The Village of Manteno governance dispute, reported from the primary record: the Village's lawsuit against four of its own trustees, the forensic audit, what the law says, plain-English reports on every board meeting, and a claim-by-claim fact check.
A plain-English guide to the Bourbonnais Township road district ballot question: what a yes vote actually does, why nothing changes until 2029, and what happened when a neighbor asked the board to show the savings math.
Where all 12 of Bourbonnais's Flock Safety license plate readers are, and who operates them — part of our Flock investigation below.
Bourbonnais operates 12 Flock Safety license plate readers shared with 1,700+ agencies. We filed FOIA requests, analyzed 9 months of network audit logs, and built an interactive tracker to show how your data moves.
A deep dive into Kankakee County's trash hauling contracts across three decades. We pulled contracts from 2010, 2015, and 2021, tracked rate changes, and produced a video and podcast episode on what residents actually pay.
An investigation into stop sign placement across Bourbonnais — mapping intersections, analyzing coverage gaps, and examining how traffic control decisions get made and by whom.
Tracking the wave of data center investment coming to Kankakee County — who's building, where, how big, and what it means for land use, power grids, jobs, and local tax revenue.
About Our Investigations
The Bourbs is an independent local news organization covering Kankakee County, Illinois, edited and published by Stan Gromer. We publish The Bourbs Daily, an electronic newsletter issued to subscribers every morning, and BradleyIllinois.com, a local news site updated daily. The investigations on this page are part of that reporting: original stories built from public records, public meetings, court filings, and our own analysis of the data, published free to the public.
Much of this work rests on requests under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act (5 ILCS 140), which we file as news media. The principal purpose of every request is to gather and publish news about local government and matters of public health, safety, welfare, and legal rights, never a commercial purpose. Every investigation is reported and edited by Stan Gromer and checked against the underlying documents before it runs; every fact is sourced to a record you can read yourself, and corrections are made and logged in public. How we report.
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