Daily Archives: December 10, 2007

2008 Campaign

Questions for John Morris

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There are a couple of questions I have about John Morris, one of three Republican candidates for the 18th Congressional District, that I don’t feel have been adequately answered:

  1. John MorrisWhen Morris decided not to run for reelection as a city councilman, he said it was so he could spend more time with his family. (May 1, 2007: “[T]he most important thing for me is to spend more time with my family.”) Yet he’s now embarked on a quest to become a U. S. Congressman, which will mean even less time with his family. Why the change?

    When I asked his campaign office about that today, they said that his family fully supports him in this race, and that eight years as a city councilman was long enough. Both excellent answers to questions that I didn’t ask. One logically-consistent but improbable conclusion we could draw is that, while Morris wanted to spend more time with his family, his family wants Morris to spend more time out of town. Like I said, improbable, but any other explanation I can think of makes him sound either wishy-washy or deceitful. So, it would be helpful if Morris would candidly answer that question, because it does make some people cast doubt on his veracity.

  2. On Dec. 1, the Journal Star reported that “WTVP was found in technical default [of their loan with Bank of America] in 2005 after failing to raise a specific number of pledges and pledge money, items covered in bond covenants.” John Morris was Vice President for Development at WTVP for 10 years — up until he took a leave of absence starting Sept. 17 to run for Congress — and it was his job to oversee fundraising for the station. So does that mean that Morris is responsible for WTVP being in technical default on their loan?

    Not according to Morris’s campaign office. They say he “exceeded his fundraising goals,” raising “more than $20 million” during his ten years of employment and winning “nine national awards” for his fundraising work. Again, we have a paradox. He met all his fundraising goals, but WTVP is in default because they didn’t meet their fundraising obligations. How do we resolve this antinomy? Was it that his boss wasn’t setting the fundraising goals high enough to be in compliance with WTVP’s bond covenants? That could explain the issue at hand, but would raise some unsettling questions about the management of WTVP. It would be nice if these questions could also be cleared up with some frank explanations.

City Council, City of Peoria

Council preview: 12/11/07

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The City Council meets Tuesday evening at 6:15 p.m. in City Hall, room 400. Here are the agenda items that caught my eye this week:

  • There are a couple of new businesses seeking to join the Warehouse District TIF. The first is LaVille de Maillet, LLC, which is buying the recently-closed Biggins Label Company building, 820 SW Adams. The development plan is to put shared office space in the front of the building and a residential apartment in the rear. Interesting trivia about the name of the company: “LaVille de Maillet” is what Peoria was called in the late 1700s when French villagers lived here (where downtown is now), led by French-Canadian military commander Jean Baptiste Maillet. The company is owned by Dennis Slape, publisher of the Numero entertainment guide. I’ve heard he’s going to set up a photography studio, and one of the other tenants may be ArtsPartners.
  • The second new business in the Warehouse District I’ve mentioned in a previous post. Drumheller Bag Corporation of Clarksdale, Mississippi, is expanding and has decided to add a new plant here in Peoria. In fact, they like it here so well, they’re moving their headquarters here, too. They’ve already hired 57 employees, 50 of which are former Bemis workers.
  • Does a development on Radnor Road really need to be part of the city’s enterprise zone? Would you consider Willow Knolls and Radnor Road to be a “depressed area,” qualifying for enterprise zone status? City staff and the Planning Commission think so. You really should click on that link and read the council communication — you won’t believe it. Double A’s Pizza just got a loan from the city’s Business Development Loan Fund in August of this year, and now they’re planning to move to this new development at Willow Knolls and Radnor, just outside the city limits. The city doesn’t want to lose the sales tax revenue (how much pizza do people eat out there?), so they’re offering this Enterprise Zone status to try to lure the development into annexing. Huh? I can only assume that it meets the letter of the law, but surely this use of the Enterprise Zone violates the spirit of the law. And do we really need more land annexed when we can’t adequately provide city services to the land we already have?
  • As previously reported, the neighbors in Vinton Highlands don’t want a gate between their subdivision and the new, upscale Coves subdivision. So the Traffic Commission is recommending that the city deny the Coves developer’s request to install a gate separating the two neighborhoods. That’s the right decision; hopefully the council will concur.
  • Finally, there’s an agenda item regarding changes to the Land Development Code. City staff has been reviewing the code to see how it works or doesn’t work, and they have made some recommendations for change. Most of them are reasonable, but the Heart of Peoria Commission had some concerns with a few of them. We expressed those concerns at our last meeting and the public hearing held by the Zoning Commission. Staff apparently doesn’t agree, as they are still asking for approval of their changes as proposed, without making any changes based on HOPC’s recommendations. The result is a council communication that asks for council to choose to adopt either Option A, staff’s recommendation, or Option B, which is staff’s recommendation with HOPC’s changes. Considering the council did not give HOPC any funding this year, it will be interesting to see if they consider our concerns.
Kellar Branch

Pioneer responds to CIRY’s filing in Kellar Branch dispute

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Kellar Branch RailroadIn their filing submitted Friday, but just posted to the Surface Transportation Board’s website today, Pioneer Industrial Railway has responded to Central Illinois Railroad’s recent petition to “hold in abeyance” the STB’s November 19 ruling.

Pioneer argues that Central Illinois Railroad (CIRY) has no legal basis to request that a decision be “held in abeyance,” and that CIRY is only filing under that terminology because they missed the deadline to appeal the STB’s decision and request a “stay” of the decision. Pioneer also defends itself against the allegations made in CIRY’s filing. Here’s the summary conclusion:

As the Board’s recent General Railway decision put it, a party may not avoid the obligation of meeting the Board’s procedural standards merely by assigning a different label to its request for relief. But that is precisely what CIRY has done here. Knowing that it has missed the deadlines to request a stay (and knowing further that it could not satisfy the stay standards anyway), it merely gives its stay request a different name – a request to hold the matter in abeyance. Of course, CIRY’s is not really a request to hold matters in abeyance, as PIRY has clearly established above. Moreover, although CIRY seeks “modification” of the November 19 Decision, it has neither requested reopening of the Board’s decision nor did it file a timely petition for reconsideration. In short, and as has been thoroughly demonstrated above, CIRY lacks any legal basis for the relief it seeks and is merely attempting here to bypass proper agency procedure. The Board must not let CIRY make a mockery of correct Board processes, and it should therefore deny CIRY’s Petition for these reasons.

But even if the Board were to address the merits of CIRY’s Petition, it has not made a case for any of the relief it seeks. Rather, CIRY engages in the typical attempts to smear PIRY, makes false and irrelevant allegations, and otherwise does its utmost to dig in its heels in an effort to deprive PIRY of access to the line and to block PIRY from fulfilling its common carrier obligations to Carver and to any other shippers that way wish to use the line. For all of these reasons, as discussed more fully above, CIRY’s Petition should be denied, and the Board should make clear that CIRY must not block or attempt to impose delay on PIRY’s ongoing efforts to restore rail service on this line.

A couple of things from earlier in the filing I found interesting:

  • Pioneer points out that CIRY claims it would be too costly to fix up the Kellar Branch track to provide service to Carver Lumber, but then states that it has spent $100,000 to fix up the Kellar Branch for the purposes of running a hi-rail vehicle of it:

    One wonders why CIRY would be willing to spend $100,000 to permit it to operate a hi-rail vehicle over the line when CIRY claims that such an expenditure “vastly exceeds the gross amount of revenues that CIRY would likely earn.” Perhaps CIRY answers this question when it admits that it is using the line for the storage of carload quantities of hazardous materials. Could it be that CIRY is not really in the business of providing common carrier service but rather in the business of storing hazardous rail cars? Could it be that CIRY is using its status as a rail carrier to take advantage of STB preemption so as to prevent the City of Peoria and the State of Illinois from interfering with what is apparently a lucrative business, i.e. storing hazardous materials in rail cars? One doubts that CIRY is truly concerned about safety over the line when it is using the line for the storage of dangerous and hazardous materials. PIRY has no such plans and intends to do what it always did – operate a line of railroad for local customers.

    This is an important distinction — CIRY is an out-of-town company that is using the city’s tracks to store hazmat cars from out of town. Pioneer, on the other hand, is a local company, headquartered in Peoria, that simply wants to serve local shippers on the Kellar Branch.

  • Pioneer also points out that CIRY filed this petition on its own, and that neither the City of Peoria nor the Village of Peoria Heights joined in this petition:

    As an initial matter, it is telling that the Cities, who are the actual owners of the Kellar Branch and who filed the adverse discontinuance in the first place, have not filed a request for stay, a petition to reopen, or joined in CIRY’s Petition. One would presume that, if the Cities continued to object to having PIRY on the line, they would be the ones taking legal action, but they have not done so. Indeed, the city council for the City on November 27 voted 6-4 to reject a motion for continued legal adversity against PIRY. The majority of the city council indicated a willingness to negotiate with PIRY, CIRY, and others to resolve the outstanding issues. Granting the Petition would simply undermine the city council’s desire to negotiate a settlement rather than to litigate.

    While all that is true, it is worth mentioning that the Village of Peoria Heights did, in fact, pass the resolution that the City of Peoria defeated. It’s also worth mentioning that Peoria Heights has not footed any of the legal bills associated with the efforts to turn the Kellar Branch into a hiking trail over the past decade-plus. Hopefully, someday, all the parties will be able to work out a mutually beneficial agreement and all this acrimony can come to an end.