Local coverage
Project conversations across Champaign County.
Which provider is available shifts from town to town, but the notes below hold regardless of who ends up on the job.
Urbana
The construction boom that followed Urbana's 1871 fire produced most of the city's historic commercial and residential stock, built decades before central air conditioning or forced-air ductwork existed as a standard feature.
Local planning notes →Savoy
Savoy's population growth -- the fastest of any Champaign County municipality between 2000 and 2024, more than doubling in size -- happened almost entirely after central air conditioning became a standard builder feature.
Local planning notes →Mahomet
Mahomet's 1832 founding around the Sangamon River gave the village a location with higher ambient ground moisture than open prairie, and central Illinois's humid summers add to that baseline.
Local planning notes →Rantoul
Chanute Field trained Air Force technicians from 1917 until its 1993 closure, and the buildings that housed 76 years of that mission were heated and cooled with whatever technology was standard at the time they were built or last upgraded.
Local planning notes →St. Joseph
St. Joseph grew from a small railroad village east of Urbana into a Champaign-Urbana bedroom community, and much of that commuter-driven residential growth came recently enough that homes were built with central forced-air heating and cooling from the start.
Local planning notes →Tolono
Tolono incorporated in 1865 as a railroad junction town, with early residents mostly employed by the rail lines rather than farming, and its housing grew up around that 19th-century junction-town economy.
Local planning notes →Monticello
Monticello's historic State Street homes, along with the Allerton mansion built 1899-1903, were constructed at a scale and complexity well beyond a standard county farmhouse, and heating and cooling systems in those homes have been upgraded across multiple eras since.
Local planning notes →Villa Grove
Villa Grove was platted in 1887 and then rebuilt again after 1902 as a Frisco railroad division point, with the newer townsite built specifically around railroad operations and repair shops on 260 purchased acres.
Local planning notes →