Who's behind this, who pays for it, and what we promise you — in plain English
That's the whole origin story. No business plan, no investors — just a guy with kids, a free weekend, and the realization that finding something to do around here took forty-five minutes of detective work. One park district calendar. Then the other one. Then every library's page. Then three Facebook groups. By the time you'd checked it all, the kids had turned on the TV.
So he made a list. For himself. Then it got away from him.
That dad is Stan Gromer, and he is still the editor and publisher of The Bourbs: he reports and signs the investigations, sets the rules the daily coverage follows, and answers for everything The Bourbs publishes.
Hand-collected events so a dad would know where to take his kids Saturday. Purely selfish.
Every parent in the county was doing the same detective work. The list became a public events page.
Checking a website every morning is work. So it started sending a daily digest — first to one inbox, then to anyone who asked.
Where do we eat after? Which park has the good playground? Who do I call about the furnace? Every question became another directory.
A daily newsletter, an events map for 27 towns, a dozen directories, local news — all from a guy who just wanted to take his kids somewhere.
Most local sites eventually get big enough to be worth something, somebody offers them money, and the thing quietly stops being for you. We'd rather write these down now, in public, while nobody's offering us anything — so you can hold us to them later.
Not from businesses, not from candidates, not from anybody. No one has ever paid to be on this site, and no one ever will.
No banners, no pop-ups, no "sponsored" listings wearing a costume. If a restaurant is at the top of a list, it's because of the list — not because of a check.
No premium tier, no featured placement. The 30-year diner and the brand-new taco truck get the same treatment.
We don't endorse candidates or parties, we don't work for any campaign, and we don't quietly help our friends. We're not anybody's megaphone. We follow the records and tell you what they show.
No favors for people we like. No punishment for people we don't. Nobody gets buried and nobody gets boosted.
No accounts, no tracking you around the internet, no selling your inbox to a data broker. You show up, you find what you need, you leave.
These aren't "for now" promises. No plan to monetize later, no ads down the road, no exit strategy. This was never built to be sold — it was built because a dad couldn't find a list.
Why it matters: when nobody's paying, nobody's owed. No advertiser to keep happy, no sponsor whose bad review we'd soften, no donor whose meeting we'd cover gently. We can be straight with you because nobody has bought the right to be otherwise.
Our readers disagree with each other about nearly everything — and still coach the same Little League teams and show up to the same pancake breakfast. We'd like to keep it that way.
So here's the standard: we report what was said, what was voted, and what was decided. If a board voted 5–2, we say 5–2. If it's on the agenda but hasn't been voted on, we say it's on the agenda — not that it passed. If a document says something, we link the document so you can read it yourself.
We don't endorse candidates or parties. We don't work with, coordinate with, or take money from any campaign, party, or committee. We don't run anybody's talking points as news. Every candidate and every official gets covered under the same rules, whether we like them or not.
We run independent investigations. We file public records requests, read the board packets and the invoices, watch the meeting video, and put the documents online so you can check our work. Sometimes that work leads somewhere clear. When an official says one thing and the records or the recording show another, we'll say so plainly, no matter who said it or which side they're on. That isn't playing politics. It's the job.
Now and then the records point somewhere clear enough that we'll give you our view, most often on a ballot question like the Bourbonnais Township road district vote. When we do, the same rules apply every time:
It's labeled. Opinion runs under an “Our view” heading, set apart from the reporting, so you always know which part is which.
It's signed. It carries the editor's name, Stan Gromer. Never a house byline and never a software call. Dale, Rae, and Mack report; they don't take positions.
It's built on the reporting. Every reason we give traces back to a document, a vote, or a recording in the same piece, so you can check it and make up your own mind.
The other side gets its best case. We lay out the strongest argument against our view, in good faith, right alongside it.
Nobody's in on it. No campaign, committee, candidate, or official asked for it, paid for it, or helped write it.
You can push back. If you think we got a fact wrong, send us the record. We'll correct what's wrong, say that we did, and publish your response.
Can we be perfectly unbiased? No — nobody can, and we're suspicious of anyone who claims otherwise. What to cover, what to leave out, which sentence goes first: all judgment calls, made by someone who lives here and has opinions like everybody else. What we can do is watch for it and fix it when we get it wrong.
We rewrote this section on September 23, 2026. It used to say we stay out of politics entirely. That made sense when this site was mostly an events calendar. Once we started investigating local government, it stopped being accurate, so we changed the words instead of pretending.
Who we are. The Bourbs is an independent local news publication for Kankakee County, Illinois, edited and published by Stan Gromer. We publish The Bourbs Daily, a newsletter emailed to subscribers every morning, and BradleyIllinois.com, updated daily. Every issue of the newsletter is kept in a public archive.
What we cover. Local government and school boards, local news, public safety and weather, events, and investigations built on public records.
Where the facts come from. Primary documents first: agendas, board packets, minutes, meeting recordings, court filings, and records we request under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act, which we file as news media. The principal purpose of every request is to gather and publish news about local government and the public's health, safety, welfare, and legal rights. We link the document whenever we can. When we pass along another outlet's reporting, we credit it and link to it.
Who writes it. Investigations carry the name of the reporter and editor, Stan Gromer. The daily coverage runs under house bylines (Dale, Rae, and Mack), which we disclose as invented voices. Software, including AI tools, helps us gather listings and draft copy under rules the editor sets. The editor is responsible for all of it.
Reporting and opinion. Kept apart. Nearly everything we publish is reporting. When we give our view, it's labeled, signed by the editor, and follows the rules above.
What we won't do. Report an agenda item as a decision, invent a fact, quote, or source, dress up opinion as reporting, or publish anything we can't trace to a record. Corrections are below, and investigations keep a public change log.
1. If something we published looks biased, unfair, or flat-out wrong, tell us. No press credential or polite tone required — "this is wrong and here's why" works fine.
2. We'll actually look. Not defensively. If you're right, you're right.
3. If we blew it, we fix it fast and say we fixed it. No quiet edits pretending it never happened. Admitting a mistake costs us nothing but pride, and pride isn't on the list of things we're protecting here.
4. If we look and still think we got it right, we'll tell you that too — and why. You're free to keep disagreeing.
We'd rather be corrected a hundred times than be wrong once in public and leave it standing. If the community can't trust this, it isn't worth running.
And nothing about how the site gets built is a secret either. Our sources, our methods, the automation behind the newsletter, and exactly who the bylines are — Dale, Rae, and Mack — are all laid out plainly on the About & FAQ page.
A dad's Saturday problem that turned into a county's homepage. Free forever, funded by nobody, owed to no one.