Category Archives: City of Peoria

City of Peoria

Proposals are in for Visitor’s Bureau retail shops

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Remember this story? The City would like there to be retail businesses sharing space in the Riverfront Visitor’s Center (which is housed in Peoria’s oldest commercial building), and issued a request for proposals.

Well, the proposals are in — all three of them:

The City of Peoria and Peoria Area Convention and Visitors Bureau received three proposals for the RiverFront Visitors Center. Mr. Kurt Huber of the Peoria RiverFront Association proposed the establishment of a retail gift shop. The PRA would offer local cultural offerings and items made by the Peoria area industry. They would relocate their office to the RiverFront Visitor Center and also be a ticket outlet for RiverFront and Peoria area events. Ms. Renada Allen of The Giant Cookie would offer fresh baked homemade cookies and hand-dipped ice cream, as well as ice cream novelties and drinks year round. Ms. Lynnette Lee of World On Wheels would offer Segway rentals and tours throughout the city, regular tandem bicycles, and also operate a snack and souvenir shop. The business or businesses selected will be located in the same building with the Peoria Convention and Visitors Bureau.

If you could only pick one, which would you like to see on the riverfront?

City Council, City of Peoria

Council preview: 1/22/08

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Notable agenda items for the Jan. 22 meeting:

  • A new traffic light is being requested for the intersection of Carriage Lane and Allen Road. Carriage Lane is halfway between Northmoor Road and Willow Knolls Drive on Allen.

  • A new strip mall is being proposed for the corner of Knoxville and Alta roads. “No specific site plans or users are specified at this time,” but they’re going to build a 152,400 ft.2 multi-tenant building with a drive-thru. Part of land to be used will need to be annexed to the city. The neighbors don’t like it, of course. They are against the added lights, noise, garbage, drainage, and tree removal, and are concerned that this will lower their property values and quality of life.

  • The owner of Tequila’s in Chillicothe, Javier Munoz, wants to open a Mexican restaurant on Pioneer Parkway in the old Cinco de Mayo’s building. The previous owner of the building did not pay his HRA taxes, and Munoz said he had no affiliation with that owner. This is coming before the council because he’s applying for a liquor license.

  • You’ll be able to drink a glass of local wine from the Mackinaw Valley Winery while dining alfresco on the corner of State and Water if this liquor license is approved.

  • City staff wants to explore possible incentive programs to improve hospitality (i.e., hotel accommodations) downtown. Possible programs include the usual suspects (enterprise zone status, TIF, special service assessment) plus a few new ideas (“historic tax credits for buildings older than 1936,” “Civic Center supported capital expenditures,” “voluntary HRA tax to be used for capital improvements”). This should make for an interesting discussion. What was somewhat amusing was reading the litany of consultants/specialists who have told us we need better hotel accommodations downtown (Johnson Consulting, HVS consultants, PACVB, and a Six Sigma Black Belt team!). It reminds me of how many consultants said the Sears block should have urban density and mixed use.

  • The Zoning Board of Appeals and City Staff want to change the fee structure for variance requests. The board felt that the fees were too high for small, residential requests and was actually discouraging residents from applying for variances and building permits for things like decks, sheds, and fences. The staff did a survey of other communities and based on their findings, have come up with a new fee structure. The proposed fee structure would charge a lower fee for residential variances than non-residential. It would also charge a lower fee if the variance is applied for before construction begins. Sign variances would have to pay a higher fee because “Staff and Board are of the opinion that improper signage pose traffic safety and aesthetics problems.”

  • Once again, the Zoning Commission and City Staff are at odds. The first item is about a request to add an access point for 901 W. Glen Ave. It’s in what’s called an “overlay district” that restricts the number of access points purposely in order to prevent too much traffic congestion. The building owners/tenants share access points with other property owners. The staff isn’t necessarily against putting in another access point, but the petitioner (Michael Landwirth) did not submit a complete application, thus staff could not adequately review the request. Nevertheless, the Zoning Commission approved it on a 5-1 vote (Klise voted no), even though they have no idea what use is being proposed for the subject property. So now the council will have to sort it out.

  • The second split decision is the Missouri Ave. project requested by Floyd Rashid. He wants to have a parcel that contains a vacant house on the corner of Missouri and War Memorial rezoned from residential to neighborhood commercial, or “CN,” under the Land Development Code. The residents on Missouri are opposed, and the Zoning Commission voted 6-0 to deny the rezoning. But City staff points out that it’s consistent with the Comprehensive Plan, is adjacent to existing CN zoning to the east, and under the Land Development Code would be a small-scale development that would be compatible with the residential neighborhood. This should also be an interesting discussion.

Although not on the agenda, no doubt there will be some discussion under new business about what the process will be to replace outgoing City Manager Randy Oliver.

City of Peoria

Oliver resigns

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More later. But for now, here’s the letter of resignation.

UPDATE 9:24 p.m.: Randy Oliver held a press conference today to announce his resignation as Peoria City Manager effective February 15. No council members nor the Mayor were in attendance. When asked why he’s leaving, he responded by saying, “I have other things I want to do.” When asked “what other things,” he said “consulting.” Later in the conference he elaborated, saying that he used to do consulting work and enjoyed it, but it required him to travel a lot. Since he had young children at the time, all the traveling wasn’t so good. Now that his kids are grown, his wife can travel with him when he does consulting work.

He had a lot of very nice things to say about Peoria, about the City’s staff, and even about the Council and Mayor. He said “the power of Peoria is in the people,” and emphasized how much he likes Peoria and will miss the people and neighborhood groups here. He also gave a lot of credit to his staff for his accomplishments, repeating several times that the good things they’ve done have been a “team effort.”

When asked if he was resigning because he would have been fired anyway or because he was being bullied to leave, he said, “the Council and I have a wonderful working relationship,” and, “I never get bullied.” He did allow that you can’t please everyone, certainly not eleven people. He considers an 8-3 vote a landslide. Interestingly, though, he also said during the press conference that it’s his policy to not disagree publicly with the Council.

I asked him about recent reports that he interviewed for a job in McKinney, Texas. I said that often when you’re looking for another job, you don’t want your current employer to know, but then asked, now that he’s tendering his resignation and secrecy is no longer necessary, does he still stand by his story that he has not been seeking employment elsewhere? He’s usually pretty smooth at answering questions, but this one seemed to make him stammer a bit. He said that he’ll have to work with recruiters in the future, and thus, “I don’t want to get into what I may or may not have done and what they may or may not have done.” He said he didn’t think the issue was germane to his resignation announcement.

He’s giving 30 days notice in order to provide time to train an interim and/or permanent replacement, resulting in a “smooth, orderly transition.” He was asked what he felt his biggest accomplishments were. He listed off a few things: the “new doctors’ building on the med school campus,” “annexations that have increased our tax base,” the Southtown property sale, the “noise impounds and boots” (referring to the City’s policy of impounding cars that violate the noise ordinance and booting cars that have unpaid parking tickets), the Museum Square deal (even though it’s not built yet, he pointed to his efforts to get Caterpillar to agree to demolish the Sears block instead of the city), and the special assessment along Radnor and Wilhelm roads.

The question now is, what happens next? Some people think Planning and Growth Director Pat Landes would be a good choice for an interim or possibly permanent City Manager, while others are saying that retired Caterpillar executive Henry Holling is likely to get the nod for the interim. Mayor Ardis said, “We [the council] will meet next week to try and select an interim [City Manager]. I imagine we’ll do a national search similar to what we did when we hired Randy,” for a permanent replacement.

City of Peoria

Oliver to hold news conference today

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I received this e-mail from the city today:

City Manager Randy Oliver will be holding a news conference today (1/16) at 3:00 p.m. in his office.

What do you think this is about? I got an anonymous tip last night that Randy resigned yesterday effective immediately. However, when I e-mailed Randy about it, he told me he is still with the City of Peoria. And, of course, there has been a lot of speculation surrounding him selling his house and a report in the Dallas newspaper that he was a finalist for a city manager job in McKinney, Texas. Throughout it all, he’s steadfastly denied that he’s looking for another job, interviewing anywhere else, or making any plans to leave Peoria.

Maybe this press conference isn’t about any of that. But I can’t imagine what else it would be.

UPDATE: Jonathan Ahl reports that Oliver is in fact resigning.

UPDATE 2: I got another e-mail from the city: “The News Conference has been moved to Council Chambers at 3:00 today instead of the City Manager’s Office.”

City of Peoria, CityLink, Sidewalks

The pedestrian experience: University

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About a month ago, I had to take my car in for some repair at the Honda dealership on Pioneer Parkway. While it was in the shop, I decided to try to get around town without a vehicle. That experiment didn’t last too long.

It was over the weekend, and I needed to go into work on a Saturday. I decided to try taking the bus. It was scheduled to arrive about five minutes to nine, so I started to the bus stop at a quarter till. It doesn’t take but maybe four minutes to walk to the bus stop, and I can see the intersection while I’m walking to it. Before I’ve walked for even two minutes, I see the bus go by. It came early — almost ten minutes early. Since it was a Saturday, the buses only run once an hour.

Well, I only live about two and a half miles from work, and I figured I could walk there in less than an hour, so I started off north on University from Columbia Terrace. I was walking on the west side of the road, down the hill, over the interstate, and up to Nebraska. Looking across Nebraska, I could see that there was no sidewalk next to the cemetery, but there was a sidewalk on the east side of the street, so I crossed at the light.

Now I’m walking north on the east side of University. The sidewalk is narrow — about four feet across — and it abuts the roadway where cars are going by at roughly 40-45 miles per hour. The sidewalk is uneven, crumbling in places, and completely missing on a couple of parcels. If anyone were trying to navigate this in a wheelchair, it would be impossible… and impassible, for that matter.

But the coup de grâce was when I was approaching McClure. Remember, there is no signaled intersection at which to cross University between Nebraska and McClure. City crews were doing some roadwork north of McClure on the east side of the road, meaning I was going to have to cross back to the west side of University to avoid them. There was just one problem — before I could get to the intersection, there was a large orange sign completely blocking the sidewalk. The city crews, in order to alert drivers that there was road work ahead, had put up a large, temporary orange sign right smack in the middle of the sidewalk. The only way around it was to walk in the yard or the street. If a person were in a wheelchair, there would be no way around it at all.

At that point, my mother-in-law happened to be driving by with my kids in her car, and they saw me walking along the road and stopped to pick me up, so my pedestrian experience came to an end.

Conclusion: Peoria really needs to improve its sidewalks and its mass transit service. The buses need to be more frequent, and the sidewalks need to be repaired and maintained — and made ADA-compliant. The city is starting to focus on the sidewalk issue, and in fact just had a policy session about sidewalks last night. CityLink, meanwhile, is looking at adding more destinations. I think it would be better for them to focus on improving their bus stops and the frequency of their buses.

City Council, City of Peoria

Deferred items are back

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Also on Tuesday’s agenda are two items that were deferred from last year:

  1. A recommendation to deny a gate blocking a public street between The Cove of Charter Oak (new McMansion development) and Vinton Highlands.
  2. A recommendation to change the city’s code so that Elliott’s strip club on University can get a liquor license. This is being recommended because of a recent court case that has led the city to believe that they are vulnerable to litigation if they don’t change the code.
City of Peoria, Heart of Peoria Plan

Traffic consultant on Tuesday’s council agenda

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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.

City of Peoria

Is Peoria a sinking ship?

77 Comments

Peoria LogoEditor’s note: “George” wrote this as a comment on a previous post and garnered some response, but many readers may have missed it, so I’m reprinting it here as its own post. Let me know what you think of George’s assessment of Peoria:

Peoria may be a sinking ship and I think the Titanic is a good analogy. The affluent are dancing merrily without knowing (caring?) about the underlying problems the ship is facing. The ride seems fine from their vantage point- all is well. If they were to mix with the poor or question why we haven’t had any population growth in fifty years-they would certainly sense danger ahead.

I would argue Peoria has been sinking in a more gradual way compared to the Titanic, but we are sinking.

Look at the facts:

• Peoria is no longer the second largest city- we are the seventh. Obviously the growth cells have not produced the population growth or revenue streams projected. The Civic Center and Ball Park (while nice and impressive) also-have not produced the spin off downtown renaissance they promised. I would argue the Museum project is similarly flawed.

• Our largest school district, District 150, is now primarily serving minority and impoverished students. Superintendent Hinton has no prior superintendent experience and the current school board is insistent on maintaining the status quo.

• Racial tension in Peoria seems to be at an all time high and there doesn’t seem to be a solution in sight- unless you really believe prayer is a solution, and if so, that notion may be part of the problem. Haven’t Peorians been praying daily for generations and with what success?

• Our tax base is not sufficient to pay for necessary city services, much less provide money for enhancing public space, professional development or providing other amenities needed to attract scalable enterprises. The newly built residential housing units (north of Pioneer Parkway) and those planned for the future will never ever support themselves. When you do the math you will discover we are annexing ourselves into destitution. If you disagree then please explain why have there been increased city budget cuts and why are we likely looking at higher city taxes in the years to come?

• Developers claim they are simply responding to the market as they build ugly development after ugly development. Meanwhile, the most desirable cities, regardless of size, do just the reverse. The best cities drive the market by laying out their vision and getting it built. They do not take what ever is brought before them (schlock strip malls and cookie-cutter subdivisions) – they do not act desperate. Peoria has behaved desperate beginning with Dick Carver’s administration and it has become worse through the terms of Maloof, Grieves, and Ransburg. The precedent has been set and with the current set of developers it appears impossible for Ardis to reverse this trend. Our current City Council members are weak and lack vision- and so it goes.

• Young talented people are not flocking to Peoria because it is not the type of place they want to live. Some think we need more late night bars, but 24/7 does not mean having a plethora of sleazy bars and taverns. We do not have the appropriate housing destiny, enough downtown retail, adequate transportation options, and variety of downtown restaurants to make Peoria an exciting place to live. Good grief- we do not have a grocery store, dry cleaner, or drug store within walking distance of the city center. If you want to go to breakfast in the city where do you go? If you want well planned green space in the city center where do you go? Peoria generally has done a bad job of creating and maintaining a great place.

• Additionally ask yourself: How is life for our pre-teens and senior citizens who are unable to drive? Social scientists judge a city’s quality of life by how easily the young and old move around independently. When your pre-teens want to do something or go somewhere independently- where do they go and how do they get there? Are they walking out their doors and taking off on their own? No, most likely you are driving them someplace. Our children and our elderly citizens are forced to be dependent on someone with a car. In most cases they can not comfortably or safely walk or use alternate transportation to have fun or take care of their daily needs.

I think we are at risk of becoming the next East St. Louis or Detroit if the citizens do not start paying attention and demand that the City Manager and elected officials start doing their best to create a safe and great place to live. Keep a tally of their votes on issues- they repeatedly say they are for neighborhood revitalization but their votes prove otherwise.

If Randy Oliver leaves Peoria it is no great loss. He is not a visionary- but neither are members of the city council. Ok I give- pray for us!

— “George,” December 30th, 2007

City of Peoria

That is one good recruitment firm

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Randy Oliver almost got another job without even realizing it. I don’t know about you, but I find it fascinating that a guy can be a finalist for a job in another city simply by having his name in with a recruitment firm. No interview. No knowledge he was even being considered. But, theoretically at least, he could have been chosen as the new city manager of McKinney, Texas.

What would have happened then? Would the recruitment firm have come to Mr. Oliver’s house (well, apartment, I guess) ala Publisher’s Clearing House with a camera crew, balloons, and a large foam-core-mounted W-2 form? “Surprise! You’re the new city manager of McKinney, Texas!”

Oliver is kind of like the bizarro-Ray-LaHood. LaHood, you’ll recall, was clearly not a finalist for the Bradley University president position, but claimed he was still potentially in the running. Oliver was a finalist for the Texas job, but claims he knew nothing about it.

According to WCBU (via Jonathan Ahl’s blog), “McKinney’s Media Manager confirms Oliver interviewed for the position about two weeks before the holidays.” But Oliver told the Journal Star he didn’t interview, although he had previously admitted to being in Texas at the time. I am not going to call anyone a liar here. But I will say it’s the darndest coincidence I’ve ever seen. Perhaps this recruitment firm is like the Impossible Missions Force and orchestrated a very elaborate scheme — utilizing hypnosis, disguises, and holograms — to make McKinney officials think that this interview took place.

One thing is for sure, though. I need to get my name in to that recruitment firm. Maybe they can make me a finalist as a new editorial writer for the Journal Star.