Monthly Archives: January 2009

Museum Block

The Economist: Museums “unsafe bets for urban renewal”

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A special edition of The Economist magazine (“The World in 2009”) includes this article, which was alluded to in a previous comment. The article is titled, “The Museum-building binge.” Here’s something to consider when deciding how much money and land we want to dedicate to a new downtown museum complex:

Museums often enjoy cheeringly high visitor numbers in the first year or two, but then attendance tends to taper off.

“Sustainability is the new buzzword,” explains Javier Pes, editor of Museum Practice, a journal published by the Museums Association. Wealthy private donors have been happy enough to contribute large sums in exchange for a glamorous new wing named after them. But donations tend to ebb after the museum reopens, and directors need to find other ways to pull in tourists after the initial excitement wears off, such as pricey blockbuster shows. Operating costs go up.

In Denver, for example, where Daniel Libeskind designed a new $110m building for the art museum, an initial boom of visitors in 2006 has waned, and budget constraints have forced the museum to cut staff. The remarkable new structure—an explosion of angles and intersecting shapes—is the centrepiece of Denver’s nascent culture district. Yet some visitors complain of feeling disoriented inside. […]

Such investments are clearly unsafe bets for urban renewal.

What is the Museum Collaboration Group’s plan to sustain their optimistic attendance numbers over the next 20 years (i.e., the duration of the bonds used for construction) and beyond?

General News

Circuit City chain closing down

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If you have gift cards to Circuit City, use them now. The whole chain is liquidating their assets and going out of business. Over 30,000 employees will be losing their jobs. Not sure how many people work at the Peoria store in Westlake Shopping Center. A customer service rep I talked to guessed that they employed 80 people, which seems high to me.

Estimated closing date is March 31, but could be sooner if they sell all their merchandise.

Heartland Partnership

Infrastructure projects list released

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From a press release:

Peoria, IL – (January 15, 2009) The Heartland Partnership and the Tri County Regional Planning Commission have been gathering a list of regional infrastructure projects that could benefit from President-elect Obama’s proposed infrastructure stimulus recovery project. The goal is to have a list of potential projects ready when the new administration gives the go ahead for the stimulus package.

The Heartland Partnership President and CE Jim McConoughey said this group has been working to gather this list since early December. “This is an evolving project. As we compile our list, Washington DC is compiling the criteria. This list enables us to have the necessary information at our fingertips when it’s needed.”

The group released details on that list today at the Heartland Partnership Office. Over two hundred projects were submitted from 41 municipalities in eight counties including Peoria, Tazewell, Woodford, Mason, Logan, Fulton, Marshall and Stark. The list includes development, road, water, sewer, schools, and community projects.

McConoughey said the anticipated federal stimulus package is approximately $800 billion and as the President and Congress unfold the various components of the plan, it will be important for our communities to decide what we consider success. This stimulus package is about creating jobs in our communities and across the nation, McConoughey said. “So if any project on this list receives funding it will mean jobs in our community. And when people have jobs, they shop in local stores, they buy or rent homes, and they pay taxes and contribute to the overall welfare of the community in a variety of ways. So any project on this list that receives funding is a success for the larger community.”

The next step is to get this list to our lawmakers. McConoughey will be traveling to Washington DC and Springfield to deliver the list to the Illinois delegation in the coming weeks. He went on to say that the work is not over, “We will continue to monitor the rules and keep an eye on any changes that may affect projects in our region. If invited to submit more detailed information on this list, we will do so. And if local project leaders need assistance we will help them find it.”

Here’s the list in PDF format.

Some of these projects are real head-scratchers — for instance, the “Riverfront Village Stairway Replacement” project. Did some catastrophe happen to the stairs that I missed? Or were they just poorly constructed in the first place? I’m trying to figure out why they need to be replaced already when that development is only (roughly) 10 years old.

And then there’s this one: “Peoria Academy School 27,000 sq ft addition.” I thought these were supposed to be public projects. Peoria Academy is “an independent, private, non-profit school,” according to their own website. Are we now handing out public money to private schools? St. Mark’s is ready to build a new school — I’ll bet they would welcome some of that stimulus money, too.

One more thing: “Riverfront Museum Parking deck construction.” This isn’t significant in and of itself. What’s more significant is the “start date” listed: February 1, 2009. That’s almost three months before the sales tax referendum. They wouldn’t start construction before they knew if they had enough funds to finish the project, would they? That would be most unwise.

Peoria Public Schools

Protest planned against school closings

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Well over 100 people crowded into the banquet room at Godfather’s Pizza Thursday night in reaction to District 150’s proposal to balance the budget by closing and consolidating schools. Included in the crowd were teachers, students, coaches, staff members, parents, alumni, and other concerned citizens. The meeting started at 5 p.m. and lasted about an hour and a half. Terry Knapp was the moderator and several people spoke. Here’s a small sampling:

[flashvideo filename=http://peoriachronicle.com/wp-content/uploads/Video/WHS-Protest.flv /]

My thanks to Terry, Jeff Adkins-Dutro, and Hedy Elliot-Gardner for letting me publish their comments. Jeff and Hedy are running for union president and vice president, respectively.

In case you didn’t catch it, the plan is to hold a protest outside the District 150 offices on Wisconsin next Tuesday at 5:30 p.m., prior to the board meeting. School board meetings are normally on Mondays, but next Monday is the Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday. The goal is to have 300-400 people from demonstrating against closing Woodruff High and other schools slated for closure.

The concerns with closing schools are many:

  • Larger class sizes — When Manual was restructured, the district emphasized that it was important to establish/maintain “small learning communities.” Now they want to combine schools that will lead to large classes of 29+ students. To make matters worse, the district is also trying to take special education children out of their special classes and integrate them into regular classrooms. So now, in addition to having larger class sizes, teachers are going to have the added pressure of helping special ed kids keep up with the rest of the class.

  • Mixing rival gangs — I’m not up on Peoria’s gang situation, but several attendees who are aware of it expressed concern about putting a lot of kids from rival gangs in the same school building. It poses a number of security problems.

  • Combining of athletic teams — Kids who are able to make the cut for, say, basketball in their respective schools now will end up being cut from the team when players from both high schools are combined to make one team. For some of those kids, sports is what keeps them in school and keeps them connected; and being cut from the team will raise the likelihood of them dropping out.

  • Edison schools not on the chopping block — No one can understand why the district wouldn’t cut Edison schools’ contract before closing down schools. A lot of money could be saved by getting rid of that private, for-profit company’s contract.

  • Consultants/administrators not on the chopping block — At the same time the administration is talking about closing schools and cutting teachers, they are adding more administrative staff. Why wouldn’t they cut the fat in the administration before they start making cuts that impact students?

As I listened closely to the rally Thursday, I noticed that this was not just about schools closing. There are some deeper issues that are frustrating the teachers. Consider that the teachers and principals found out about the District’s proposal to close and consolidate schools from the press. The assistant principal of Woodruff first heard it on the 10:00 news Wednesday night. It’s bad enough that the administration doesn’t consult their teachers and staff for input on these matters; the least they can do is inform them of their plans before they tell the news media and general public.

There was also frustration that no union representatives were at the meeting Thursday. Many teachers were incensed that Peoria Federation of Teachers president Scott Schifeling wasn’t at the meeting Thursday night, nor was anyone from the union’s executive board. An attendee who had talked to several board members reported to the group that they weren’t attending the meeting because they “felt slighted that they weren’t invited.” Not exactly the way to inspire confidence among the teachers.

Expect a lot of protesters Tuesday night, and a lot of people lined up to speak to the school board during the public comment period of Tuesday’s meeting.

The Peoria Chronicle

Chronicle down for server maintenance this weekend

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I’ve been alerted by the company that hosts my site that the server the Peoria Chronicle is on will be down for maintenance for about two hours this weekend:

The server peoriachronicle.com is hosted on will be undergoing a hardware upgrade at approximately

11PM MST Saturday January 17th

We expect the downtime for the account to be 1-2 hours, but could be completed long before that window. This upgrade will greatly increase performance on your server and therefor your account. We apologize for any inconvenience.

That’s midnight central time, which means the site will be down from midnight to 1 or 2 a.m. Sunday. I doubt this will affect very many of you, but I wanted to make you aware of it.

Museum Block

Johnson: Attendance projections “not simply pulled out of the air”

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The following is a response to my post, “Questioning museum attendance projections.” It’s such a good response, I couldn’t let it be buried in the comments section of an old post, so I’m reprinting it here in its entirety. It’s a response from Mark Johnson, Caterpillar Experience project manager, who has been involved with the museum project for quite some time. Whatever you think of Mr. Johnson’s argument, you have to give him credit for his honesty and civility. I wish all debates would be this cordial and on-point. My thanks to Mr. Johnson for responding and to frequent commenter Ileriet for forwarding it to me.

An acquaintance advised me that you’d posted some critical analysis of the attendance projections for the new Museum and the Caterpillar Experience. Since I’ve been very involved in the development of those numbers, I thought perhaps that some additional info might be beneficial for your continued evaluation. I don’t expect that this info will eliminate your skepticism, but as this aspect of the project continues to receive significant focus, I’d like to attempt to explain some of the rational behind the numbers.

First, I’m glad you understand the 1/3 – 1/3 – 1/3 breakdown of the total attendance figure of 360,000. This does immediately get confusing, but it means that we recognize that not everyone who visits the site will visit both facilities. Therefore we’re talking about each facility having an annual attendance figure of 240,000.

Let’s focus on the Caterpillar Experience first as that’s my primary responsibility. Here we’ve used the John Deere Pavilion in Moline as our primary benchmark. For the first five years after the facility opened in August of 1997, it averaged 228,000 visitors annually. Attendance has declined over the past five years however, averaging only 176,000 per year. I think this shows that without continued investment in updating exhibits and displays any facility such as this will experience attendance declines. We believe that the exhibits and displays planned for the Caterpillar Experience, along with the significant focus on educational aspects of the facility, and the commitment to update the exhibits and displays within the facilty, should allow the Experience to attract and maintain an average annual attendance of 240,000 visitors per year.

For instance, we plan to work with instructors from the Caterpillar University to develop a potential course curriculum for middle school, high school and college students who are visiting the Experience on an organized tour. If time permits, their instructor will be able to select a grade level appropriate topic from the curriculum and the group could then extend their visit after the normal tour with this additional class. We’re hopeful that this concept will make the Experience an even more attractive field trip for area educators and continue to bring them to the facility year after year.

Most of the customers that our dealers bring to the Peoria area to visit Caterpillar facilities have free time from the end of first shift operations at the factories (about 3pm) until they go to their evening meal. Again, we hope that the dealers will find the displays and exhibits at the Experience very appealing and bring their customer tour groups to visit the Experience during this period of free time in the late afternoon. I suspect you can guess where many of these guests in Peoria spend most of that time currently.

Attendance projections for the Caterpillar Experience however, should really not be a controversy in regard to the overall project, as the company will be paying for the operation of the facility and if attendance projections are not achieved, it will be at no expense to the general public. So, lets look at some of the museum attendance projections in more detail. I’ve worked with the museum planners and their consultants on these numbers, including various revisions, several times over the past four years. We’ve scrubbed these numbers over and over until we’ve concluded that they are “reasonably achieveable”. Guaranteed, certainly not; a stretch, most probably; will achieving them require significantly more aggressive advertising and promotion than Lakeview currently utilizes, absolutely.

OK, here goes, again we’re looking at an annual attendance projection of 240,000 visitors or an average of 667 per day and in response to some of the inquiries you’ve received, yes, that includes every visitor to the facility (with the exception of those pre-school students that are enrolled in the facilities day-care program which will be a carry over from the current program operated at Lakeview Museum).

As I understand their projections, those 240,000 visitors have been broken down into five sub-categories as follows:

  • Exhibit Galleries & Planetarium only
    (56,000 annually or an average of 156 per day)
    (The general admission ticket will include admission to both the
    exhibit galleries and one show in the planetarium).

  • Exhibit Galleries & Planetarium & IMAX theater combination ticket
    (53,000 annually or an average of 147 per day)

  • IMAX Theater only
    (93,000 annually or an average of 258 per day)

  • Planetarium only
    (19,000 annually or an average of 119 per day)
    (this would primarily be school tours so I’ve assumed 160 days of school –
    throw out the first 20 days while teachers are getting organized).

  • all other visitors
    (19,000 annually or an average of 53 per day)
    (this would primarily be museum classes and special events, exhibit openings,
    special fund raising events, visitors to the museum store or book
    court)

With this breakdown, it becomes apparent that the IMAX theater is projected to be the primary generator of attendance at the Museum facility. The closest IMAX theater facility to Peoria is at the Putnam Museum in Davenport. Their attendance figures were the primary benchmark taken into account when the PRM numbers were developed. The four-year average attendance figures at the Putnam’s IMAX theater were 97,000 during the day and 73,100 during the evening or a total of just over 170,000. From the above figures, you can see that the museum planners are projecting 146,000 for annual attendance at the PRM IMAX or 86% of the Putnam’s history. When these numbers were originally put together, this was assumed to be a conservative projection for the PRM and was accepted as reasonable.

If you’ve been to visit the Putnam Museum in Davenport, I’d hope you’d agree that it is not located in a very attractive, nor conveniently located area of the community. The PRM’s location on the riverfront should generate much greater visibility to the Museum’s IMAX and boost attendance figures. Being relatively close to the downtown hotels and guests in town overnight for Civic Center events should also provide a boost to IMAX attendance figures. (To the best of my knowledge, negotiations with IMAX are still continuing on a positive track and museum planners have every intention of this large screen theater bearing the IMAX label).

Also, again referencing back to the Caterpillar dealer and customer guests in Peoria. We’ve talked to the Museum planners about the possibility of showing the IMAX film “The Fires of Kuwait” each afternoon during the week at about 4:00 or so, at a somewhat expected slack time at the museum after the school age tour groups have left for the day. This film is a very interesting documentary on the efforts to extinguish the oil well fires in Kuwait after the first gulf war and features the extensive use of Caterpillar equipment in very hazardous conditions. Again, we’d expect that many of the dealer and customer guests would be interested in watching this movie during that normally free time. It would certainly be a unique opportunity for them during their visit to Peoria.

Looking at this IMAX attendance projection on a daily basis breakdowns down to approximately 400 per day. With four shows planned during the day and two shows in the evening, that would require an average of about 68 people per show, or about one large school bus per show with a few others joining them. Reasonable or unreasonable, to each his own opinion, but the Museum planners have set this as their target.

Another way to analyze the data would be to combine the 56,000 figure for the Gallery/Planetarium only visits with the 53,000 figure for the Gallery/Planetarium/IMAX visits which would result in a total of 109,000 visitors to the galleries each year or a total of just over 300 visitors per day. And yes, this projection counts every student who tours the exhibit galleries at the museum with his class on a field trip. Obviously the museum planners feel these numbers are reasonable and achievable, skeptics will look at them as overly optimistic and most likely unobtainable. However, doesn’t the JFK quote go something like, “Some men see things as they are and ask why, others dream of what might be and ask why not?” Perhaps that’s appropriate in this situation.

There are pages and pages of other benchmarking data to substantiate all of these numbers, however I don’t have the time or space to cover everything individually. My intent in sharing these numbers with you is to simply demonstrate that they were not simply pulled out of the air in an effort to make the project look attractive. I suspect that some of your fellow bloggers will recall the old phrase, “Liars figure and figures lie” However, from my perspective, one of the primary objectives of the “Build the Block” campaign has been to share information about the project with the public in order to allow them to better understand the proposed development and I hope this information contributes to that understanding.

Mark L. Johnson
Project Manager – Caterpillar Experience

Peoria Public Schools

Woodruff High School may close

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From WMBD-TV:

The district is proposing the following: Closing Tyng primary school and consolidating Harrison, Garfield, Tyng and Trewyn into three pre-kindergarten through 8th grade buildings. The district also wants to close Woodruff High School and essentially merge it with Peoria High.

And from the Journal Star:

With the proposed closure of Tyng this year, students from Tyng, Garfield, Harrison and Trewyn will be consolidated, making the three open schools all pre-K through eighth-grade buildings.

Irving and Kingman also are on the list to close by the end of this school year; the Lincoln-Woodruff site would reopen as a pre-K through eighth-grade campus.

To curb the total number of students at a merged Woodruff-Peoria high school, officials proposed creating a “ninth-grade academy” to be housed at Loucks School for a year until Peoria High could be expanded. That’s provided the renovations at Thomas Jefferson school, closed this year because of a fire, are completed in time, because those students now are at Loucks. Eighth-graders at Hines and Von Steuben schools who would have attended Woodruff or Peoria High would attend Richwoods under the plan.

This plan actually makes sense. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not at all happy about school consolidation, larger class sizes, fewer teachers, or the loss of neighborhood schools. I still think that District 150 administration is top-heavy (and heavy on consultants, aka rehired retirees) and that cuts should start there. But assuming that the school district’s financial situation is as dire as they say it is, and assuming that consolidation is the only way to bridge the funding gap, this makes sense.

High school enrollment is not high enough to support four high schools in Peoria. Geographically, we have one high school to the north (Richwoods), one to the south (Manual), and two that are very close to each other in the middle (Central and Woodruff). It would make sense to close one of the high schools in the middle. Central is the older and more geographically centered of those two schools; it makes sense to keep it.

Reusing the Woodruff/Lincoln campus accomplishes two things: it lowers construction costs because a new primary school won’t need to be built on the campus, and it preserves the building for future use as a high school if enrollments go up again someday. I also like the return to K-8 schools instead of the primary/middle school setup.

However, Terry Knapp and Martha Ross are right. The board needs to solicit and seriously consider ideas from parents, teachers, principals, and staff members — not just make decisions in a vacuum. “It seems like just one or two people are making the decisions,” Martha Ross said, according to the Journal Star. Unfortunately, that’s standard operating procedure for District 150.

Ray LaHood

LaHood gets heat from press over earmarks

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The Washington Post is questioning Barack Obama’s pick for Secretary of Transportation for a familiar reason:

The former Republican congressman chosen by President-elect Barack Obama to direct billions in federal highway spending has been an unapologetic advocate of earmarks, a practice Obama now opposes, and has used his influence to win funding for projects pushed by some of his largest campaign contributors.

It’s interesting to see LaHood’s earmarks reported in the national press. The Post goes on to list how much money in earmarks LaHood secured for Caterpillar, Lakeview, PeoriaNext, and road projects. They also report who his top campaign contributors are and match that list up to how much he secured in earmarks for those contributors. Cat’s contributions are no shock, of course. But I was unaware of these large contributors:

Local road-building companies also have supported LaHood. United Contractors Midwest, led by president James Bruner, is often ranked as his second or third largest donor, and its officials have donated $24,925 to LaHood. Three leading members of the Illinois Asphalt Pavement Association have given more than $60,000 to LaHood.

And:

LaHood also has been criticized for his ties to a longtime Republican state kingmaker in Illinois, William F. Cellini Sr. […] LaHood’s road-building earmarks have highlighted his relationship with Cellini, head of the Illinois Asphalt Pavement Association and other businesses.

Forgive me for being cynical here, but that would certainly explain why LaHood favors road and paved trail projects, and has opposed expanding Amtrak service to Peoria.

Government watchdog groups are not pleased with LaHood’s nomination. They say “LaHood’s selection does not bode well for Obama’s pledge to return transparency to government spending,” according to the Post.

“This guy has history of pork barrel spending and lot of a questionable spending linked to his friends. He’s going to be in charge of funneling hundreds of billions of dollars into local projects . . . and he’s not going to be suddenly changing his stripes tomorrow,” said Leslie Paige of the watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste.

Nevertheless, I’m under no illusion that this will in any way derail LaHood’s confirmation. After all, if Treasury secretary nominee Timothy Geithner can continue to garner praise and support despite the fact that he didn’t pay his taxes for the past four years, one wonders what it would take to disqualify a nominee.

Transportation

The future of transportation

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Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl have a book out called “Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight Without Oil.” I haven’t read the book, but I heard an interview with Perl on this week’s Smart City radio show. It sounds like he and his co-author have an interesting prescription for our transportation systems.

There are lots of different energy forms out there: gasoline, ethanol (corn-based, switchgrass-based, etc.), hydrogen, solar, nuclear, wind, hydroelectric, coal, natural gas, etc. Many of these forms of energy simply aren’t feasible for vehicles (e.g., solar, wind). The ones that are feasible for vehicles would require engines to be modified or changed completely. For instance, if the country wanted to take advantage of hydrogen power, a whole new line of cars would have to be produced that could take that kind of fuel, and fueling stations would have to be built throughout the country. It’s a very expensive proposition.

Perl and Gilbert think the answer is electric motors. They point out that electricity is not a source of energy, but a carrier of energy. By going to electric motors, you move energy production to centralized power plants, which can make use of several different sources of energy. Electricity can be generated at the plant by coal, wind, hydroelectric, nuclear power, solar, etc., or a combination of methods – the point being, it could all be generated domestically, without having to import oil. And it could adapt quickly to new sources of energy – more quickly than changing everyone’s car in America over to some alternative fuel.

Electricity could be delivered to cars through batteries. It could be delivered to trains and even buses through catenary. But whenever the source of fuel changes, it wouldn’t result in having to change vehicles and delivery systems, etc., because they would all run on electricity, so it would be a seamless transition.

Perl and Gilbert had quite a bit to say about trains in particular. Trains are already a very efficient way to transport people and freight. By running the nation’s trains on electricity, Perl & Gilbert believe they can be even more efficient, and serve a larger purpose as well – electricity delivery. If the rail corridors were electrified, they could not only provide power to trains, the excess power could also be distributed throughout the nation for other purposes as well. Rail corridors crisscross the nation, setting up a pretty efficient grid that could be utilized to distribute power between cities and even states.

Hence, the authors think Obama’s infrastructure stimulus should go toward improving and electrifying the nation’s rail system rather than building more highways or airport runways.

What’s funny about this whole discussion is that many cities including Peoria used to have electric trains serving them about a century ago. Peoria had electric streetcars up until the 1940s. And there used to be interurban electric trains that would serve central Illinois called the Illinois Traction System. All those systems have long been dismantled, and it would take a lot of money to recreate them.

This is why I hate seeing infrastructure — for instance, the Kellar Branch rail line — destroyed for no good reason. That corridor could be used for more efficient movement of people and freight through the heart of the city, and such a system will undoubtedly be needed in the future. Pulling it out for a walking path (especially when a walking path and rail corridor can coexist peacefully) is a waste of resources.

On the positive side, work is continuing on a feasibility study of returning Amtrak service to the area. Hopefully we’ll hear the results early in 2009.

The Peoria Chronicle

New theme… maybe

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You may notice that I’ve switched my theme. I’ve been using a WordPress theme called Wu-Coco for, oh I don’t know, maybe three years? I rarely fiddle with the theme on my blog since it can be disorienting, but I felt like maybe this January it could use some freshening up. So now I’m using a theme called Paalam (which I’m told is the Tamil word for “bridge”). Let me know what you think of it. If you all just hate it, I can easily switch back to my old theme.

The main thing I like about this theme is that it’s wider. The columns in Wu-Coco are a bit narrow, especially the main column. Anyway, give it a test run, tell me what you think. Thanks!