Daily Archives: May 20, 2006

City Council, City of Peoria

Ardis: Status quo is not acceptable; Peoria must become more business-friendly

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Peoria has a reputation for not being especially business-friendly, but Mayor Ardis wants to change that. He’s proposing the city implement nineteen specific changes and/or improvements in a six-page Business Task Force Report (read it here) that was placed on the council agenda for Tuesday. The report was a collaborative effort with Third District Councilman Bob Manning, Fifth District Councilman Patrick Nichting, and local businessman Lee Graves.

The changes are placed under four major categories, or action items:

  1. Better information and communication regarding the development process.
  2. Reduced time frames for permits and zoning certificates.
  3. Changes in codes and/or policies that will facilitate development and redevelopment.
  4. Customer service and friendly, helpful attitude is a priority and goal for all city employees and departments.

Some of the highlights of the plan: The city is working to develop a “Developer’s Handbook” that would be “a guide to assist customers in the development process, containing regulations, processes, and policies related to development approval.” They would publish it in hard copy and also digital form, presumably to put on the city’s and/or Chamber of Commerce’s website. The goal is to have this project done by September this year.

The report also calls for “a complete rewrite of the city’s comprehensive plan.” This plan hasn’t been updated since 1992. The first phase of that rewrite is happening this weekend — the development of a form-based code for the Heart of Peoria. The rest of the comprehensive plan is tentatively scheduled to be completed by January 2008. That may sound like a long time, but if you’ve ever seen the comprehensive plan (it’s huge), you know that’s a pretty ambitious goal.

City employees would receive customer service training under this plan in order to improve their attitude and professionalism in dealing with city customers. I’ve never had to work with the departments a developer would need to consult, so I can’t comment on their attitude or professionalism. However, the city employees I have dealt with, both in the treasurer’s office and the city clerk’s office, have all been friendly, helpful, and professional.

There are also several items that involve regularly-scheduled meetings between different departments to improve communication, and several very specific items that were undoubtedly brought up by developers as being pet peeves of theirs when working with the city. Many items have already been completed. My favorite is item 2A: they reduced the time it takes to get residential building permits from one day to one hour. Now that’s process improvement!

This is a big step in the right direction. Peoria should be more business-friendly, and this document shows the city is aware of the problem and working to correct it. Kudos to the Business Task Force for their work on this plan.

City Council, City of Peoria, Parking

Free riverfront parking on the council’s agenda

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You may soon be able to park two hours for free — during the day — at the city-owned lots along the riverfront.

On the city council agenda this coming Tuesday is a proposal to change the way fees are charged for the Michel/Edgewater/Liberty and Riverfront Village parking lots. Currently, these lots are staffed during the day with parking attendants and you pay a set rate for every half hour you’re parked weekdays during working hours.

Under the proposed fee structure, there would be no gates or attendants and you would be allowed two hours of free parking at these lots weekdays during working hours. If you parked longer than two hours, you would get a parking ticket. (Incidentally, if you don’t pay your parking ticket, the city approved an ordinance at their last meeting that authorizes the city to send unpaid parking tickets to a collection agency instead of through the courts.)

The Peoria Riverfront Association requested the parking fee change as a way to increase patronage of riverfront businesses and save the city money. The city incurred a net loss of $2,235 in 2005 because the cost of staffing full-time attendants exceeded revenues from parking fees. Much of the revenue comes from businesses who pay for their customers’ parking through ticket validation.

The city would enforce the two-hour limit by having a part-time city employee monitor the lots using a handheld license plate scanner from ParkTrak which basically allows the monitor to do “electronic tire chalking.” Barney Fife would have loved this gadget:

With ParkTrak Pro’s handheld License Plate Recognition technology, a flick of the chalkstick is turned into a click of the trigger. Each click records plate, date, time, and location, while simultaneously comparing duration of stay, distance moved (if any), and scofflaw status. Officers are automatically prompted to issue a ticket when a vehicle reaches overtime status. Flexible software allows for an individual license number’s total time duration to be calculated by stall, block face, street, programmable distance or zones. Added benefits include capturing a wealth of parker statistical data, and best of all electronic chalk marks… THAT CAN’T BE WIPED AWAY…

But before you get too excited about that free two-hour parking, it’s only being proposed on a one-year trial basis, so it may not last long. In any case, it will be done away with when the new museum is built. City Manager Randy Oliver says, “This is a short term solution and will not work upon completion of the Museum project.”

City of Peoria, Heart of Peoria Plan

Studio H.O.P.: Open government at work

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Recently, Peorians have been up in arms about some decisions that were made by a certain government body without adequate input from the citizens. It made us feel left out, undervalued, like our opinion doesn’t matter about issues that affect us and our neighborhoods.

Well, if you felt that way, then you need to be at these “Studio H.O.P.” charrettes this weekend. The city council and staff are going out of their way to show you that they do value you, they want your opinion, and they want you to have a say in something that will directly affect you.

The charrette (or “citizen collaboration,” for those of you who don’t like French words) process is “to focus and record the political will of the citizens,” according to consultants Geoffrey Ferrell and Mary Madden who kicked off the Studio H.O.P. charrettes tonight (5/19) at the Civic Center. To successfully determine the “political will of the citizens,” they need as many citizens as possible to be there — to collaborate on this project.

What’s taking place this weekend is nothing less than a rewriting of the city’s comprehensive plan for the Heart of Peoria (roughly defined as the area of the city south of War Memorial Drive — think of it as the pre-Richwoods-Township-annexation area). The city will essentially be throwing out the Euclidian zoning laws which require strict segregation of commercial and residential land uses, and replacing them with something called “form-based codes.”

One website defines form-based codes as “a land development regulatory tool that places primary emphasis on the physical form of the built environment with the end goal of producing a specific type of ‘place.'” What the charrettes try to determine is just what type of “place” Peorians want to have, and then codify those desires into a regulatory document.

The charrettes will cover the entire Heart of Peoria area, but will give special emphasis to the Sheridan/Loucks triangle, the Prospect Road corridor, and the Warehouse District.

All they really want to know is how you want Peoria to look. How do you want the streets to look? The blocks? The neighborhoods? The special places? There will be a lot of ideas generated, and undoubtedly some contradictory ideas — they all get considered. When the idea gathering is done, the consultants will try to synthesize the ideas as much as possible, although there will obviously need to be some compromise on the most divergent ideas.

In the end, we’ll have a code that tells homeowners, developers, et al., what kind of physical form we want in our neighborhoods and business districts so that when they are developed and built out, they maintain the character and consistency we enjoy and expect.

And you have the opportunity to have a voice in writing this code. If you can make it, even for part of the day, it will be well worth your time to attend. The charrette goes from 8:30-Noon on Saturday, May 20.