If you missed the 18th Congressional District candidates’ foreign policy debate last night, you can hear it online. WCBU has an mp3 of the entire debate on their site. By the way, Schock did end up attending. Kudos to him for not chickening out. The other candidates are former city councilman John Morris and Heartland Partnership CEO Jim McConoughey.
Too bad there’s no Democratic candidate in the primary. It would have made the debate a lot more interesting.
Also on Tuesday’s agenda are two items that were deferred from last year:
I am so in the wrong line of work. I need to become a traffic consultant and get in good with IDOT.
The city wants to narrow Washington Street, add on-street parking, and widen the sidewalks as part of the effort to spur mixed use development in the Warehouse District. Now you might think that the city could just narrow the street, add on-street parking and widen the sidewalks, but you’d be wrong.
Why? Because Washington Street is a state route — Route 24, in fact. That means the Illinois Department of Transportation has to approve any changes, and they have procedures that require streets to always get wider and more pedestrian-hostile. So you can see what the city is up against.
One option is to move Route 24 to Adams and Jefferson streets, but then that causes other problems, such as the fact that Adams and Jefferson are one-way streets, and there’s a desire to convert them to two-way. If Route 24 moves there, then IDOT would have to approve the conversion there, so you’ve just traded one problem for another.
The good news is that there’s a process to try to change IDOT’s mind: Hire a consultant. For $525,000. Yes, a little more than a cool half a million. To put that in perspective, that’s like the equivalent of five assistant city managers.
First of all, don’t get me wrong. I’m glad that this process is moving forward — it shows that there’s a commitment to the plan for the Warehouse District. And secondly, you should know that Peoria doesn’t have to pay all of that — in fact, IDOT will pay $325,000 of the cost, and the council may decide to restrict the scope of the project so that it doesn’t exceed the IDOT-covered amount. So it might not cost Peoria anything (which makes you feel better until you realize that it’s just coming out of the taxes you pay to the state).
But still, whether a third or half a million, doesn’t that seem a bit crazy? Here we employ engineers at state and local levels. One would think they are more than capable of figuring out how to handle street drainage, or widen sidewalks, or change the painted lines from dotted white to double yellow. But in addition to the salary and benefits we pay for these engineers, we also need to pay over $300K to a consultant, and there’s no guarantee that his results will sway IDOT in the city’s favor.
Oh well, the important thing is that progress is being made… if the council passes the agenda item next Tuesday.