Daily Archives: June 16, 2011

City of Peoria

Starting over? Come to Peoria

19 Comments

According to MSN Real Estate, Peoria is one of the ten best places for starting over; i.e., Peoria is one of “10 midsize to large cities with the best job prospects and most affordable mortgage payments.” The list is:

  1. Scranton-Wilkes-Barre, Pa.
  2. Beaumont-Port Arthur, Texas
  3. Kalamazoo-Portage, Mich.
  4. Rochester, N.Y.
  5. Oklahoma City
  6. Peoria, Ill.
  7. Little Rock-North Little Rock-Conway, Ark.
  8. Kingsport-Bristol, Tenn.-Bristol, Va.
  9. Columbus, Ohio
  10. Fort Wayne, Ind.

Here’s what they had to say about our fair city:

Employment gains in Peoria are setting it apart from some of its Midwest rivals. The city is working to grow small businesses with a technology incubator that opened in 2007.

A new entertainment project, The Block, with an interdisciplinary museum, theater, planetarium and The Caterpillar Experience will open along the downtown riverfront in the fall of 2012.

With an average home price of just $140,666, residents here can afford to take in all that the city has to offer on the weekends.

I think it’s interesting that they didn’t mention (for example) the recently-expanded Civic Center, which we have, but did mention “The Block,” which won’t be opening for more than a year. Regardless of what I think about the museum, this write-up makes Peoria sound like it doesn’t have much in the way of entertainment — and won’t until next fall. Why not highlight some of the amenities we already have?

Hat tip: homemade and happy

Census 2010, City Council, City of Peoria, Redistricting

City redistricting maps released

9 Comments

City staff has created nine options for new Peoria City Council districts. You can see all the proposed maps in the Redistricting Committee June 21 meeting packet from the City’s website. I’ve also put a copy of the maps on my site here:

6-21-2011 Redistricting Maps

Several different scenarios are included: columnar districts (north to south), layered districts (east to west), drawn-out-from-center districts, and districts expanded from current boundaries (there are several of these). All of them have one thing in common: the fifth district gets smaller and the other four districts get bigger.

There’s also an interesting memo from Randy Ray at the end of the packet that details what the process would be for changing the number of districts and council members, and eliminating cumulative voting for at-large council members. The City’s current system of government (five at-large council members elected by cumulative voting plus five district council members) was established as the result of a civil rights lawsuit in the 1980s, so any change to this system would have to be approved by the federal court that decided that case. In addition, state law requires that changes to the system of government be approved by the voters via referendum. So the process would be this: A public referendum would have to be drafted and approved first by the federal court and then the voters. In order to have enough time to comply with redistricting requirements, the decision would have to be made this year (2011) on whether they wanted to try to make these changes. It will be interesting to hear the discussion on this possibility at the next meeting.

The next meeting of the redistricting committee is Tuesday, June 21, at 5:30 p.m. in Council Chambers.