Representatives from Farnsworth Group, an engineering firm out of Bloomington, were at the Jacksonville Area Chamber of Commerce building yesterday for Task 2 of the project that aims to improve the city’s waterway.

Task One consisted of assessing what constitutes the Town Brook using data from the city’s GIS mapping system.

Bruce Brown, a landscape engineer at Farnsworth Group, says the firm will assemble the information and ideas they heard from members of the public, city leaders, and various community stakeholders.

“And then we're going to create a very quick and dirty, what we call, 'bubble diagram'," says Brown. "So, basically, all the input we got as far as potential pathways, the corridor and things that might impact the brook we're going to do a very schematic bubble diagram on a series of areal photographs and GIS information. We'll be bringing that back to City Council probably in the next month."   

Kevin Hannel, a water/wastewater engineer with Farnsworth Group, says there were some good preliminary ideas.

“I think generally speaking it seemed like there was a lot of discussion of where the corridor for the brook project would start and end," says Hannel. "There was a lot of discussion of basically going from Illinois College at Lincoln Avenue to MacMurray College near the Hardin Avenue area."

Brown says the community was well-represented during yesterday’s meetings.

“We had both colleges here today," says Brown. "We had a large contingent from the city itself. We had people from the neighborhoods. I think we had a great cross-section of where this thing might go and a lot of input from a lot of different groups."

Anybody who didn’t make it to the discussions can still e-mail their ideas to city alderwoman Lori Large-Oldenettel at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. before the end of next week.