Monthly Archives: June 2006

City of Peoria, Traffic

I Hate Driving

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Lester WireIn 1912, Lester Wire invented the first American traffic signal in Salt Lake City, Utah, and driving hasn’t been the same since. In the 1950s, they even invented the interstate highway system just to get away from the cursed devices.

Traffic signals are a large part of why I hate driving. And now that Peoria has them posted just about every 100 feet all over the city, I’m starting to think I could travel faster by bicycle.

Stop. Wait. Wait. Arrow. Wait. Go. Stop. Repeat at every intersection.

Now I know why Chevy came out with the “Sprint” back in the ’80s. No vehicle has been more aptly named for city driving, where sprinting is all you can accomplish between stop lights that are apparently timed to keep traffic travelling an average of 20 mph.

The worst lights of all are the ones that change for no reason. For instance, the light at Knoxville and McDonalds, south of McClure. There may not be anyone there at the light either direction in the middle of the night, but it will change just for the heck of it as a lone car approaches from the north. And there you sit, idling, burning precious fossil fuel while trying to convince yourself it would be wrong to run it, even though there’s no one around to see you.

Stop lights add frustration to an experience that is already maddening because you have to (a) suffer interminable road construction and (b) share the road with other drivers.  Ever seen car commercials from the ’50s, where having a fine automobile on the open road meant freedom, relaxation, and exploration?  Ha!  Maybe when there was only one car per family and all the highways were new that was possible.  Today, it’s not uncommon for a family to have more vehicles than licensed drivers, and of course all the nation’s highways are in a state of perpetual disrepair.  The 1950s’ dream has become the 2000s’ nightmare.

Driving has lost its allure for me.  I would be happy riding the bus to work every day, if I didn’t need my car to run job-related errands all week, and if it didn’t take three times as long as driving.   Occasionally, when my car has been in the shop, I’ve taken the bus to and from work, and despite the extra time it took, I found it very relaxing.  I could read the paper, plan out my day, and not once be concerned about traffic lights or other drivers.

Hmmm…  Read the paper, plan the day, be unconcerned about lights or other drivers — that pretty much sums up what the driver in front of me was doing on my way to work today….

Photo credit: UDOT

City Council, City of Peoria, Peoria Public Schools, Public Building Commission

News flash: Shadid okays PBC bill

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George P. ShadidDuring a presentation about the Public Building Commission at tonight’s City Council meeting, it was revealed that Senator Shadid advised the Governor to approve SB2477, a bill he had previously asked the Governor not to sign pending public input on the site of District 150’s new school building.

“Senate Bill 2477 would allow the Peoria Public Building Commission the temporary authority to enter into construction contracts with Peoria School District 150.”

City of Peoria, Heart of Peoria Plan, Museum Block, Peoria Mayor

Circle the Square

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I just love irony.

A mere four years ago, the city, then led by former mayor Dave Ransburg, brought in Andres Duany to come with a plan to revitalize the Heart of Peoria. Duany’s company, DPZ, came to town and got a lot of public input through the charrette process. What did the public want? Something like this:

Duany museum

Urban density. 24-hour activity. Residential component. New Urbanism. The Heart of Peoria Plan.

What did they get? Here’s the approved site plan:

Museum Square

Not dense. 9-5 activity. No residential component. Suburban. Antithetical to the Heart of Peoria Plan.

The irony part? They want us to help pay for it now.

Mayor Jim Ardis and seven former mayors pledged Monday to use their collective star power to help raise at least $16 million for the new regional museum over the next year…. “This isn’t for a group of mayors who have sort of done their thing; it’s for you,” said former Mayor Jim Maloof…. “The single most important project I see, along with the Civic Center (expansion), is this museum,” [former mayor Bud] Grieves said. “Whether you can give $5, $500 or $500,000, everybody ought to step up to the plate.” (Source: Journal Star)

The Mayor’s Circle will be out and about speaking to individuals, community groups and civic organizations gathering grassroots support for Museum Square. (Source: 1470 WMBD)

Pardon my frank language, but that takes a lot of balls. First they design something that’s almost the exact opposite of what residents want, then are shocked — shocked, I say! — to find that the money isn’t rolling in. What to do? Redesign? Listen to residents? Nah! “Let’s try to gather grassroots support for our design! Clearly the problem is that residents can’t see the wisdom of our plan.”

Not to mention the fact that one reason the cost of construction is so high is due to the unwarranted and expensive underground parking deck they want to build — against the recommendation of the Heart of Peoria Commission.

“It’s for you,” Maloof says. With all due respect, if it were for us, it would look like the Heart of Peoria Plan, not the Cat Visitor Center Plan. I’ll save my money, thanks. We’ll all be supporting this boondoggle through our property taxes soon enough.

UPDATE (6/27/06 8:44pm):  PeoriaIllinoisan has also written an excellent post on this issue.

City of Peoria, Renaissance Park, Southtown

Ren Park plans go south; but setback could be blessing in disguise

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Ren Park LogoNot long ago there was a lot of optimism regarding Renaissance Park, formerly known as the Med-Tech District. Work is still progressing on the PeoriaNEXT Innovation Center, but the next big project that was supposed to land on West Main street has gone south — to Southtown, that is.

A joint venture that includes OSF St. Francis Medical Center, Methodist Medical Center, and RehabCare of St. Louis, considered building their planned long-term acute-care facility in Ren Park. Being on Main just up the hill from the hospitals seemed like a reasonable location, especially since it’s in an area the city is eager to see developed and might be willing to offer some incentives for locating there.

In fact, according to the Journal Star, the city offered “more than $1 million in financial incentives from the city, including $750,000 in property tax abatement over five years and about $300,000 in sales tax abatement.” But despite all that assistance, and even the willingness of the hospitals to pay a little extra to put their hospital on the west bluff, it still wasn’t financially feasible.

Why not? Because some property owners were asking more for their land than the hospitals were willing to pay. Second District Council Member Barbara Van Auken is quoted as saying, “We cannot get in a mode where the bid developments are being held up by extortion.”

That’s pretty strong language, considering this is simply the workings of the free market. Property owners are free to ask whatever price they want for land they own that someone else wants. It’s not like they’re obligated to take the first offer that comes down the pike. From the Journal Star article, it sounds like some of those property owners — maybe the ones with the high asking prices — aren’t all that anxious to sell.

So I don’t blame property owners for wanting to get the best price they can for their property, especially if they don’t really want to move. But it does seem to hamper the city’s strategy for the Ren Park area. The idea was to fill it up with medical and technology companies — either home-grown or relocated — because of its location close to the hospitals and Bradley University. If the property owners aren’t willing to sell, or have asking prices that make the city’s plans unfeasible, isn’t that a bad omen for the future of this area?

That’s what I asked Barbara Van Auken in an e-mail. She responded, “I can only hope that in the future property owners on West Main are more realistic in their financial expectations. If not, obviously development will be much slower than we had hoped.”

Not knowing which properties were at issue, we can only speculate about how slowly West Main will be redeveloped. But considering the size tract the hospitals are trying to purchase in Southtown (more than six acres), I’m going to guess they were asking for a pretty large chunk of land on Main Street as well, and that most property owners were willing to sell, but there were a few strategic properties that were asking a high price.

If that speculation is somewhat accurate, then it may just be that Ren Park is going to be transformed in bite-size pieces instead of large swaths. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If acres of land are taken up with a few large developments, it would make the area less diverse and, thus, less appealing as a new urbanist neighborhood — one of Ren Park’s big selling points.

It could be that this delay in redevelopment is really a blessing in disguise. Maybe instead of one development making a big splash, we’ll see a lot of smaller projects quietly remake the area without the need for a lot of city incentives. I kind of thought that was how it was supposed to work anyway.

Peoria Journal Star

Blogs fill void other city’s newspapers offer

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PJStar.com LogoQ: What does the Journal Star and Vonster have in common?

A: They don’t allow comments on their websites.

Oh, sure, you can e-mail them, and they may or may not choose to publish your response. But their interactivity is limited to a more traditional “we’ll talk to you publicly, and you can talk to us privately” approach.

As I was checking out the news on the Bloomington Pantagraph and Springfield’s State Journal-Register, I noticed that, after each news article, there’s a blog-like comments section where readers can self-publish their responses to the news stories. The Journal Star doesn’t offer this benefit to its readers. I thought perhaps it was a corporate policy, but Springfield’s paper is owned by the same corporation as the Journal Star, Copley Press, Inc.

Well, the good news is that we have a robust blogging community here in Peoria that picks up the Journal Star’s slack. Bill Dennis does an excellent job of picking the most interesting news stories out of the paper each day and publishing them as a regular feature (“Today’s News Budget”) on his Peoria Pundit site.

You’d think the Journal Star would rather see all that reader reaction at their own site where readers would be seeing their advertisements and perhaps clicking around to other articles — maybe even stumbling across the subscription page and deciding to get a hard-copy delivered.

Perhaps they don’t understand the technology well enough to add this functionality to their site. Or maybe they don’t want the hassle of monitoring it to keep it safe for families to read. Or maybe they think blogging is just a fad that will run its course and not worth the jump onto the bandwagon.

Whatever the reason, the Journal Star’s website is the poorer for it. But their loss is our gain, so I’m not complaining.

City of Peoria, Heart of Peoria Plan, Peoria Public Schools

Bad news for New Urbanism

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First there was the Civic Center expansion. Then there was the Peoria Museum and Cat Visitor Center.

Next it will be the new District 150 schools.

What am I talking about? Exceptions to the Heart of Peoria Plan, Peoria’s attempt at New Urbanism.

The City’s Efforts

The city has been working hard to develop a form-based code — you know, the kind of code that regulates the form of the built environment, the kind that says you have to make sure your building fits in with the surrounding architecture, construction materials, and setbacks. It’s actually a great idea that will help preserve the character and appeal of the older neighborhoods.

And the best part is that they sought and obtained a lot of input from the most important people: the residents. They held charrettes and got the input of hundreds of ordinary citizens on the kind of built environment they would prefer in these neighborhoods, even working together to reach consensus on those points on which residents disagreed.

The School Board’s Counter-Efforts

Unfortunately, the school district is not interested in the city’s (or the residents’) efforts to revitalize the older neighborhoods. Garrie Allen said at Monday’s school board meeting, “It’s not our job as a school district to clean up blighted areas… We’re not urban renewal people.” That doesn’t sound especially cooperative. In a recent e-mail to a neighborhood activist, another school board member agreed, stating in an even more adversarial tone, “The Board of Education is charged with doing what is best for students, not for neighborhood groups or community redevelopment.”

The law is on the school board’s side. According to legal experts, the 1965 Illinois Appellate Court decision, “Board of Ed., School Dist. 33, DuPage County v. City of West Chicago” (55 Ill.App.2d 401), set the precedent that school districts are not subject to municipal zoning laws or building codes. That means they can build any kind of building they want in whatever style they want, regardless of the city’s form-based codes.

So, hypothetically, if they wanted to put up a 12-story high-rise on the corner of Wisconsin and Frye, they could. Or if they wanted to set up a group of interconnected yurts, they could do that, too. But what they want to do is build a sprawling, single-story, suburban-style school on a large swath of land in the middle of Peoria’s older neighborhoods — the exact type of structure form-based codes are being created to prevent.

Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Just because the school board has the legal authority to do something doesn’t mean they have to disregard the clear wishes of neighbors. And, contrary to the rhetoric of school board members, they don’t have to compromise educational objectives to cooperate with the city’s revitalization efforts.

In Seattle, Washington, when their Whittier Elementary School was wearing out and needed to be replaced, they built a new structure in 1999 that the principal described as “uplifting, effective, safe, and secure.” The new building was also designed to meet these requirements (see if they look familiar):

  • Enhance teaching and learning and accommodate the needs of all learners.
  • Serve as center of the community.
  • Result from a planning/design process involving all stakeholders.
  • Provide for health, safety, and security.
  • Make effective use of all available resources.
  • Allow for flexibility and adaptability to changing needs.

These are the same objectives for the new “birth through eighth” school that District 150 wants to build, but there’s one big difference: the new Whittier School in Seattle looks like this:

Whittier Seattle

Notice it is brick, has an urban setback, is multi-story, and sits on a mere 2.7 acres. It cost somewhere between $9 million and $13.6 million total to build, according to published reports. Yet despite the small footprint, this school “has won praise and prizes, including a Citation of Excellence from the American School Board Journal and an Exemplary Learning Environment award from the American Institute of Architects.” It’s also a Learning By Design 2000 Citation Winner.

And how about the kids — do they like it? Are their spirits lifted, and does it make them want to learn? “‘From the minute the children walked in here,’ [the principal] says, ‘I knew we had succeeded. They love it, and that tells me we did things right.'”

If Seattle can figure out how to meet their educational objectives while still making their building congruous with the neighborhood on a small site, I’m sure Peoria can do the same…. if the school board is willing to be open-minded, that is.

General News

Mothers who kill

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Just weeks after Karen McCarron suffocated her 3-year-old autistic daughter, a Pekin mother is accused of trying to kill her 4-year-old daughter who suffers from cerebral palsy.

It’s almost impossible to understand what could drive a mother to kill her own child, but there’s an interesting article from a 2002 issue of Slate magazine that tackles the topic. It’s called “When Parents Kill,” by Dahlia Lithwick.

In addition to giving the most common explanations for why parents kill their children (mothers: “because the child is unwanted; out of mercy; as a result of some mental illness in the mother; in retaliation against a spouse; as a result of abuse,” fathers: “because they feel they have lost control over their finances, or their families, or the relationship, or out of revenge for a perceived slight or infidelity”), the article points out an intriguing inequity in punishment for these crimes:

A 1969 study by Dr. Phillip Resnick, the “father” of maternal filicide (the murder of a child by a parent), found that while mothers convicted of murdering their children were hospitalized 68 percent of the time and imprisoned 27 percent of the time, fathers convicted of killing their children were sentenced to prison or executed 72 percent of the time and hospitalized only 14 percent of the time. More recent British studies by P.T. D’Orban support these findings.

The reason for this, the article explains, is that our society still views children as the mother’s property. Since one is considered criminal for destroying someone else’s property but crazy for destroying their own property, mothers who kill their own children are considered mentally ill while fathers who commit the same crime are considered common murderers.

At first, I was taken aback by the use of the word “property” in reference to children. It just kind of makes you bristle, doesn’t it? But use whatever word you want — the fact is that our society recognizes a stronger bond between mother and child than father and child. And thus, we incarcerate/execute fathers for filicide, but hospitalize mothers who commit the same crime.

This bias is reflected in print and television news coverage of these cases. Indeed, we can readily think of McCarron, Susan Smith, and Andrea Yates as high-profile cases. Can you name any cases of fathers killing their children? They don’t get as much attention in the press. When they are covered, they’re treated as any other murder case.

In the cases of McCarron and the Pekin woman, once we find out that the children had/have autism and cerebral palsy, respectively, we immediately assume that the mother must have contemplated this a mercy killing. We want to believe that it wasn’t a wanton act of violence or done for selfish motives, but that it was an attempt — however grievously misguided — to do something altruistic.

Would we feel the same way if the father killed or attempted to kill his child? Maybe. But I think we would be less inhibited to impute nefarious motives to the father.

Despite these inequities and attempts to explain parents’ actions, it will forever remain a mystery to me how a parent could kill his or her own child.

Peoria Public Schools

Bottom line: Hello Glen Oak Park School

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Peoria Public Schools logoSo, what do we make of Monday’s school board meeting?

The long and the short of it is that the school board is really not interested in working out a compromise with the city. This moratorium on property acquisition and meetings with Ray LaHood and the city has all been a farce and a waste of everyone’s time. They either want to locate next to an existing park or force the city to create a new park adjacent to an existing school site. Of course, they know very well the city isn’t going to pay over $5 million to give land to the school district even if they had it to spend. So, that means, thanks to their inflexibility on the arbitrary acreage standards, the new school will be built right where they wanted it all along: in Glen Oak Park.

In essense, they want to create a suburban school environment (one-level building in a sea of green space) in the heart of the city. And they believe, without any solid evidence, that this will improve the educational environment and give our children “the best” instead of “good enough.”

As for specific rebuttals to board members’ concerns:

  • There was a lot of rhetoric about “denying opportunities” to the children and “compromising educational objectives” if they received any less than 15 acres. However, at the very beginning of the meeting, Alicia Butler announced the times and locations of the next two “planning sessions” (i.e., community forums) that would help “determine the programming and space needs” for the new “birth through eighth” schools that will be built. If the programming and space needs haven’t been determined yet, how do they know they need 15 acres?
  • Hinton mentioned he wanted a baseball field and a soccer field… that adds up to about 5 acres. What are the other 10 for?
  • Do these children not have access to a park when school is not in session? To hear the school board members talk, you’d think these kids were prisoners in detention camps, never allowed outside except to attend school. Also, how dense do they think the East Bluff is? It’s not like these kids don’t have any yards at all. I lived on the East Bluff for 11 years and, while it is denser than suburbia, there’s a healthy bit of green space there, thank you very much.
  • I’ve already dealt extensively with the question of ISBE recommendations in a previous post.
  • As for accessibility, did they ever consider putting the children with special needs on the first floor, and the able-bodied children on the upper floor(s)? A sprawling, single-level school will look incongruous in the East Bluff.
  • From Gorenz and Allen, I’d like to know when school improvement and community revitalization became mutually exclusive activities. This is a false dichotomy, and further evidence that the school board isn’t interested in any real dialogue or compromise. The sad truth is, if the school board and city are working against each other, they will both lose.
  • Ken Hinton talked about the psychological effects green space has on children — that it “lifts a child’s spirit” and makes them want to learn! If so, how does he explain the dismal performance of Sterling school, which sits on 26 acres of spirit-lifting green space? Or that students in acreage-deprived Whittier are the fifth best in the district on standardized tests? Anomalies?

The most insulting part of this whole discussion is the clear implication that city leaders, parents, neighbors, and other concerned citizens are a bunch of malevolent obstructionists who get their jollies out of subjecting their own and others’ children to dilapidated educational facilities to satisfy their own selfish desires, and that the only kind-hearted, child-loving saints in the city are the seven members of the school board.

Yet their facilities “solution” is not based on any objective, evidence-based educational practices, but rather arbitrary standards and anecdotal evidence. I would recommend to the school board that they read a publication from the U. S. Department of Education called “Identifying and Implementing Educational Practices Supported by Rigorous Evidence: A User Friendly Guide.” (PDF File)

I would especially like to draw their attention to page iii, which states:

As illustrative examples of the potential impact of evidence-based interventions on educational outcomes, the following have been found to be effective in randomized controlled trials – research’s “gold standard” for establishing what works:

  • One-on-one tutoring by qualified tutors for at-risk readers in grades 1-3 (the average tutored student reads more proficiently than approximately 75% of the untutored students in the control group).
  • Life-Skills Training for junior high students (low-cost, replicable program reduces smoking by 20% and serious levels of substance abuse by about 30% by the end of high school, compared to the control group).
  • Reducing class size in grades K-3 (the average student in small classes scores higher on the Stanford Achievement Test in reading/math than about 60% of students in regular-sized classes).
  • Instruction for early readers in phonemic awareness and phonics (the average student in these interventions reads more proficiently than approximately 70% of students in the control group).

It’s interesting to note that “provide students with 15 acres of spirit-lifting green space” isn’t listed. That’s not to say they aren’t focusing on the things that are listed, as I’m sure they are, but the difference between these items and the 15-acre minimum is that the listed items have been proven effective.

To establish a 15-acre standard that has proven ineffective in the district’s own experience, produce no rigorous evidence indicating it will be effective in the future, and then tell the public they are somehow denying their children a quality education if they don’t give them said 15 acres, is nothing more than a hollow emotional plea — a straw man set up for no other purpose than to “guilt” people into agreement.

Frankly, to say I’m disappointed with the school district would be an understatement. I’ll continue to send my children to private school. And if I didn’t love Peoria so much despite the school district, I’d move out just to deny them my tax money.

Peoria Public Schools

District 150 gives ultimatum to city

District 150 school board members made it very clear at Monday’s board meeting that they are not willing to accept less than 15 acres for a new school site. “15 acres is the minimum in terms of the school site for our children,” Superintendent Ken Hinton said at the meeting. All the other board members agreed.

Furthermore, they want the city to pay for the acquisition of all the land needed to create those 15 acres around the Glen Oak School site (estimated to be over $5 million) or they will pursue the Glen Oak Park site for the new school. Regardless of the final site chosen, the school board wants to continue acquiring property on the park site because “it’s not fair to keep them in limbo,” Superintendent Hinton said.

I’d like to credit board president Alicia Butler for at least asking the question I wanted asked. Here’s a transcription of her question and Hinton’s answer:

BUTLER: Mr. Hinton, can you delineate why you are coming up with the 15 acres?

HINTON: Sure I can. The 15 acres, in terms of the — and again, this is the vision on my part — in terms of as we go forward as a school district, we have an image and our children, I mean our, you know, our district has an image that I want to work on, and one of the things that is very important is that I want our families and our children to have the very best in the sense that they have a playground that has ball — baseball fields on it, the possibility that they want to go outside and do outdoor exploration, if we need to have soccer there, soccer’s available. Many of our children don’t have that particular environment. That is why the park site was such a choice site — is such a choice site, I should say — in terms of the opportunities it affords our students and our families and our staff.

The other part of that is that it is a minimal recommendation in terms of Illinois State Board of Education, and if you were to take that recommendation completely, it would actually be more than 15 acres. So the 15 acres is a minimum in terms of building the types of schools that we’re talking about doing as we go forward in terms of providing our children with state-of-the-art facilities to promote learning and see to it that we have optimal success with our children.

Mary Spangler added that based on national information, “we’re right there nationally” — which I assume means that we’re within the national average. (Yet, based on 2003 information from CEFPI, 22 states don’t have any minimum acreage requirements; one would think that would bring down the average.) She also said we need room to expand parking in the future, and the school building needs to be all one level to make it accessible to kids with special needs who shouldn’t be going up and down in elevators “in case of emergencies; it’s a safety issue.”

Martha Ross was concerned that switching sites would have a significant impact on the district’s construction timeline, and she later expressed her support for the park site.

David Gorenz believes that the best decision is to go with the park site based on its suitability for the educational programs the district wants, affordability, transportation issues, safety concerns, and community revitalization. He made a big point that community revitalization was last on the list and that the district should not compromise educational programs for the sake of community revitalization.

Matheson prefers the park site and will only consider the Glen Oak School site if the city provides complete financing of a 15 acre site.

Garrie Allen, unable to resist the urge to play the race card, said that “children of former slaves are being denied their 15 acres and a mule.” He later added, “it’s not our job as a school district to clean up blighted areas . . . Our job is to make things better for children.”

Stephen Morris and Butler both back the park site as well, although Butler was more evenhanded in her comments.

That’s my report.  In my next post, I’ll analyze the meeting.