“I love everything about the river,” says Gracie Mott, a self-described “river rat” who is director of the park district in Havana, a small town along the Illinois River. “The barges, the towboats, the history of what’s going on up and down the river, I just love it all.”
She moved to Havana with her husband who had just retired and grown up nearby. After first seeing the river, “I immediately fell in love,” she recalls.
In 2019, Mott took over leadership of the park district’s 13 parks, including a five-block-long riverfront park, which is about three times the number of parks for a town their size. “Now I’m steward of the parks I fell in love with,” she says.
Just three weeks after Mott started her job, Havana was hit with the news that Vistra Corp was shutting down its local coal-fired power plant within three months. The park district would lose one-third of its funding from the real estate taxes paid by the power plant.
In Illinois, 23 coal plants have been partially or entirely closed since 2007, a transition driven largely by aging infrastructure and falling natural gas prices. The lost revenue to park districts like the one in Havana is just one of the unfortunate consequences of the transition from heavy carbon producing coal power plants to renewable energy.
For the Havana Park District, the immediate impact was the loss of most of the staff, from 15 employees down to three . It’s not just Havana — other communities in Illinois are facing the same dilemma. Lost tax revenue is the biggest impact, but job losses, sales tax, and coal waste cleanup are additional impacts facing communities facing coal plant and coal mine closures.
Mott was determined to find a solution. “I was new and I was stubborn,” she recalls.
Prairie Rivers Network (PRN) connected with Mott and other coal community leaders after the four coal plant closures of Havana, Duck Creek, Hennepin, and Coffeen were announced in 2019. Through these connections, we were able to ensure that the community needs were part of the policy negotiations that were underway for a new state energy law.
When the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act passed in 2021, it included several measures to support coal communities and workers, including a new grant program, the Energy Transition Community Grant. PRN and community leaders then got to work helping to inform the development of the grant program, and ultimately apply for funding.
Mott wasn’t the only community leader dedicated to finding new opportunities for Havana. “I’m a person who believes if you get lemons, you’re going to make lemonade,” said Havana Mayor Brenda Stadsholt. “We chose to keep trying after the closing of the power plant. A lot of the tax bodies who pursued the grants, pursued the opportunities, benefited. Money does make a difference. But you got to have people who are willing to work hard.”
In 2023, the first year of the grant program, Mott wrote and received $157,000 from an Energy Community Transition Grant to hire two staff. That year the school district received $757,000 and the city of Havana received $55,482.
“That’s really what got us back on track,” Mott said.
In 2024 the District again received another grant for an additional $225,870. Replacement of the Park District’s Administrative Assistant and Recreation Director/Facility Manager positions will allow them to increase programming, market their campground and allow the Director to get back to doing more administrative work and grant writing, all of which will help bring in funds and provide a more sustainable future for the Park District.
City leaders have marketed Havana as a tourist destination, utilizing the Illinois River as its greatest resource. The Havana Park District has played a major role in attracting people from the area to visit. They maintain several public access boat ramps. The park district hosts a Riverfront Concert Series on a stage that overlooks the river. There are Fourth of July fireworks, a car show, and Oktoberfest. Another park is home to the public swimming pool, playground, and Rockwell Mound, a 2,000 year-old Native American burial site.
The transition grant helps them to market Havana’s attractions to draw people to the community.
“We’re very lucky to have all of these parks,” Mott said, “people in central Illinois love their parks.”
“We’ve never not been moving,” said Mayor Stadsholt. “We’ve never sat around thinking what the world should do for us. We are trying to change our community so that future generations can come back, or stay here, to live and raise their family.”
