Jonathan Ahl reports on his blog that Amy Paul and Clare Jellick are leaving WMBD-TV and the Journal Star, respectively. They’ll be staying in Peoria, but not in the journalism business. I’m happy for them, but bummed they won’t be reporting anymore.
Best wishes to them both.
Manning and Spears were both absent. The meeting started with a couple of annexation agreements, both of which were approved by everyone except Sandberg, as usual. Sandberg continues to warn that annexing land with low density requirements is only going to exacerbate Peoria’s problems, but the council is undaunted. They believe Peoria can annex itself into prosperity, even though it’s been trying to do that for 40 years unsuccessfully.
The consent agenda passed unanimously, with one notable exception (more on that later). Some of the interesting parts of the consent agenda that passed:
Perhaps the weirdest vote of the night was on the lone item pulled off the consent agenda: item L. “L” as in “light up.” It’s a seemingly mundane item calling for the City of Peoria to conform one of its ordinances to a state ordinance. The reason it’s controversial is because that state ordinance is the Smoke Free Illinois Act.
Van Auken pulled this off the consent agenda. She moved that the council not pass it. Sandberg seconded it and said the reason to reject the ordinance is because (a) the state law is poorly written and could lead to downtown businesses getting tickets for non-patrons who happen to be smoking within fifteen feet of their entrance, and (b) the city’s police department is too busy working on more important issues to be called away to give citations for smoking violations; since the state issued this unfunded mandate, the state should enforce it. Councilman Gulley joined in by stating that if the city passes this ordinance, then they will have to pay for adjudicating the tickets, whereas if they don’t pass the ordinance, the tickets would be adjudicated by the state’s attorney. Randy Oliver countered that, while that is true, the city would get 100% of the fine if it prosecutes under a local ordinance, and only 50% if under a state ordinance violation. Turner tried to counter that since the violation is complaint-driven and is not high-priority, it wouldn’t pull any officers off their beat or cause any hardship.
Then it came time for the vote. Remember, it was a motion to deny, so a “yes” vote means they don’t change the ordinance. Initially the vote was 4-5. Van Auken, Sandberg, Gulley, and Jacob voted for the motion to deny (meaning, they voted against passing the ordinance). Then Jacob changed his vote. Why he changed his vote, no one knows — the motion was defeated either way. But the final vote tally was officially 3-6.
Then a motion was made to approve the ordinance. That vote was 5-4. You’d think that would mean it passed, but it didn’t. To change an ordinance, it’s not enough to have a majority of a quorum. You have to have a majority of the council, and that means it needs six votes to pass. So the motion failed.
The weird part is Jacob’s switched vote. Had he voted to approve the ordinance, he would have been the sixth vote, and it would have passed. As it is, he voted against denying it, then voted against approving it. The only thing I can think of is that when he changed his vote on the first motion, it was so he could later ask for that motion to be reconsidered. Speaking of reconsideration, the motion to approve will probably be reconsidered at the next meeting when Manning and Spears return.
The item on changing city code relating to strip clubs and liquor licenses was deferred until the January 8 meeting.
Before that deferral, however, the council dispensed with Item No. 7. To really do this one justice, I should write a separate post about it, but I don’t have time. Perhaps another enterprising blogger could take up that task. Essentially, it’s another bite in transforming Growth Cell 2 from industrial to commercial zoning. This appears to be the latest plan.
The existing Comprehensive Plan says that Growth Cell 2 will be industrial, and has that area zoned accordingly. That’s why there are warehouses and rail spurs and stuff like that out there. Developers, however, want that land out there to be commercial, which is why Wal-Mart, Menards, and a litany of other stores are drifting there, many of them leaving empty buildings in their wake. Toward that end, another parcel on Allen Road was rezoned tonight from industrial to commercial.
Gary questioned why this didn’t go to the Planning Commission to be vetted. Nichting said the market should decide what goes out there, not the Comp Plan. And by “market,” he means “developers.” And by “Comp Plan,” he means “the city.” In other words, the city shouldn’t plan the city, developers should plan the city. Because we’ve been letting developers plan the city for the past 40 years, and that’s why we’re awash in revenue, able to provide ample public works and public safety services, and have myriad people moving into Peoria from all the surrounding towns and villages.
It was a typical council meeting.
UPDATE: If you missed it, you can listen to it online here. Thanks, Jonathan!
I just got the WCBU e-newsletter and thought I would pass this info along:
Outside the Horseshoe Year in Review – December 18
WCBU’s Outside the Horseshoe will continue its annual tradition of a year-end special that counts down the top stories of the year, and looks ahead with predictions for next year. Join us Tuesday, December 18th at 7:00 PM for a special one-hour edition of Outside the Horseshoe. WCBU’s Jonathan Ahl will lead the roundtable discussion that will include John Sharp from the Peoria Journal Star, Shaun Newell from 1470 WMBD, and Billy Dennis of peoriapundit.com.
I hope they taped this in advance, because it sounds like Billy is coming down with a cold. Get well soon, my friend.
As we go into the final week before Christmas, I regret that I won’t be able to do any blogging or even keep up on the news as much as I would like. It’s crunch time! But I’ll be back after Christmas. In the meantime, please feel free to comment on the news as much as you’d like here.
“To make a statement that you’re going to arm one country with nuclear weapons to attack China I think shows a fairly high level of not doing your homework, and … immaturity and not using good political sense.”
— Ray LaHood, as quoted on the Peoria Journal Star’s website, 12/13/2007, about State Representative and congressional candidate Aaron Schock.
Frequent Chronicle commenter PrairieCelt left a comment on Billy’s site that was so good, he made it its own post. It’s a good summary of all the money squandering that has gone on in District 150. Also check out Clare Jellick’s recent post about the cold reception District 150 has given Mr. Vallas.
At Tuesday’s council meeting, one item on the agenda was a recommendation from the Traffic Commission to deny a request to install a gate on Sedley Avenue between Vinton Highlands and the newly-constructed Cove at Charter Oak subdivisions. That item was inexplicably deferred. So far, I haven’t been able to find out why it was deferred. I’ve e-mailed Councilman Bill Spears, who asked for the deferral, but received no response. Another citizen has called Public Works and been told that department doesn’t know why it’s been deferred either. While I haven’t driven out there myself, it’s apparent from the minutes of the public hearing that the gate has already been installed.
This seems to me like an open-shut case. There was a public hearing, and the majority of the people who spoke were against the gate. Those who spoke in favor of the gate said it was for one purpose only — to reduce traffic and make the neighborhoods safer. However, there is no evidence that there is currently any traffic problem or any reasonable cause to believe there will be a problem in the future. If traffic does become a problem, there are other traffic-calming methods that could be employed short of installing a gate.
So why the deferral? What is holding up the denial? Are there behind-the-scenes efforts to try to get this gate approved against the wishes of the residents and against the recommendations of the Traffic Commission and City Staff?
Ladies and gentlemen, you have the floor. Speak your mind.
The city says that a new development at Radnor Road and Willow Knolls “meets all the qualifications of Section 4 of the [Enterprise Zone] Act” (20 ILCS 655). Really? One of the qualifications in Section 4 is “(1) An area is qualified to become an enterprise zone which […] (c) is a depressed area.” And just what is “a depressed area”?
20 ILCS 655/3(c) “Depressed Area” means an area in which pervasive poverty, unemployment and economic distress exist.
By the way, “pervasive” means “spreading widely throughout an area or a group of people,” according to the Oxford American Dictionary. So, let’s take a look at Radnor Road and Willow Knolls, shall we? Here it is on a map (courtesy of Google):
The development site is in that area just below the green arrow, bounded by Radnor to the east, Willow Knolls to the south, the Union Pacific rail line to the west, and Eagle Point Drive to the north. Here’s a house currently for sale on Eagle Point Drive:
Yes, the “pervasive poverty” in this area has depressed the listing price of this house (representative of houses in the area) to a paltry $264,900. Isn’t that awful? Too bad, too, because it’s right across from Kellogg Golf Course:
This is obviously where all the unemployed in the area loiter. You often see them sitting next to the greens with “will caddy for food” signs. They’re unemployed because of the “economic distress” of the area:
They’re also less than a mile from Sam’s Club, Willow Knolls 14 theater, and a plethora of relatively new development. We really should get together with some social service agencies and churches to work on caring for these poor, unemployed, economically distressed folks. The council is doing their part: they approved Enterprise Zone status at Tuesday’s meeting, 10-1 (Sandberg was the lone “no” vote).
Their reasoning? “Everybody’s doing it.” All over Illinois, they say, this is the way the Enterprise Zone is being used, so therefore, that’s also how we should use it. And if everyone else in Illinois were jumping off a bridge, then I suppose we would, too. The City’s economic development director Craig Hullinger also had this rationalization that he e-mailed to the council and also reiterated at the meeting:
There is some concern on the blogs about extending the Enterprise Zone to the new Horan development on Radnor.
This area is in the unincorporated County. They had proper zoning and sewer and water to build in the County, and they planned to do so.
By annexing them into the City and into the Enterprise Zone we give them a sales tax rebate on taxes for building material that we would not have gotten anyway if they had stayed unincorporated.
And we get a lifetime of property, sales, and utility tax from the development that would never have come to the City. And logical expansion of the city boundaries.
In other words, the ends justify the means.
Here’s the problem with this logic: it doesn’t tell the whole story. It’s a half-truth. Because the trade-off is less Enterprise Zone area that could be used to help legitimately depressed areas of the city, more land mass for the city to support with public works and public safety services which are already stretched thin, and an exacerbation of developer-welfare and the entitlement mentality among developers.
I think it’s interesting that the district councilmen in the first, second, and third districts voted for this measure even though it incentivizes businesses to move out of their districts and into the growth areas of the city. Even though it means less area that they could use to try to attract businesses to (and retain businesses in) depressed areas in their districts.
I also take issue with the idea that this development “would never have come to the City.” Never? Never is a long time. I think it’s most likely that growth in this area would have encircled this development within a few years, and the city would have annexed it anyway. I also think that the city probably has other tools it could have used to woo it into the city without further bastardizing the Enterprise Zone.
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:
When 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.
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.