Champaign City Council will convene Tuesday night to appoint a new member to fill the vacant District 5 seat. The appointment was pushed back after its last scheduled meeting was cancelled due to the weather.

One of the five candidates — Cathy Emanuel, Paul Faraci, Linda Cross, Steve Meid and Jim McGuire — will be appointed and sworn in after receiving five of the eight council votes. The appointment is scheduled to be at the start of the agenda and the new member will begin serving immediately.

Members of the council have still expressed no clear favorite.

“If I had to guess, I’d say that more council members may be leaning towards an interim choice. I’m not, but it’s the sense I get,” Marci Dodds, District 4 council member, said.

The meeting will be a combination of last week’s agenda and a post council study session about the city’s groundwater restriction ordinance, a measure that restricts Champaign residents from drilling private wells.

Champaign County Health Care Consumers has asked the council to revisit and eventually repeal this ordinance.

Claudia Lennhoff, executive director of Health Care Consumers, said she believes the issue is really a city-wide issue because any polluter — a gas station or dry cleaner, or industry — can use this ordinance to avoid the costs of cleaning contaminated groundwater. Lennhoff added that the electric and gas company, Ameren Illinois, is one of the biggest examples of this.

“This is a sham ordinance, and it allows corporations to walk away without cleaning up after themselves,” Lennhoff said.

Lennhoff also pointed to a different ordinance that repeals citizens from drilling wells, but she said it is really a non-issue anyways.

Champaign County Health Care Consumers held a press conference with a group of hired consultants Monday afternoon. They released information on an ongoing investigation of a pipe they believe had been used for dumping tar.

Lennhoff said her organization tested six Champaign homes around the Fifth and Hill area, the former site for an Ameren coal gasification plant, for vapor intrusion and any groundwater that could carry toxic chemicals. They all came back positive.

“Within about three blocks of Ameren property we found a chemical that isn’t naturally produced from samples underneath these homes,” Lennhoff said.

Dodds was a part of the council that initially approved the ordinance and called the recent findings an “unexpected ramification.”

“We did not have intentions of letting a corporate polluter of the hook, which is why we were fine with re-opening this ordinance for discussion,” Dodds said.

The city council will convene at 7 p.m. at Champaign City Hall, 102 N. Neil St.