Quinn to Reopen State Historic Sites

By Kevin Robinson in News on Mar 26, 2009 4:20PM

Governor Quinn said Wednesday that he plans to reopen several state historic sites that former governor Rod Blagojevich closed late last year. At the time, Blagojevich said that cutting nearly $3 million from the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency was necessary to plug a hole in the state budget. Quinn has already reopened several state parks that Blagojevich closed along with the historic sites. Although the state is facing an unprecedented budget crisis this year, the governor says that merging state agencies will offset the cost of the reopenings.

Earlier this week, State Senate President John Cullerton announced his support for the reopenings. "Springfield has become, because of the (Abraham Lincoln Presidential) Museum, a place where people can't do it all in one day, so they're spending an extra night, which is great," Cullerton told the Galesburg Register-Mail. "We're going to correct that," Cullerton said of the budget, noting that funding for reopening state historic sites wasn't included in the governor's proposed budget. "The (Dana-Thomas) House - I can't believe that he didn't put that in," said Cullerton.

Spokespeople for the Department of Natural Resources and the IHPA say that the agency's directors have already begun meeting to work out the details of merging the two agencies. "One thing that is clear is the two agencies have similar missions," said IHPA spokesman David Blanchette. "We're both about preserving the state's resources." Noting that IHPA came out of DNR in the mid 1980's, added that "essentially it's going back to where the agency came from."