Glendale Cemetery in Washington is undergoing a major landscaping makeover but needs residents to help bring it to fruition.

The Washington City Council has approved a tree planting plan for the cemetery, located at the end of Market Street, which calls for all future planting of trees and shrubs there to be performed exclusively by the city.

Even after living in Chicago, Houston and Seattle, Washington native Dr. Paul Kinsinger wanted to return to his roots.

And he is hoping his children, Adam, 8, and Allison, 10, will do the same if they someday leave their town for college or career opportunities.

What he hopes will bring them — and thousands of other Tri-County natives — back to their roots is a recreational trail built alongside the proposed Eastern Bypass route, which Kinsinger said he hopes will one day connect East Peoria and Peoria to the “rim towns” of Washington, Morton, Germantown Hills and Metamora.

When Dianna Wara’s best friend and competitive cooking buddy challenged her to enter the first-ever National Festival of Breads baking competition, the game was on.

But the Washington woman never expected to win the grand prize.

See the winning recipe at the end of this story!

The Illinois Department of Human Services recently notified funeral directors and cemetery owners that the state will no longer pay to bury the poor, but locals who were already helping pay the bills said the state did not offer much money anyway.

“The state has been finicky in how it does its payouts,” said Gary Deiters, owner of Deiters Funeral Home. “The amount they were giving us, $1,000, does not cover our costs.”

Three-and-a-half years after they voted in favor of unionizing, employees of the city’s public works department said their patience is wearing thin.

“We’ve tried to be calm and determined,” said Kevin Schone, 13-year employee of the public works department. “We don’t want to put the city in a bad light, but we’ve given them every opportunity to get this settled, and it’s time the public is aware of what’s going on.”

The effort to renovate Sunnyland Plaza and attract retailers to the shopping center has begun.

Armed with results of a recent in-depth retail study, Ray Poe of Chicago, who was hired less than two months ago by the plaza’s owner, Neelam Salmen, to serve as her asset manager, said he and Washington officials now have enough information to move forward with beautifying the plaza and attracting retailers.