Daily Archives: January 3, 2010

Peoria Journal Star

Journal Star gets a little smaller

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Sunday’s Journal Star brings news of “a few changes.” There’s no longer a separate business section in Sunday’s paper, so they’ve moved Paul Gordon’s column into section A and axed the Wall Street Journal content. In the comics section, they’re discontinuing “Hi & Lois,” “Hagar the Horrible,” “Prince Valiant,” and “Comics for Kids,” all of which produce new strips every week. They’re keeping the “Peanuts” reruns from the 80s, though. With the elimination of the KidzBuzz page, that cuts the comics section to four pages.

They’re also discontinuing the “Faith & Values” page, the “Pet World” column by Steve Dale, and Joan Lloyd’s column. Lloyd’s column will be replaced with a column called “Shoestring Living” (apropos, don’t you think?) by Chicago freelance writer Molly Logan Anderson.

Subscription rates were raised in October, and just last month the paper laid off 11 employees including Sports editor Bill Liesse, Statehouse bureau reporter Adriana Colindres, and State editor Lisa Coon. Now they’re cutting a little more content, probably to save on newsprint costs.

2010 Election, General News

Chicago Tribune wants a revolution

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The editors of the Chicago Tribune have an interesting take on why we keep electing the same leaders in Illinois:

Evidently, it’s Stockholm syndrome, the tendency of some hostages to bond with their captors. How else to explain Illinoisans’ habit of re-electing lawmakers who chronically spend and borrow billions more than taxpayers supply? The result: huge debts and unfunded obligations that will make this an unaffordable state for employers and workers to build a future.

They want us to snap out of it and clean house in the next election. And they’re running a series of editorials aimed at convincing voters to do just that. The first one — “A call to arms” — ran last Sunday, December 27. Today’s editorial is “Splurge. Borrow. Repeat.” While they’re obviously talking about state government, I think this can be applied to other levels of government as well — specifically in regards to fiscal irresponsibility:

If you enjoy the political culture as is — with the next corruption scandal never far off and with your public officials borrowing future generations into penury in order to prop up today’s treacherously uncontrolled spending — then you should support candidates who’ll protect the status quo. If, however, the failure of too many politicians to make urgently needed reforms infuriates you, then reach for a broom.

We hope you’re among the millions who are infuriated. And we hope you’ll reach for that broom.

Politicians at all levels of government are addicted to debt. The City of Peoria paid almost 11 cents of every dollar toward debt service in 2009 — a percentage that will go up in 2010 as the city cuts operational costs while simultaneously taking on more long-term debt. The next City Council election is in 2011 when all the at-large council representatives come up for reelection.

Pantagraph, Peoria Journal Star

Pantagraph fed up with offensive comments

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The Bloomington Pantagraph has disabled the comments section of their site all weekend because of rampant incivility and personal attacks. In a letter to their readers originally posted December 30, 2009, editor Mark Pickering stated that comments have too often been “offensive and devoid of civility, the worst of which include personal attacks and/or assertions that have nothing to do with the story.”

The ban on commenting over the weekend is intended to be a “cooling off period” and a wake-up call to readers, reminding them “that the reason comments are allowed in the first place is to foster a ‘spirit of community involvement and conversation.'” The comments sections will be turned back on January 4, 2010. Pickering warns, however, “Continued abuse of our standards could lead to further restrictions.”

This once again begs the question: Should newspapers allow comments in the first place? The argument has been made by many that they shouldn’t (here’s one excellent treatment). I tend to agree. Let blogs be blogs, and newspapers be newspapers. The comments on the Journal Star’s website are often just as bad as the Pantagraph’s; I don’t believe it would be any kind of loss if they removed the comments section entirely.

Speaking of the Journal Star: I find it funny that they simply printed the Associated Press report of the Pantagraph’s decision instead of writing an original report on it. I guess when you’re short-staffed, AP coverage of local stories is a godsend.

General News

Novel idea: Accountable development

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The Associated Press has published an article (sent to me by alert reader and frequent commenter “anp”) about how municipalities are starting to hold companies more accountable for the tax incentives they take.

As the economy sputters along, municipalities struggling to fix roads, fund schools and pay bills increasingly are rescinding tax abatements to companies that don’t hire enough workers, that lay them off or that close up shop. At the same time, they’re sharpening new incentive deals, leaving no doubt what is expected of companies and what will happen if they don’t deliver.

They call these “clawback” (or “recapture”) provisions, and such a provision sure would have come in handy had it been written into the MidTown Plaza agreement. Instead, Peoria gave away the store and is left holding the bag. A recent Journal Star article states that MidTown Tax Increment Financing (TIF) district “has an annual $351,000 bill but doesn’t bring in the property and sales tax revenue to cover expenses.”

The AP article gives several examples of successful clawback provisions in other cities. Here’s one:

[In DeKalb, Ill.,] Target Corp. got abatements from the city, county, school district and other taxing bodies after promising at least 500 jobs at a local distribution center.

So when the company came up 66 workers short in 2009, Target got word its next tax bill would be jumping almost $600,000 — more than half of which goes to the local school district, where teachers and programs have been cut as coffers dried up.

Even better news is that there is no evidence that these kinds of provisions “scare off other employers,” according to Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First. Incidentally, the website for Good Jobs First is fantastic. If you do nothing else, read A Beginner’s Guide to Accountable Development.

This is an idea whose time has come. If DeKalb can do it, so can Peoria. If it’s good enough for Target, it should be good enough for local developers here in the river city. We should all demand of our council representatives that recapture provisions be written into any new developer subsidies; in fact, it should be boilerplate language. There’s no excuse for taxpayers shouldering all the risk while developers reap all the rewards of sweetheart economic development incentives.

Books, Business

Waldenbooks in Peoria to close this month

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Waldenbooks in Peoria's Northwoods MallWaldenbooks in Northwoods Mall is closing for good this month.

Waldenbooks’ parent company Borders Group, Inc., released a statement in November 2009 that it would be closing 200 Waldenbooks stores this month in order to improve the chain’s profitability. Borders Group, headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, lost $39 million the third quarter of 2009. Border Group CEO Ron Marshall explained, “Through this right-sizing, we will reduce the number of stores with operating losses, reduce our overall rent expense and lease-adjusted leverage and generate cash flow through sales and working capital reductions.”

Also closing this month are Waldenbooks stores in Aurora, Calumet City, Danville, Gurnee, Joliet, Lincolnwood, Marion, and Sterling. The Waldenbooks in Galesburg closed a year ago this month. The Borders superstore in the Shoppes at Grand Prairie is unaffected.

The history of Waldenbooks in a nutshell: In 1933, Lawrence W. Holt and Melvin T. Kafka founded a company “they believed would help people cope with the effects of the Depression. Specifically, Holt and Kafka’s new company lent popular books for three cents a day, saving people the cost of purchasing.” This sounds similar to the way we rent movies and video games today. Once cheap paperback books started being published in the 1950s, Kafka retired and Hoyt took over the company. In 1962, the company started opening retail stores — selling books instead of renting them. It was named after the book Walden by Henry David Thoreau. The company was acquired by a retail conglomerate called Carter Hawley Hale in 1969. It was acquired by many other companies over the years, including K-Mart, which also acquired Borders. In 1995, Borders and Waldenbooks initiated a public offering, eventually buying out K-Mart’s ownership interest.

I’m not sure when Waldenbooks opened in Northwoods Mall, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it were an original tenant. It’s been there as long as I can remember. Its departure will leave Northwoods without any bookstore. The mall’s other bookstore, B. Dalton Booksellers, closed several years ago after its parent company, Barnes & Noble, built a superstore in the Glen Hollow shopping center.