I had a strange sense of deja vu last night.
I attended an open house meeting Wednesday at the Gateway Building to look at plans for Washington and Adams Streets (Route 24) from I-474 to Hamilton Blvd. There were lots of artist’s renderings of how it could look in the future, with wider sidewalks, on-street parking, street trees, shorter crossing distances for pedestrians, etc. But I got the distinct feeling I’d been through this exercise before.
Oh, that’s right — I have. I remember seeing the same thing at the Sheridan Triangle open house meetings. I see a pattern emerging here. The city gets finished with the feasibility study for these projects, then they don’t appropriate money for the engineering or construction of them, so they wither on the vine.
There’s $10 million in state construction money earmarked and set aside for Peoria to use. This was money that was secured years ago to move the S-curve where Adams and Jefferson meet north of downtown. That project never materialized either, so now the money is available for another project. But no one’s tapping into it.
Instead, lack of money is cited as the problem for pushing off these projects. Improvements to Main Street were put on the back burner by second district council member Barbara Van Auken because it’s estimated to cost $10 million. And in November of last year, the council decided to delay five large capital projects — including the Sheridan Triangle redevelopment — until some time in the future when they might possibly issue bonds to pay for them. No word on when that will show up on the agenda.
Meanwhile, the council has had no problem finding money or issuing bonds to give $39.5 million to a private hotel developer. Nor have they had any trouble spending $55 million overbuilding the Peoria Civic Center. There’s plenty of money to go around for non-necessities — and taxes imposed to pay for them. And these deals get through the council lickety-split.
So the problem isn’t money. It’s priorities.