County put a sheriff and three deputies tending to their hometown for three days while their own homes were flooding.

“The state asks us to send people,” Page said. “We got 70 officers down there. The commander sends one of the squad leaders and eight officers to Hardin County to tell the sheriff and these officers to go home, take care of their business.”

Tornadoes and floods are expected in the Midwest, though.

There are other situations, nightmares that have not yet happened, that ILEAS prepares local law enforcement agents for. Since 2004, ILEAS has operated under the assumption and realization that terrorists or weapons of mass destruction (WMD) would attack the United States.

For this reason, ILEAS trains two WMD special response teams.

“These are SWAT teams on steroids,” Page said. “They all have 25 to 30 officers each.”

Page said while the State has its own WMD team, ILEAS is also available to help if the need should arise.

“(Our teams) have millions of dollars of chemical and biological warfare equipment,” he said. “They’ve been to the advanced federal SWAT training, they’ve got a full complement of nuclear detection capability, and they can operate in contaminated environments.”

The training takes place in Alabama.

“They get the confidence in their equipment that they can go into a contaminated environment,” Page said.

“Most of the time, you’re not going to go into a contaminated environment because most everybody in there is dead. But when a guy is in a building who says I have chlorine bomb, and I’m going to blow this place up and flood the place with chlorine, well then, you have to go in and get that guy.

“So you have to be able to get into that gear and be a SWAT guy while wearing all that.”

ILEAS has access to bomb suits, robots that detect radiation and x-ray devices so that law enforcement has bomb response capabilities.

Even though the WMD team has not taken one call since 2004, Page said the federally-funded training provides benefits to all communities throughout the state of Illinois. Training for hostage situations, bomb response, natural disasters, research and facilities provide a cohesive unit that is prepared when the unpredictable happens.

Page said the vision of ILEAS is to make sure all of the little things are done right so those big things fall into place when a situation is chaotic.

“That’s our message,” he said.

Although Page spends his days preparing the moments when humans produce the “most heinous depth of evil that you can imagine,” for the most part, he works with people and serves people who are capable of the “greatest compassionate, loving, awesome and heroic acts.”

“Overall, people are generally good and want good things for themselves and their families,” he said.

“I think there’s more great than evil in the world,” Page said. “Because if there if there was more evil than great, it would be chaos all the time.”

Almost 50 years after the first time Page realized he wanted to be one who ran towards those who needed help, he still isn’t sure when it’s time to move on to something else.

In his downtime now, he’s running towards making St. Joseph a better community. He said an ongoing community development project might be a good transition from his professional life into retirement.

Over the last year, Page has worked towards making a vision for the St. Joseph Community Sports Complex a reality. He’d like to see youth sports programming grow, new fields be built, extensions of walking paths throughout the community and a community center.

“I will never sit down,” Page said. “(My family) knows that the only time I’m going to sit down is when I physically can’t, mentally can’t,  do anything.

“I cannot not be doing something.”

The post St. Joseph’s Jim Page continues to work toward the greater good first appeared on SJO Daily.

BY DANI TIETZ
dani@sjodaily.com

What’s the next move for St. Joseph?

Jim Page and a committee of four volunteers are looking into how the development of the St. Joseph Community Sports Complex could impact the village.

Over the last year, Page has worked on a “living document” that eventually will set a clear vision for the 34-acre park located on the east side of town.

He knows that vision should not only be his, the committee’s or that of the Village staff and board, though. Earlier this week, Page sent out a survey to collect feedback on a Community Center in order to begin the discussion.

“We want to gauge the support for engaging in the process to begin with,” Page said. “If there is significant push back on the concept, we need to understand what it is in order to be successful.

“We are also looking to see if there are ideas that the citizens may have to offer that never occurred to us. “

The committee is also touring other community buildings throughout the region to see how they are laid out, how much they cost to operate and to pick the brains of the owners to see what they missed or would do differently.

Once the survey and the tours are done, the committee will produce a report for the Village of St. Joseph to help guide the necessary next steps.

Page said discussions about financing have not taken place, either at the committee level or at the Village board level.

“Our operating philosophy is that we are researching what the citizens want, what can reasonably be built, what that would look like and get a preliminary cost estimate from professionals,” he said.

“Once we have reached that stage, then the discussion about paying for it will fall to the Village Board.

“I am convinced that by further developing the Community Park including the expansion of facilities and the addition of a community building will attract money to St. Joseph from the surrounding area,” Page said.

“Increased activity there would also increase motor fuel tax receipts, sales taxes and other secondary fiscal advantages to the Village. This also includes the money that is currently spent by St. Joseph residents at other community centers in the area staying home in the first place.

“I believe that the community building will make sufficient funds to keep it maintained and managed; hopefully, arranged so that its existence is not a burden on the Village.”

While the Village has not been involved in the process, Page has updated the Village throughout the year at public meetings. They have been assisting with the efforts, but citizens are the ones leading the efforts.

At this point, gathering information about the community center is the only task the committee has.

Part of the overall plan for the park includes sidewalks or multi-purpose paths like a one-mile walking path around the park and a finished path from the park to the future extension of the Kickapoo Bike Trail.

Page applied for the Open Space and Land Acquisition and Development (OSLAD) grant, but the Village did not receive it. Instead, the Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR) told the group that the Bike Path Grant would be much more applicable.

The Village of St. Joseph Board of Trustees voted on Jan. 14 to proceed with the application.

“Other than the Kickapoo Rail Trail, there is not much of a dedicated trail system in St. Joseph,” Page said.

“However, I feel it would be nice to start developing a trail system in St. Joseph to keep kids and walkers from sharing the roadway with vehicles.”

Page encourages those who want to volunteer or offer suggestions to contact him.

“There is always some work to be done,” he said.

The post St. Joseph community center survey to help build vision first appeared on SJO Daily.

A St. Joseph Citizen’s Group has been created to start a discussion on the potential of creating a Community Center in St. Joseph.

They have been tasked with working with the Village to determine the use, design, location and management of the Community Center.

To gain an understanding of the community’s desires and vision for the space, the Citizen’s Group has created a survey to collect input. The feedback will not only be used to determine the type of Community Center St. Joseph might need, but will also be used in the grant application process.

Questions should be directed to Jim Page at page3457@gmail.com.

Click here to take the survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/TQWDDF9?fbclid=IwAR2yZdPQVE_s-tmHdCapacd7gXgtcX1QPe1dDpJeNqCM42dkQIxYEyQLW5M

The post St. Joseph Community Center Survey first appeared on SJO Daily.