The Zoning Commission will be having their April meeting this Thursday, and their agenda is posted on the City’s website. One item on the agenda, however, has already been withdrawn.
Item “G” is a “public hearing on the request of Ed Barry for District 150 to…approv[e] a Special Use for a Public School…located at 2628 N Knoxville Ave, Peoria, Illinois.” If the address doesn’t ring a bell, it’s the old Social Security Administration building District 150 wants to use for an alternative school.
The item was withdrawn because, according to a 1991 intergovernmental agreement between the City of Peoria and District 150, the district doesn’t have to appear before the city’s zoning commission — in fact, the city’s zoning ordinance does not apply to the school district at all, save some minor exceptions. As the Journal Star summed up nicely on February 6, 1991:
The [school] district has agreed to adhere to zoning requirements for issues like setbacks, landscaping and building heights, but will not be required to bring its plans to the city’s Zoning Commission or Zoning Board of Appeals. Neither will it have to obtain building permits or have plans reviewed by the inspections department.
Any disagreement, as per the intergovernmental agreement, will be taken to the city manager and district superintendent for final resolution. The School Board will be responsible for public hearings.
So, rather than the City conducting the public hearing, the school district will conduct one instead. No word yet on when that will be.
I looked up the proceedings of the February 5, 1991, city council meeting to see what kind of discussion there was about this agreement. I was surprised to find that, according to the minutes, there was no discussion. The motion was made, seconded, and quietly passed unanimously.
I didn’t know anything about this agreement until today. And it appears that the city and the district had forgotten about it, too — at least temporarily — since the district applied for a special use and was on the zoning commission’s agenda for a time.
Since April 2006, the City of Peoria and Insight Communications have been operating without a franchise agreement. The old 20-year agreement expired last year and negotiations for a new agreement have been going on ever since. The City isn’t saying what the holdup is, although it could be any number of things, including state and federal legislation designed to take local franchising authority away from home-rule communities like Peoria.