Community announcements and Chronicle hiatus

It’s just about December, and that means that work duties will be dominating my time. You may remember from last year that each December the church where I work (Grace Presbyterian) puts on a big Christmas concert called “Grace Family Christmas,” and I spend the time between the actual concerts (Nov. 30-Dec. 3) and Christmas Eve editing the concert footage to show on WEEK, channel 25, at 10:30 p.m. Christmas Eve and 12:00 p.m. (noon) Christmas Day. That takes up so much of my time that any free time I have outside of that I spend with my family, and that leaves no time for blogging.

Some things that are upcoming that I want to remind everyone about:

  • Tuesday night (11/28) at the council meeting, the Heart of Peoria Commission will be presenting their position paper on the Glen Oak School siting issue.
  • The next two Wednesday nights (11/29 and 12/6) are the last two public hearings scheduled for 2006 on the Land Development Code for the Heart of Peoria area.
  • Dec. 13 is the Park Board meeting where they will be discussing whether or not to enter into an intergovernmental agreement with the school district to allow them to share Glen Oak Park land for a new school building.

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I’d just like to say once again how much I appreciate you, the readers of this blog. And a special thanks to those of you who take the time to comment — whether it’s to encourage me, disagree with me, or offer constructive criticism, or whatever. The best part of the blog, for me, is the feedback I get and the discussions we have.

I hope you all have a very merry Christmas and I’ll see if I can’t squeeze in some time to post a couple times this month. You know how it goes… If there’s some big local news story (say, if the STB hands down a decision on the Kellar Branch between now and Christmas), I won’t be able to contain myself and I’ll have to put something on the blog about it. But other than that, it will be pretty quiet around the Chronicle until after Christmas. While I’m out, please check out the other fine blogs that I have listed on the sidebar.

Happy holidays, everyone!
C. J. Summers

Late to The Office party

Office CastYes, I know it’s in its third season and it’s won an Emmy, but I had never seen an episode of NBC’s comedy show “The Office” until about a week ago. And now I’m addicted to it.

It’s not that friends hadn’t told me about it before. The lead singer of my old band even told me about it once — said it reminded him of when we used to work together for the same company. It does. But I just never got around to watching it until another one of my friends sat me down and made me watch an episode. Well, that was all it took. I had to see them all, then.

It is hilarious! If anyone is looking for a Christmas gift to get me this year, seasons 1 & 2 are out on DVD. The pranks that Jim plays on Dwight are classic. My favorite is the one where he put all of Dwight’s office supplies in the vending machine and then gave him a sack full of nickels so he could get them back. And, of course, how can anyone not love watching the beautiful Jenna Fischer?

Jenna Fischer

In terms of productivity, “The Office” reminds me most of my time at now-defunct Foster & Gallagher. I worked in the customer service department for their Magazine Marketplace division back in the late 80s and early 90s. I would answer letters and phone calls from people who bought magazines thinking it would increase their chances of winning the big sweepstakes, then cancel them when they didn’t win. I have a list of about 50 different ways our customers spelled the word “cancel.” Most common misspelling: “cancle.”

Well, F&G wasn’t doing real well, and often we would have stretches when very few people contacted us. But they didn’t lay us off during those times, so we had a lot of free time on our hands. The customer service department operated on a team concept. There were two or three (can’t remember now) suites of six agents, plus a team leader and assistant team leader. One Christmas when we were especially slow (and by that, I mean absolutely no one called or wrote us practically the whole month of December), our team decided to decorate our suite as Whoville, and we’d all dress up as Whos. Our team leader was the Grinch, and our assistant team leader was his dog.

We were very productive. We made banners, played the soundtrack to the show on a portable tape deck, brought in lots of treats — including green Rice Krispie treats. I think I have a picture of it somewhere. Hard to believe we actually got paid for that… although we didn’t get paid much, come to think of it.

“The Office” is on NBC Thursday nights at 7:30 CT.

An interesting take on annexation

We always hear that annexation is good for the city because it’s “capturing” the growth just outside municipal borders. But there’s another hypothesis out there as to why municipal employees might be so gung-ho for more annexation — higher wages.

In an article originally published in 1987 for the journal “Public Choice,” Rodolfo A. Gonzalez (Department of Economics, University of California, Davis) and Stephen L. Mehay (Department of Administrative Science, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey) concluded the following (emphasis mine):

We hypothesized that extending municipal boundaries will have a positive effect on discretionary outlays and on expenditures per capita. The evidence presented supports these hypotheses. Furthermore, municipal wages appear to be significantly increased in cities experiencing annexation growth. Therefore, we would expect to find that municipal employees are more inclined to favor annexation than the rest of the electorate. From a policy standpoint, this study suggests that significant perverse effects on fiscal efficiency may follow adoption of legal reforms that facilitate the ability of municipalities to extend their borders, or that restrict the formation of new municipalities.

The name of the article is “Municipal annexation and local monopoly power,” and if I had $30 to spare, I’d download and read the whole thing just so I could see how they came to such conclusions. But I found the abstract alone to be thought-provoking. One wonders whether there truly is a correlation here, or if these findings are simply raw cynicism.

Heart of Peoria Commission takes a position on school siting

Jennifer Davis has a great article on yesterday’s Heart of Peoria Commission meeting. She even quotes me:

Commissioner C.J. Summers noted, “The Heart of Peoria plan says our schools are perfectly located where they are now.”

Another key concern of the commission is the fear that District 150 has not fully examined whether the current school, built in 1889, can be renovated and expanded.

“By their own admission, they haven’t done a study to see if the building can be reused,” Summers said.

Just to clarify and back up those assertions, I wanted to point out that on page II.5 of the Heart of Peoria Plan, it says this (emphasis mine):

The school buildings sprinkled throughout the study area were one of the first features noted by the charrette team. The buildings are not only beautiful, but well located from the standpoint of maintaining the neighborhood structure of the city. This makes the city’s schools even more important as components of Peoria’s neighborhoods.

And on page V.15, it reiterates this point:

Finding: Peoria has maintained an architectural legacy of attractive brick school buildings, well located in its inner city neighborhoods.

So it’s indisputable that Duany Plater-Zyberk — the consultants who wrote the HOP plan — felt that Peoria’s school buildings were well-located, and that their location was an asset in our older neighborhoods.

Why is this important? Because not too long ago, the school board took out of context a book co-written by Duany (“The New Civic Art,” 2003) in which he states that “edge-schools” (those built on the edge of a neighborhood) are a good idea. Of course, the context of that recommendation was completely different than Peoria’s context. There, Duany was saying that a school placed on the edge of adjacent neighborhoods would be the best place for the school to serve both neighborhoods.

In Peoria’s case, the most compelling argument for keeping the school at the current Glen Oak School site is this picture, which was also printed in the Journal Star article (click on the picture to view the very large JPG image):

Glen Oak School attenance area

The red boundary is the attendance area; the blue dot is the current Glen Oak School site; the yellow dot is the approximate location of the proposed replacement school for the Woodruff attendance area on the edge of Glen Oak Park. The circles around each site represent 1/4-mile and 1/2-mile radii from each location. As you can see, the current Glen Oak School site is perfectly centered in the neighborhood, allowing easy accessibility and walkability for the entire attendance area. The proposed site would make it within better walking distance of the animals at the zoo, but longer commute times for the children; in fact, it would lead to increased busing or other motor transportation.

As for my other comment that they “haven’t done a study to see if the building can be reused,” I’m referring to Ken Hinton’s admission in the 9/25/06 Journal Star “Word on the Street” column where they reported, “according to Hinton himself, the district only did a preliminary review of whether the school could cost-effectively be renovated. ‘Glen Oak had a preliminary one, but not a final one,’ Hinton said Friday.”

Once the Commission’s position paper is finalized and submitted to the City, I’ll post a copy of it here for everyone to read.

UPDATE: Here it is (1.45 MB PDF file).

Peoria police response to exposé unacceptable

I’m with Scott Janz on this one. The WHOI (channel 19) news team recently did an exposé on child sex offenders who were living within 500 feet of Peoria area schools.

In Illinois, it’s illegal for child sex offenders to live within 500 feet of schools. The only exception is if the offender owned the home before the summer of 2000.

WHOI checked public records of sex offenders’ addresses in Peoria, East Peoria, Washington, and even Bloomington to see if they were complying with the law. They didn’t find any violators in Washington. The violations they found in East Peoria and Bloomington were dealt with quickly:

Two hours afters after [East Peoria Police Chief Ed] Papis learned of our findings, he sent out two officers. A man found to be living about 450 feet from an elementary school was put on notice. He now has a month to move.

Bloomington police have given a child sex offender there fourteen days.

Yet, WHOI found seven sex offenders living within 500 feet of District 150 schools. The response they got from the Peoria Police Department? Ho-hum:

“Originally it is the offenders responsibility to find some place to live that is within the legal boundaries, so they have to take some responsibility themselves,” said [Peoria Police Department spokesperson] Ann Ruggles. […]

When asked if the spokeswoman thought the department did enough, she responded: “Yeah, I do. With the personnel that we have at this point, but I don’t know what else basically we could do. I’m sure you’ve told me and I’m sure there are people out there who are in violation.” […]

“We will check those out, but the person, the convicted person should take responsibility, too. If we go out and they are found to be not compliant, then they will have to suffer the consequences,” said Ruggles.

I think we’re all aware that it is each person’s individual responsibility to obey the law, but thanks for reminding us, Ms. Ruggles. As far as your department doing enough “with the personnel that [you] have at this point,” I beg to differ. You have seven sex offenders living within 500 feet of District 150 schools. I submit to you that that fact proves your department is clearly not doing enough.

Martha Hammer is reported as being “the woman over Peoria’s sex offender registration.” So, they’re already telling you their address — how much extra time would it take to type that into the computer and see how close it is to a school? How about taking a couple officers off the seat-belt violation beat and having them work on keeping sex offenders away from children?

It is outrageous for the Peoria Police spokeswoman to shrug her shoulders and say the department is doing all it can. In a city with eight unsolved murders yet this year, this latest scandal further deteriorates our lack of confidence in the Police to enforce public safety. Take a cue from East Peoria and send officers out to address this immediately if you haven’t done so already, and then tell people what action you’ve taken.

Gerrymandering won’t be easy to reverse

I left the League of Women Voters meeting Saturday morning a little less hopeful than when I arrived. It’s not going to be easy to change minds in Springfield about the way the legislative districts are drawn. The meeting was dedicated to exploring ways we can make the districts contiguous and compact (as the Illinois Constitution demands), unlike they are now:

The suggested action plan, as proposed by former city councilman Bruce Brown, was to “let the sun shine in.” That may not sound like much, but the fact is that most people don’t realize just how ridiculous our districts are, and when they see them for the first time, they can hardly believe it. Brown mentioned that in Iowa, where their districts are now determined by an independent Legislative Support Bureau, agitation for change began with the Des Moines Register newspaper and some concerned citizens. He also cited the increased scrutiny congressional earmarks have been getting since that process was exposed. We need to get as many people and groups as possible to see the outrageousness of the current Illinois districts, and then get those people and groups to write their legislators demanding change. If enough constituents put pressure on them, legislators will respond.

Perhaps more difficult, but more importantly, we need to hold those legislators accountable. The reason these gerrymandered districts work, as Jim Thomas pointed out, is because our voting habits are so predictable. To have real change, we’re going to have stop rewarding gerrymandering politicians with our votes.

Another possibility, but one the League seemed loathe to attempt, is to vote for a constitutional convention for Illinois in 2008. The question of whether a constitutional convention should be called must appear on the ballot at least once every 20 years, according to the Illinois Constitution. The last time a constitutional convention was on the ballot was 1988, when it was soundly defeated (only 19% voted for it). The problem with a convention is that the whole Illinois Constitution is then up for grabs, and the League members fear that Illinoisans may lose more than they gain. Call it a healthy fear of the law of unintended consequences.

The legislative map is redrawn every ten years following the census, so the next scheduled redistricting will be voted on in 2011 and take effect in 2012. Unless anyone has a better idea, I say we get the word out and start putting as much pressure on our legislators as possible.

Should government get out of the education business?

Here’s an article sure to get you thinking. It’s called “Enterprising Education: Doing Away with the Public School System” (PDF file), by Andrew Young and Walter Block. Here’s their summary of their argument:

We critically examine the accepted notion that primary education is a legitimate and necessary function of the state. The notion is based upon three tenets: 1) public education is a necessary condition for democracy, 2) the market will not provide equal access and quality of education to all, and 3) education represents an external economy. Each tenet is addressed and evaluated according to its merits. In doing so, we also contrast the fulfillment of the ends implicit in the tenets under state and market provisions. We conclude that the state provision of primary education cannot be justified by these goals, and that market provision is a preferable alternative.

That’s right. They argue that government should get completely out of the schooling business. They don’t consider half-measures like District 150’s contract with Edison Schools a truly free-market solution. In their opinion, all government involvement in education should be completely eliminated and free market allowed to reign supreme.

Shocking? Brilliant? Absurd? I would encourage you to read the whole article before passing judgment on it. I will say that I think they make some excellent points, even if I don’t agree with their ultimate conclusion. But before positing details of my own opinion, I’d like to hear what my readers think of Young & Block’s article.

I love articles like this that challenge fundamental assumptions. Be honest; have you ever heard anyone seriously argue against public education? I hadn’t. I think that going back to square one, so to speak, can help us clarify our thinking about public education and maybe even lead to some novel solutions to its challenges.