What does the Fox say? Woodland creature gets a lot of attention after YouTube video. Lifestyle, C1
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Hope Academy .............. 49 Genoa-Kingston............. 48 Rochelle ...........................41 Sycamore ........................41 Kaneland......................... 49 Hiawatha .......................... 0 Marengo ............................3 DeKalb............................. 46 Yorkville.............................7 Morris...............................14
Complete Friday night football coverage in Sports, B1; and online at Daily-Chronicle.com/DCPreps
Search narrows for city manager By JILLIAN DUCHNOWSKI jduchnowski@shawmedia.com DeKALB – The top five candidates for DeKalb’s next city manager will be in town Friday for separate interviews with City Council members, city staff and two groups of residents. City Council members narrowed about 50 applicants down to five last week, after
Top 5 candidates for DeKalb spot to interview Friday search firm Voorhees Associates of Deerfield reviewed the applications, city leaders said. Interim City Manager Rudy Espiritu is among the finalists to permanently replace Mark Biernacki, who retired in June after about nine years as DeKalb’s city manager. “We were all pretty pleased
with the quality of the candidates and the range of the candidates,” said Fifth Ward Alderman Ron Nay- John Rey lor. “We got a big cross-section, and I think we’re all looking
forward to the face-to-face interviews.” Under DeKalb’s form of government, the City Council sets policy and the city manager carries it out. The city manager compiles the city’s annual budget, oversees all city employees and is responsible for the day-to-day opera-
tions of government. The city manager reports to the City Council. The next city manager will support first-term Mayor John Rey and guide city staff as city leaders continuing emphasizing partnerships with Northern Illinois University and continue pursuing econom-
ic development downtown, along the South Fourth Street corridor and along Sycamore Road. The new manager also will start just as DeKalb police finish moving to a new facility at 700 West Lincoln Highway, leaving leaders to decide what to do with the vacated space at the Municipal Building at 400 S. Fourth St.
See CITY, page A9
New boss for fixing the balky health care website
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Sycamore receiver Ben Niemann (8) celebrates with his teammates after his 31-yard touchdown reception Friday during the first quarter in Yorkville.
For first time since 2010, DeKalb, G-K likely earn playoff berths By ROSS JACOBSON rjacobson@shawmedia.com GENOA – With victories in the final week of the high school football season, both DeKalb and Genoa-Kingston likely earned playoff berths for the first time since 2010. G-K defeated Marengo, 48-3, on the road while DeKalb hung More online on for a 46-41 victory against Rochelle at home, each earning Check out their fifth win of the highlights from season. the DeKalb and The playoff brackG-K games on ets for all eight classes Daily-Chronicle. will be announced tocom/dcpreps. night during the IHSA Football Playoff PairMore inside ing Show on Comcast SportsNet Chicago at 8 For complete prep p.m. football coverage, Kaneland (8-1) and turn to page B1. Sycamore (9-0) already had clinched postseason berths, each with six-plus victories. With the wins, G-K (54) and DeKalb (5-4) are now playoff eligible, but should receive an at-large berth into the playoffs based on their strength of schedule. “The boys are going to sleep in for once,” G-K coach Travis Frederick said of
Monica Maschak – mmaschak@shawmedia.com
Coach Matt Weckler celebrates a touch down that breaks the tie Friday in the second quarter against Rochelle. the team’s plans for today. “They will probably get together and watch a little IHSA TV and see what happens. The coaches will obviously be hanging out together.” Sycamore’s victory over Yorkville capped the Spartans’ first undefeated regular season since 1978 and gave them their first Northern Illinois Big 12 East championship. The Spar-
tans defeated Kaneland, 31-21, last week to end the Knights’ 35-game regular season winning streak. It was the first time Kaneland had lost a conference game since the creation of the NI Big 12 in 2010. Sycamore will likely be one of the top-seeded teams in Class 5A when the brackets are released tonight.
WASH INGTON – Nearly a month into the dysfunctional rollout, the Obama administration acknowledged the wide extent of its health care website’s problems Friday and abruptly turned to a private company to oversee urgent fixes. Setting a new timetable, officials said most issues will be repaired by the end of November. It will take a lot of work, but “HealthCare. gov is fixable,” declared Jeffrey Zients, a management consultant brought in by the White House. By the end of next month, he said, there will be many fewer signup problems such as computer screen freezes – but he stopped short of saying problems will completely disappear. The administration also said it is promoting one of the website contractors, a subsidiary of the nation’s largest health insurance company, to take on the role of “general contractor” shepherding the fixes. Quality Software Services Inc. – owned by a unit of UnitedHealth Group – was responsible for two components of the government’s online insurance system. One is the data hub, a linchpin that works relatively well, and the other is an accounts registration feature that initially froze and caused many problems. Zients reported that his review found dozens of issues across the entire system, which is made up of layers of components meant to interact in real time with consumers, government agencies and insurance company computers. HealthCare.gov was supposed to be the online portal for uninsured Americans to get coverage under President Barack Obama’s health care law. Envisioned as the equivalent of Amazon.com for health insurance, it became a huge bottleneck immediately upon launch Oct. 1. A major embarrassment for the administration, it is likely to end up as a case study of how government technology programs can go awry. The briefing from Zients came a day after executives of QSSI and the other major contractor, CGI Federal, told Congress that the government didn’t fully test the system and ordered up last-minute changes that contributed to logjams. Next week, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is scheduled to testify on Capitol Hill. Visiting a community health center on Friday in Austin, Texas, Sebelius said that “in an ideal world there would have been a lot more testing.” But she added that her department had little flexibility to postpone the launch against the backdrop of Washington’s unforgiving politics. Republicans hoping, in the words of their TV ads, to “defund Obamacare” precipitated a government shutdown. Some Republicans have been calling for her ouster, and she addressed that issue a day earlier in Phoenix. She said, “The majority of people calling for me to resign I would say are people who I don’t work for and do
See HEALTH CARE, page A7
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