Daily Archives: July 31, 2008

City of Peoria

City launches on-line budget questionnaire

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From a press release:

The Mayor and City Council are seeking public input into the 2009 budget. In previous years, public comment was limited, at least formally, to the night that the budget was adopted. This year, the Council has made it a priority to educate citizens on the budget and seek their priorities, thoughts and ideas.

Two open houses are being held on August 4th: 10 a.m. – 12 p.m. at Expo Gardens and 5 p.m. – 7 p.m. at the Peoria City/County Health Department. These open houses are designed to allow citizens to drop in, learn more about the budget, and talk with Council Members and City staff. Attendees will also be asked to complete a brief questionnaire that will gather input about budget priorities, revenue sources and cost-saving ideas.

For those citizens who cannot attend one of the open houses, an on-line questionnaire is available at www.peoriabudget.com. This questionnaire will be open from August 1 through August 10. The website will also contain information about the City’s budget, revenue sources, staffing levels and operating indicators so that visitors can be well informed about the process.

Staff will compile the answers from both the paper and on-line versions and present a summary to the City Council at their September 9 meeting.

I thought at first that I couldn’t make it to one of the open houses, assuming they were both in the evening. Upon closer inspection, I realized that one of the open houses was in the morning! So, I just wanted to point out to anyone who may have skimmed that part like I did, the open house at Expo Gardens is from 10 a.m. to noon.

Yeah, I know, how could I have missed it, right? Well, sometimes when you get a lot of press releases, you just don’t pay close enough attention. 🙂

Amtrak, Dick Durbin, Nation/World

Durbin introduces Amtrak fleet improvement bill

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U. S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) introduced the “Train Cars Act” (S.3360) on Tuesday in the Senate. The State Journal-Register explains what the bill proposes:

Durbin’s bill provides funding to encourage manufacturers currently supplying passenger rail cars overseas to open modern facilities here. And it provides a tax incentive for private domestic businesses to re-enter the passenger rail equipment business and rebuild facilities and train cars in the United States.

The legislation also would create a trust fund to replace the nation’s train cars by transferring one-quarter cent of the per-gallon motor fuel tax into the trust fund for three years. That would generate about $400 million a year, Durbin said.

It’s good to see more funding being proposed for passenger rail service. Whereas the federal government provides tens of billions of dollars for highways and airports, Amtrak has been treated as the redheaded stepchild, getting a mere $1 billion each year, even as they stave off annual efforts from the White House to cut off funding altogether. With gas prices on the rise, rail ridership is rising dramatically, and more funding is being proposed both in Congress and at the state level.

Amtrak and IDOT are currently studying the feasibility of Peoria-Chicago passenger service.

General News

Wasn’t Sandberg just joking about this?

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The Los Angeles Times reports:

A law that would bar fast-food restaurants from opening in South Los Angeles for at least a year sailed through the Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday…. The council approved the fast-food moratorium unanimously….

When the Peoria City Council was discussing a moratorium on payday loan establishments here, Gary Sandberg joked that maybe we should put a moratorium on Starbucks coffee joints under the same theory. Starbucks isn’t what one would label a fast-food restaurant, but I thought it funny that Sandberg was joking about it, and then just a few days later L. A. does something very similar.

2008 Campaign

Ballot access challenged in 10th Congressional District

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Independent candidate for Congress Allan Stevo has filed suit in U.S. District Court (Springfield) against the Illinois State Board of Elections. Although he submitted over 7,200 valid signatures, the Board of Elections removed him from the ballot because he fell short of the statutory requirement of 10,285 signatures — “5% of the total number of persons who voted in the last general election within the congressional district.”

Stevo is challenging that requirement. He claims it’s “unnecessary, discriminatory, and unconstitutional.” On that last point, he claims it specifically violates the first and fourteenth amendments.

“Established parties,” as defined in the Illinois Election Code, only need 0.5% of the total persons who voted in the last general election — a significantly smaller requirement. And just to make things completely weird, the 5% requirement for independent candidates only applies in election years that do not immediately follow a federal census. (Yeah, try to make sense of that.) In election years that do immediately follow a federal census (1972, 1982, 1992, 2002, 2012, etc.), independent candidates running for Congress need only collect 5,000 signatures. Stevo uses this fact as proof that the 5% requirement is unnecessary.

Stevo is asking the court to declare Illinois’ ballot access restrictions unconstitutional, put his name on the ballot, and reimburse his attorney’s fees.