By CHRISTOPHER WILLS and JOHN O’CONNOR, Associated Press

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) — Former Illinois Gov. George Ryan, disgraced by a corruption scandal that landed him in prison yet heralded by some for clearing the state’s death row, has died. He was 91.

Kankakee County Coroner Robert Gessner, a family friend, said Ryan died Friday afternoon at his home in Kankakee, where he was receiving hospice care.

Ryan started out a small-town pharmacist but wound up running one of the country’s largest states. Along the way, the tough-on-crime Republican experienced a conversion on the death penalty and won international praise by halting executions as governor and, eventually, emptying death row.

He served only one term as governor, from 1999 to 2003, that ended amid accusations he used government offices to reward friends, win elections and hide corruption that played a role in the fiery deaths of six children. Eventually, Ryan was convicted of corruption charges and sentenced to 6½ years in federal prison.

During his more than five years behind bars, Ryan worked as a carpenter and befriended fellow inmates, many of whom addressed him as “governor.” He was released in January 2013, weeks before his 79th birthday, looking thinner and more subdued.

He’d been defiant heading to prison. The night before he went in, Ryan insisted he was innocent and would prove it. But when Ryan asked President George W. Bush to grant him clemency in 2008, he said he accepted the verdict against him and felt “deep shame.”

“I apologize to the people of Illinois for my conduct,” Ryan said at the time.

Ryan was still serving his sentence when his wife, Lura Lynn, died in June 2011. He was briefly released to be at her deathbed but wasn’t allowed to attend her funeral. On the day he left prison and returned to the Kankakee home where he and his wife had raised their children, one of his grandchildren handed him an urn containing his wife’s ashes.

Born in Iowa and raised in Kankakee, Ryan married his high school sweetheart, followed his father in becoming a pharmacist and had six children. Those who knew Ryan described him as the ultimate family man and a neighbor’s neighbor, someone who let local kids use his basketball court or rushed to Dairy Queen to buy treats when they missed the ice cream truck.

“He’s even offered to deliver the papers,” newspaper delivery boy Ben Angelo said when Ryan was running for governor. “He was serious.”

In 1968, Ryan was appointed to fill an unexpired term on the county board, beginning a quick rise in politics. Eventually, he served as speaker of the Illinois House, lieutenant governor, secretary of state and, finally, governor.

A glad-handing politician from the old school, Ryan emphasized pragmatism over ideology. He worked with officials from both parties and struck deals on the golf course or during evenings of cigars and booze.

Ryan helped block the Equal Rights Amendment in the early 1980s during his term as speaker of the Illinois House, triggering some of the most heated demonstrations ever seen at the Capitol.

“They wrote my name in blood on the floor in front of the House, in front of the governor’s office,” Ryan said. “They were trying, hectic times, frankly.”

His willingness to set aside party orthodoxy sometimes put him at odds with more conservative Republicans.

He led a failed effort in 1989 to get the General Assembly to restrict assault weapons. He backed gambling expansion. He became the first governor to visit Cuba since Fidel Castro took power. And in 2000, after signing off on the execution of one killer, he decided not to carry out any more. He imposed a moratorium on executions and began reviewing reforms to a judicial system that repeatedly sentenced innocent men to die.

Ultimately, Ryan decided no reforms would provide the certainty he wanted. In virtually his last act as governor, he emptied death row with pardons and commutations in 2003.

“Because the Illinois death penalty system is arbitrary and capricious — and therefore immoral — I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death,” Ryan said.

Ryan found himself mentioned as a contender for the Nobel Peace Prize at the same time federal prosecutors were closing in. Before year’s end, he would be charged with taking payoffs, gifts and vacations in return for steering government contracts and leases to cronies, as well as lying to investigators and cheating on his taxes.

Much of the illegal activity took place during Ryan’s two terms as Illinois secretary of state, including the 1994 deaths of six children. They burned to death after their minivan struck a part that had fallen off a truck whose driver got his license illegally from Ryan’s office.

Federal investigators found that Ryan had turned the secretary of state’s office into an arm of his political campaign, pressuring employees for contributions — some of which came through bribes from unqualified truck drivers for licenses. After the children’s deaths, Ryan also gutted the part of his office responsible for rooting out corruption.

Then as governor, he steered millions of dollars in state leases and contracts to political insiders who in turn provided gifts such as trips to a Jamaican resort and $145,000 loans to his brother’s struggling business, investigators found. He was convicted on all charges April 17, 2006.

The father of the six dead children criticized Ryan’s attitude at the time.

“There was no remorse in George Ryan after the verdict. That didn’t surprise me. That’s Ryan’s same attitude, a chip on the shoulder,” said the Rev. Scott Willis. “It makes it a little easier to feel elation. His attitude confirms the verdict was right.”

Anger at Ryan weakened Republicans for years and energized the gubernatorial campaign of a charismatic young Democrat who promised to clean up Springfield — Rod Blagojevich. Later, as federal investigators probed his own conduct, Blagojevich would call for Ryan to be granted clemency and released from prison.

Wills, a former Associated Press staffer, was the principal writer of this obituary.

By LINDSAY WHITEHURST, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Friday to clear the way for Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to access Social Security systems containing personal data on millions of Americans.

The emergency appeal comes after a judge in Maryland restricted the team’s access under federal privacy laws.

Social Security holds personal records on nearly everyone in the country, including school records, bank details, salary information and medical and mental health records for disability recipients, according to court documents.

The government says the DOGE team needs access to target waste in the federal government, and asked the justices to put the lower court order on hold as the lawsuit over the issue plays out.

Solicitor General John Sauer argued that the judge’s restrictions disrupt DOGE’s urgent work and inappropriately interfere with executive-branch functions. “Left undisturbed, this preliminary injunction will only invite further judicial incursions into internal agency decision-making,” he wrote.

Musk has been focused on Social Security as an alleged hotbed of fraud, describing it as a “ Ponzi scheme ” and insisting that reducing waste in the program is an important way to cut government spending.

An appeals court refused to immediately lift the block on DOGE access, though it split along ideological lines. Conservative judges in the minority said there’s no evidence that the team has done any “targeted snooping” or exposed personal information.

The lawsuit was originally filed by a group of labor unions and retirees represented by the group Democracy Forward.

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The ruling from U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander in Maryland that blocked DOGE from Social Security systems did allow staffers to access data that has been redacted or stripped of anything personally identifiable.

The appeal is the latest in a string of emergency applications to the nation’s highest court as the Trump administration faces about 200 lawsuits challenging various aspects of President Donald Trump’s sweeping conservative agenda.

Wilder Foundation, a longstanding St. Paul nonprofit, has launched a new mental health and substance abuse disorder clinic on the city’s East Side.

The Wilder East Clinic opened Thursday at 445 Etna St., just north of Interstate 94 and Wilson Avenue. The clinic is in direct response to increased demand in the east metro for mental health and substance abuse disorder services, particularly among children and teens, according to a statement from the organization.

The clinic is geared toward offering culturally responsive services in multiple languages, with affordable care options that include parent education and family support groups. Wilder’s 2022 needs assessment found significant gaps in mental health care for Black, Southeast Asian, Latino and African immigrant families in the east metro, on top of growing need coming out of the pandemic.

“We are committed to expanding our services to meet the urgent needs of the east metro and St. Paul communities,” said Pahoua Yang, vice president of community mental health and wellness at Wilder, in the statement. “Wilder has long been a leader in school-based mental health services and culturally specific care, but with growing demand, it’s clear that we must scale our services to
provide timely, accessible and effective care to more families.”

Wilder maintains a longstanding clinic in the St. Paul Midway and also offers home-based and community-based care. A formal ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new clinic is planned this fall. Visit wilder.org/east-clinic for more information.

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“New York can forge ahead by adopting a Clean Fuel Standard (CFS). It’s a proven, market-driven strategy for rapidly decarbonizing transportation at minimal public expense.”

A truck traveling through Queens. (Adi Talwar/City Limits)

This week, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced a budget deal which allocates $1 billion for climate programs, details TBA. But the Legislature still has urgent work to do to implement New York’s landmark climate law and defend it from Trump administration attacks. To accelerate climate progress, it should pass a clean fuel policy this session.

The state’s climate law mandates a 40 percent greenhouse gas reduction by 2030, and 100 percent zero-emission electricity generation by 2040. We’re not on track to meet those goals.  Recently, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency denounced the law as unimplementable, even as the U.S. Department of the Interior revoked the permit for a large windpower project off Long Island that would have helped implement it. 

But New York can forge ahead by adopting a Clean Fuel Standard (CFS). It’s a proven, market-driven strategy for rapidly decarbonizing transportation at minimal public expense.

CFS policies incentivize low-carbon fuels and electricity for transportation, including renewable diesel and renewable natural gas made from organic wastes. They work by making polluters, not taxpayers, pay for cleaner alternatives, requiring high-carbon fuel producers to buy credits from low-carbon fuel producers. As carbon emissions targets tighten year on year, production of clean fuels generating the most credits ratchet up.

These programs really work. Since California adopted the first Low Carbon Fuel Standard in 2011, clean fuels replaced over 31 billion gallons of liquid petroleum fuel in-state, reducing the  California transportation sector’s carbon intensity by over 15 percent three years ahead of schedule, and that progress is accelerating. Similar standards were adopted in Oregon, Washington State, New Mexico, and Canada. 

Eleven other U.S. states are considering them, including New York, which is undertaking a CFS feasibility study. But the jury is already in: CFS works. Decarbonizing transportation is urgent, and the Legislature should enact CFS.

New York’s transportation sector is its second largest greenhouse gas emitter and a major source of toxic air pollution. Diesel truck exhaust contributes to smog and acid rain, harms health, and kills 3,000 New Yorkers annually. By far the worst offenders are thousands of heavy-duty diesel trucks built before 2013 still on our roads. A CFS would enable replacing them with cleaner fuel trucks.

An Energy Vision report recently assessed three replacement technologies: trucks running on renewable diesel made from vegetable oils; compressed natural gas trucks running on RNG made from organic wastes; and heavy-duty electric vehicles.

It found that while EVs work well as light- and medium-duty trucks up to 26,000 pounds, they aren’t yet a practical replacement for heavier trucks (Class 7 and 8). Heavy-duty EV trucks cost $250,000 more than diesels. Their large, heavy batteries shrink cargo capacity.

They have limited range, performance issues, longer downtime, and scant availability (fewer than 1,800 were deployed nationwide from 2017 to mid-2024). Although their tailpipe emissions are zero, their overall emissions are not. In NYS, fossil fuels still generate about half the electricity charging their batteries. And heavy-duty EVs require costly high-capacity charging stations, which have yet to be built here. 

Following California’s lead, New York instituted an Advanced Clean Trucks rule requiring truck manufacturers to sell an increasing percentage of zero-emissions vehicles starting this year, rising to 100 percent by 2045. The quota system favors EV trucks. 

But given concerns about their cost, performance and charging infrastructure, it’s difficult to see how the rule could realistically be applied to the heaviest EV trucks. NYS Senator Jeremy Cooney introduced a sensible bill to delay the rule’s implementation. “I remain fully committed to New York’s climate goals,” he said. “I also recognize the work needed to put infrastructure in place supporting EV trucking.”

Meanwhile, we can’t wait to start replacing New York’s oldest, dirtiest heavy trucks. There are viable alternatives we can deploy now.

There are already 90,000 heavy-duty compressed natural gas trucks on U.S. roads fueled increasingly by renewable natural gas. RNG-powered trucks have 88 percent of the clean air benefits of heavy-duty EVs, much lower costs, and potentially greater climate benefits. Producing RNG captures methane that would otherwise escape into the atmosphere and warm the planet. When made from manure or food waste, RNG has the lowest lifecycle GHGs of any fuel or battery system. 

A New York CFS would speed adoption of RNG fuel and trucks here. It would simultaneously generate funds for EV charging infrastructure, hastening implementation of the Advanced Clean Trucks rule. The two policies are complementary.

With New York’s climate targets looming, we need to make rapid progress on cleaning up our transportation sector. More charging stations will help eventually, but as NYS Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal said, “We cannot wait any longer to implement a clean fuel policy in New York State.”

The Legislature should do it this session, and not punt to next year. 

Matt Tomich is President of the non-profit organization Energy Vision.

The post Opinion: To Accelerate NY’s Climate Progress, Pass a Clean Fuel Policy appeared first on City Limits.