Kankakee Times

The COVID-19 pandemic has heightened many of the problems the City of Kanakee was experiencing before the crisis hit, Kankakee Mayor Chasity Wells-Armstrong said.

In an interview with WTTW, Wells-Armstrong said issues such as food insecurity are even worse than they were before the pandemic started. 

“I want to make sure that everyone has a meal,” Wells-Armstrong told WTTW. "We’ve been working with our schools as well to make sure the kids have meals while they’ve been home. And we’ve partnered with them to make sure they have cleaning supplies and those types of things while we’re enduring this pandemic."

The city anticipates receiving federal aid to help stem the crisis.

“We are lobbying Congress very heavily right now for $500 billion dollars over the next two years in direct aid to municipalities,” Wells-Armstrong told WTTW. “Some of the previous packages were restricted to populations of 500,000 or more. Kankakee County at the last Census had about 110,000 residents, so we were well under that threshold. This would allow us to get money directly to the City of Kankakee, to help us supplement the losses we’ve had in our budget.”

Kankakee is grouped with Chicago and Cook County, which have larger populations, and under Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker's reopening plan, it is expected to reopen at the slowest speed, according to WTTW. 

But Kankakee has a low population density, which means if it weren't grouped with Chicago or Cook County, it could be opening faster, State Sen. Patrick Joyce (D-Park Forest) told WTTW. 

“I just want to make sure that they are afforded every opportunity in Kankakee, in Grundy, if Chicago’s numbers were to change, and they weren’t to change in those two communities, I’d like for them to be able to [reopen sooner],” Joyce told WTTW. “We want to go along with the governor’s program. I was just concerned about where the line was drawn.”