Daily Archives: July 3, 2007

Kellar Branch

Oh my Darling, oh my Darling, oh my Darling, CIRY

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Kellar Branch RailroadBack in February, former mayor Dick Carver came to Peoria (at taxpayer expense) to talk about options for the future of the Kellar Branch, including which railroad company would be the better rail carrier: Pioneer Industrial Railroad or Central Illinois Railroad Company. The president and general counsel for Pioneer showed up at the meetings, but no one from Central Illinois Rail bothered to make the trek down from Granville, Illinois. I also addressed the council at the time with what I thought was a well-reasoned argument in favor of the rail carrier who had provided better, safer service (Pioneer).

Nevertheless, the City chose Central Illinois Railroad, in no small part because of Dick Carver’s comments. One comment in particular (summarized below from the Feb. 13 council minutes) was especially swaying to the council:

Mr. Carver said he felt that Mr. John Darling, President of Central Illinois Rail Company, had a good relationship with the Union Pacific Railroad. He said Mr. Darling committed himself to making service more reliable, and more frequent, with a reasonable cost.

You see, without the Kellar Branch in operation, the western connection is only accessible from the Union Pacific line, so a good working relationship with UP (among other things) is essential if shippers on the western connection are ever going to get something close to a competitive rate.

John Darling, President of Central Illinois Rail, was the man of the hour that night, even though he wasn’t there at the meeting. Dick Carver talked him up, explained what a great working relationship the guy had with UP, etc. He wouldn’t come right out and say that Darling/CIRY was a better choice than Pioneer, but he might as well have. The implication was clear. So the council voted to get a contract with CIRY based on that recommendation and the promise of John Darling.

Fast-forward five months: The city is still unable to reach an agreement on a new contract with CIRY, and guess what? John Darling is no longer the president of Central Illinois Railroad. Randy Ray informed at least one councilman today, “Mr. Darling has left. Their new Chief Operating Officer is Jack Stolarczyk.”

Now that their pretense for choosing CIRY over Pioneer (Darling) is “lost and gone forever,” will they say “dreadful sorry, CIRY” and drop them in favor of Pioneer?

I think we all know the answer to that.

CityLink

Park ‘n Ride into the past, I guess

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I thought I might ride CityLink’s Park ‘n Ride service to see the fireworks at Glen Oak Park tonight. My wife and I did that last year and it seemed to work relatively well. So I wanted to get some info on where they would be picking up people and how much the fares were.

First stop, the website:

Park and Ride

If you can’t read it, it says this:

Park-N-Ride Services Hotline
Call 679-8333 For Recorded Schedules, updated regularly

There are no June Park & Ride and Special Events

Please check back to see more upcoming events in July

Okay, so their website is a little out of date. I’ll try calling the hotline. I kid you not, this is the entire recording, verbatim, recorded by me today, July 3, 2007, at 6:00 p.m.:

[audio:http://peoriachronicle.com/wp-content/uploads/Audio/CityLink1.mp3]

Wow, thanks CityLink for your “regularly updated” Park ‘n Ride hotline! Now I know just where and when to catch the bus for events that happened in November and December of last year! Just one more thing, where do I find your time machine?

I think it’s funny that the telephone “hotline” is even more out of date than the website. And it’s even funnier that the recording cuts off at the end — indicating to me that even when this was originally recorded, it was only marginally helpful.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any more comical, I tried pressing “0” for an operator. Guess what?

[audio:http://peoriachronicle.com/wp-content/uploads/Audio/CityLink2.mp3]

Looks like we’ll be driving.

Museum Block

More details come out about museum changes

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Jennifer Davis has been doing some digging and came up with these specific changes:

…shrinking the building by about 15,000 square feet and doing away with both the reflecting pool and the large metal sphere enclosed in glass, which held the planetarium. Further, though it will look like a two-story building in places, the second floor will house mechanicals and no longer be accessible to visitors. The retail space along Water Street also will be put off for now. The planetarium still will exist, but in a silo-looking structure.

The City Council should shoot this down with both barrels. As far as I’m concerned, the museum group has proven that this cannot be a successful venture at its current size, and I don’t mean just the size of the building. I also mean the size of the project (combining multiple museums into one in an ever-decreasing space) and the size of the land (taking all that prime real estate away from public development that would produce tax revenue for the city for an 80,000 square foot building).

If the museum group wants to continue to try to stuff five or six museums/halls-of-fame into an 80,000-square-foot building, I suppose that’s their prerogative. But there’s no way the council should allow them to continue squatting on two-thirds of the former Sears block to do it. Give them a smaller portion of the block, and open the rest of it to private development — preferably a mix of retail and residential, in keeping with the principles of New Urbanism.