Editorial: Funding needed to replace Volo Bog's boardwalk

Billions of dollars in unpaid bills, deep cuts in social service programs, crumbling infrastructure, residents and businesses fleeing the state - it's the recent legacy of Illinois' fiscal waste and mismanagement.

State leaders have imposed a host of new taxes and legalized sports betting and recreational marijuana to generate new revenue, but the hole is deep, problems persist and there will be much capital project demand for that money as it becomes available.

One of those in financial need is the Volo Bog State Natural Area in Ingleside, where two-thirds of its half-mile long interpretive boardwalk has been closed since June. The walkway takes visitors through various ecosystems into the "eye" of Volo Bog. There's no timeline for its reopening because there's no funding to replace the structure.

Greg Kelly, the site superintendent for Illinois Department of Natural Resources, who oversees the bog, said officials have been "aggressively" sounding the alarm about the condition of the boardwalk for a decade and can no longer make Band-Air repairs. This important project at one of the suburbs' ecological icons deserves to be on the funding radar as capital project money becomes available.

While the newer floating section of the boardwalk is still open, the stationary wooden boardwalk installed in the 1970s is being pulled apart by hydraulic pressure from rising water and has been deemed unsafe, officials have said. Structures to control water flow also are deficient.

Some $700,000 to $1 million is needed to fund the replacement project, one that would need a delicate touch in a fragile environment.

The eye of Volo Bog is a floating mat of sphagnum moss, cattails and sedges surrounding a small lake created thousands of years ago by a melting glacier and ringed by tamarack trees and other state-endangered plants. Volo Bog provides a variety of ecosystem services, including floodwater mitigation, groundwater recharge and habitat for a vast array of wetland wildlife, including endangered Blanding's turtles and American and least Bitterns.

It also is a valuable outdoor classroom and laboratory for students young and old, and the boardwalk is an important part of the structure that makes those lessons possible. About 144 guided school groups visit each year.

There's sure to be a lot of competition for any state capital funds that become available, but the bog is a unique ecosystem - "It's the last one. This is it," Kelly told our Mick Zawislak.

That's reason enough for the Volo Bog boardwalk to get serious consideration when capital funds are disbursed.