“Lindbergh flew the Atlantic without a radio, but we wouldn’t think of going through the produce section without having a little cell phone on our hips.”
–Garrison Keillor
All posts by C. J. Summers
District 150 accused of racial discrimination
The Journal Star reports today that former Peoria Public School Superintendent Kay Royster is suing the school board (and board members Aaron Schock, Vince Wieland, Sean Matheson, and Mary Spangler individually) for racial discrimination.
Read the case for yourself
(13-page PDF file):
Kay Royster Suit against District 150
Everything I read in the suit can be explained based on performance issues rather than racial discrimination (in my opinion), except for this:
In approximately October 2002, less than three months after her contract period began, a meeting of Board Members was organized to discuss terminating Royster. Board members Allen and Martha Ross were not invited to the meeting. Both Allen and Ross are African-Americans.
If that allegation is true, it certainly is damning. Why would Allen and Ross be excluded if it were a mere performance issue? It will be interesting to follow this case and see the evidence presented during trial, assuming the parties don’t settle out of court before then. Royster has demanded a jury trial.
Meanwhile, the children of district 150 continue to be the ultimate losers in this battle. No matter whose fault it is, money that should be going to provide the best education for the students is instead going to lawyers.
Governor to protect Peoria taxpayers before signing PBC bill
I’m not a fan of Gov. Blagojevich, but I was thrilled to read this in today’s paper:
“We just want to make sure that if there’s going to be any talk about an increase in anybody’s property tax, that it can’t just happen by the School Board (or the Public Building Commission). It’s got to be by referendum,” Blagojevich said Friday.
Thus, he’s going to amend the PBC bill (SB2477) that Sen. Shadid asked him to sign to ensure just that. This is a victory for Peoria County taxpayers. The possibility of the school board being able to get around a referendum to increase taxes was the biggest complaint about the PBC bill. The governor’s amendment will make sure taxpayers are protected.
I Hate Driving
In 1912, Lester Wire invented the first American traffic signal in Salt Lake City, Utah, and driving hasn’t been the same since. In the 1950s, they even invented the interstate highway system just to get away from the cursed devices.
Traffic signals are a large part of why I hate driving. And now that Peoria has them posted just about every 100 feet all over the city, I’m starting to think I could travel faster by bicycle.
Stop. Wait. Wait. Arrow. Wait. Go. Stop. Repeat at every intersection.
Now I know why Chevy came out with the “Sprint” back in the ’80s. No vehicle has been more aptly named for city driving, where sprinting is all you can accomplish between stop lights that are apparently timed to keep traffic travelling an average of 20 mph.
The worst lights of all are the ones that change for no reason. For instance, the light at Knoxville and McDonalds, south of McClure. There may not be anyone there at the light either direction in the middle of the night, but it will change just for the heck of it as a lone car approaches from the north. And there you sit, idling, burning precious fossil fuel while trying to convince yourself it would be wrong to run it, even though there’s no one around to see you.
Stop lights add frustration to an experience that is already maddening because you have to (a) suffer interminable road construction and (b) share the road with other drivers. Ever seen car commercials from the ’50s, where having a fine automobile on the open road meant freedom, relaxation, and exploration? Ha! Maybe when there was only one car per family and all the highways were new that was possible. Today, it’s not uncommon for a family to have more vehicles than licensed drivers, and of course all the nation’s highways are in a state of perpetual disrepair. The 1950s’ dream has become the 2000s’ nightmare.
Driving has lost its allure for me. I would be happy riding the bus to work every day, if I didn’t need my car to run job-related errands all week, and if it didn’t take three times as long as driving.  Occasionally, when my car has been in the shop, I’ve taken the bus to and from work, and despite the extra time it took, I found it very relaxing. I could read the paper, plan out my day, and not once be concerned about traffic lights or other drivers.
Hmmm…Â Read the paper, plan the day, be unconcerned about lights or other drivers — that pretty much sums up what the driver in front of me was doing on my way to work today….
Photo credit: UDOT
Quote of the Day
“God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board.”
— Mark Twain
(Hat tip: Mom)
News flash: Shadid okays PBC bill
During a presentation about the Public Building Commission at tonight’s City Council meeting, it was revealed that Senator Shadid advised the Governor to approve SB2477, a bill he had previously asked the Governor not to sign pending public input on the site of District 150’s new school building.
“Senate Bill 2477 would allow the Peoria Public Building Commission the temporary authority to enter into construction contracts with Peoria School District 150.”
Circle the Square
I just love irony.
A mere four years ago, the city, then led by former mayor Dave Ransburg, brought in Andres Duany to come with a plan to revitalize the Heart of Peoria. Duany’s company, DPZ, came to town and got a lot of public input through the charrette process. What did the public want? Something like this:
Urban density. 24-hour activity. Residential component. New Urbanism. The Heart of Peoria Plan.
What did they get? Here’s the approved site plan:
Not dense. 9-5 activity. No residential component. Suburban. Antithetical to the Heart of Peoria Plan.
The irony part? They want us to help pay for it now.
Mayor Jim Ardis and seven former mayors pledged Monday to use their collective star power to help raise at least $16 million for the new regional museum over the next year…. “This isn’t for a group of mayors who have sort of done their thing; it’s for you,” said former Mayor Jim Maloof…. “The single most important project I see, along with the Civic Center (expansion), is this museum,” [former mayor Bud] Grieves said. “Whether you can give $5, $500 or $500,000, everybody ought to step up to the plate.” (Source: Journal Star)
The Mayor’s Circle will be out and about speaking to individuals, community groups and civic organizations gathering grassroots support for Museum Square. (Source: 1470 WMBD)
Pardon my frank language, but that takes a lot of balls. First they design something that’s almost the exact opposite of what residents want, then are shocked — shocked, I say! — to find that the money isn’t rolling in. What to do? Redesign? Listen to residents? Nah! “Let’s try to gather grassroots support for our design! Clearly the problem is that residents can’t see the wisdom of our plan.”
Not to mention the fact that one reason the cost of construction is so high is due to the unwarranted and expensive underground parking deck they want to build — against the recommendation of the Heart of Peoria Commission.
“It’s for you,” Maloof says. With all due respect, if it were for us, it would look like the Heart of Peoria Plan, not the Cat Visitor Center Plan. I’ll save my money, thanks. We’ll all be supporting this boondoggle through our property taxes soon enough.
UPDATE (6/27/06 8:44pm):Â PeoriaIllinoisan has also written an excellent post on this issue.
Ren Park plans go south; but setback could be blessing in disguise
Not long ago there was a lot of optimism regarding Renaissance Park, formerly known as the Med-Tech District. Work is still progressing on the PeoriaNEXT Innovation Center, but the next big project that was supposed to land on West Main street has gone south — to Southtown, that is.
A joint venture that includes OSF St. Francis Medical Center, Methodist Medical Center, and RehabCare of St. Louis, considered building their planned long-term acute-care facility in Ren Park. Being on Main just up the hill from the hospitals seemed like a reasonable location, especially since it’s in an area the city is eager to see developed and might be willing to offer some incentives for locating there.
In fact, according to the Journal Star, the city offered “more than $1 million in financial incentives from the city, including $750,000 in property tax abatement over five years and about $300,000 in sales tax abatement.” But despite all that assistance, and even the willingness of the hospitals to pay a little extra to put their hospital on the west bluff, it still wasn’t financially feasible.
Why not? Because some property owners were asking more for their land than the hospitals were willing to pay. Second District Council Member Barbara Van Auken is quoted as saying, “We cannot get in a mode where the bid developments are being held up by extortion.”
That’s pretty strong language, considering this is simply the workings of the free market. Property owners are free to ask whatever price they want for land they own that someone else wants. It’s not like they’re obligated to take the first offer that comes down the pike. From the Journal Star article, it sounds like some of those property owners — maybe the ones with the high asking prices — aren’t all that anxious to sell.
So I don’t blame property owners for wanting to get the best price they can for their property, especially if they don’t really want to move. But it does seem to hamper the city’s strategy for the Ren Park area. The idea was to fill it up with medical and technology companies — either home-grown or relocated — because of its location close to the hospitals and Bradley University. If the property owners aren’t willing to sell, or have asking prices that make the city’s plans unfeasible, isn’t that a bad omen for the future of this area?
That’s what I asked Barbara Van Auken in an e-mail. She responded, “I can only hope that in the future property owners on West Main are more realistic in their financial expectations. If not, obviously development will be much slower than we had hoped.”
Not knowing which properties were at issue, we can only speculate about how slowly West Main will be redeveloped. But considering the size tract the hospitals are trying to purchase in Southtown (more than six acres), I’m going to guess they were asking for a pretty large chunk of land on Main Street as well, and that most property owners were willing to sell, but there were a few strategic properties that were asking a high price.
If that speculation is somewhat accurate, then it may just be that Ren Park is going to be transformed in bite-size pieces instead of large swaths. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If acres of land are taken up with a few large developments, it would make the area less diverse and, thus, less appealing as a new urbanist neighborhood — one of Ren Park’s big selling points.
It could be that this delay in redevelopment is really a blessing in disguise. Maybe instead of one development making a big splash, we’ll see a lot of smaller projects quietly remake the area without the need for a lot of city incentives. I kind of thought that was how it was supposed to work anyway.
Blogs fill void other city’s newspapers offer
Q: What does the Journal Star and Vonster have in common?
A: They don’t allow comments on their websites.
Oh, sure, you can e-mail them, and they may or may not choose to publish your response. But their interactivity is limited to a more traditional “we’ll talk to you publicly, and you can talk to us privately” approach.
As I was checking out the news on the Bloomington Pantagraph and Springfield’s State Journal-Register, I noticed that, after each news article, there’s a blog-like comments section where readers can self-publish their responses to the news stories. The Journal Star doesn’t offer this benefit to its readers. I thought perhaps it was a corporate policy, but Springfield’s paper is owned by the same corporation as the Journal Star, Copley Press, Inc.
Well, the good news is that we have a robust blogging community here in Peoria that picks up the Journal Star’s slack. Bill Dennis does an excellent job of picking the most interesting news stories out of the paper each day and publishing them as a regular feature (“Today’s News Budget”) on his Peoria Pundit site.
You’d think the Journal Star would rather see all that reader reaction at their own site where readers would be seeing their advertisements and perhaps clicking around to other articles — maybe even stumbling across the subscription page and deciding to get a hard-copy delivered.
Perhaps they don’t understand the technology well enough to add this functionality to their site. Or maybe they don’t want the hassle of monitoring it to keep it safe for families to read. Or maybe they think blogging is just a fad that will run its course and not worth the jump onto the bandwagon.
Whatever the reason, the Journal Star’s website is the poorer for it. But their loss is our gain, so I’m not complaining.
Bad news for New Urbanism
First there was the Civic Center expansion. Then there was the Peoria Museum and Cat Visitor Center.
Next it will be the new District 150 schools.
What am I talking about? Exceptions to the Heart of Peoria Plan, Peoria’s attempt at New Urbanism.
The City’s Efforts
The city has been working hard to develop a form-based code — you know, the kind of code that regulates the form of the built environment, the kind that says you have to make sure your building fits in with the surrounding architecture, construction materials, and setbacks. It’s actually a great idea that will help preserve the character and appeal of the older neighborhoods.
And the best part is that they sought and obtained a lot of input from the most important people: the residents. They held charrettes and got the input of hundreds of ordinary citizens on the kind of built environment they would prefer in these neighborhoods, even working together to reach consensus on those points on which residents disagreed.
The School Board’s Counter-Efforts
Unfortunately, the school district is not interested in the city’s (or the residents’) efforts to revitalize the older neighborhoods. Garrie Allen said at Monday’s school board meeting, “It’s not our job as a school district to clean up blighted areas… We’re not urban renewal people.” That doesn’t sound especially cooperative. In a recent e-mail to a neighborhood activist, another school board member agreed, stating in an even more adversarial tone, “The Board of Education is charged with doing what is best for students, not for neighborhood groups or community redevelopment.”
The law is on the school board’s side. According to legal experts, the 1965 Illinois Appellate Court decision, “Board of Ed., School Dist. 33, DuPage County v. City of West Chicago” (55 Ill.App.2d 401), set the precedent that school districts are not subject to municipal zoning laws or building codes. That means they can build any kind of building they want in whatever style they want, regardless of the city’s form-based codes.
So, hypothetically, if they wanted to put up a 12-story high-rise on the corner of Wisconsin and Frye, they could. Or if they wanted to set up a group of interconnected yurts, they could do that, too. But what they want to do is build a sprawling, single-story, suburban-style school on a large swath of land in the middle of Peoria’s older neighborhoods — the exact type of structure form-based codes are being created to prevent.
Can’t We All Just Get Along?
Just because the school board has the legal authority to do something doesn’t mean they have to disregard the clear wishes of neighbors. And, contrary to the rhetoric of school board members, they don’t have to compromise educational objectives to cooperate with the city’s revitalization efforts.
In Seattle, Washington, when their Whittier Elementary School was wearing out and needed to be replaced, they built a new structure in 1999 that the principal described as “uplifting, effective, safe, and secure.” The new building was also designed to meet these requirements (see if they look familiar):
- Enhance teaching and learning and accommodate the needs of all learners.
- Serve as center of the community.
- Result from a planning/design process involving all stakeholders.
- Provide for health, safety, and security.
- Make effective use of all available resources.
- Allow for flexibility and adaptability to changing needs.
These are the same objectives for the new “birth through eighth” school that District 150 wants to build, but there’s one big difference: the new Whittier School in Seattle looks like this:
Notice it is brick, has an urban setback, is multi-story, and sits on a mere 2.7 acres. It cost somewhere between $9 million and $13.6 million total to build, according to published reports. Yet despite the small footprint, this school “has won praise and prizes, including a Citation of Excellence from the American School Board Journal and an Exemplary Learning Environment award from the American Institute of Architects.” It’s also a Learning By Design 2000 Citation Winner.
And how about the kids — do they like it? Are their spirits lifted, and does it make them want to learn? “‘From the minute the children walked in here,’ [the principal] says, ‘I knew we had succeeded. They love it, and that tells me we did things right.'”
If Seattle can figure out how to meet their educational objectives while still making their building congruous with the neighborhood on a small site, I’m sure Peoria can do the same…. if the school board is willing to be open-minded, that is.