No council meeting Tuesday

From Alma Brown, City of Peoria Communications Manager:

Pursuant to Rule 32 of the Council Rules, the Peoria City Council Meeting scheduled for November 17, 2009 is hereby canceled.

The cancellation is due to the City Council’s inability to make budget decisions necessary to close the deficit and bring forward a balanced budget in the absence of specific concession information from our Police Benevolent and AFSCME bargaining units.

The City Council has directed staff to continue meeting with these units in order to reach agreement on the requested concessions.

My sources say that some sort of concessions might be forthcoming from the Police union, thus accounting for the delay in making final budget decisions. Despite the wording in the e-mail, there doesn’t appear to be the same optimism regarding AFSCME. But we’ll see what happens between now and next Tuesday.