Category Archives: City of Peoria

City Council, City of Peoria, Peoria Police

Police want 5:00 security start time at Adams Supermarket

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Adams Supermarket owner Ahmad Abud (aka Hussein Alsalahi) insisted that his South Side grocery store needed to sell liquor to be successful, and was willing to agree to a number of conditions in order to secure his liquor license. One of those conditions was having an off-duty Peoria Police officer act as a security guard from 2 p.m. to midnight.

Sales haven’t been as good as Abud thought they would be, so he’s looking at reducing costs — and one of those costs is the off-duty police officer. He wants to only have an officer working security from 8 p.m. to midnight, and he has the support of First District Councilman Clyde Gulley.

The Police Department, however, thinks that won’t be sufficient and is recommending a third option — that the police security officer start at 5 p.m. They further recommend that this be on a 12-month trial basis, and that if there’s any trouble, the full 2 p.m. to midnight condition be reinstated.

Gulley and others will complain that this is unfair because it’s not required of any other grocery stores with liquor licenses. That’s a valid complaint. But on the other hand, Abud did agree to it. If he thought it was unfair, he should have stated that early in the process, like when he appeared before the Liquor Commission initially or when his license came up for approval before the council. Since he enthusiastically agreed to the conditions, and is now trying to get out of one of them, it makes people nervous that he will continue to chip away at the conditions until his store is nothing more than a glorified liquor store.

City of Peoria, Southern Gateway

South siders not supporting supermarket

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The Journal Star is reporting that Adams Supermarket isn’t doing so well. Sales are slow, and expenses are high. So store owner Ahmad Abud (aka Hussein Alsalahi) is wanting to lower his costs.

A big cost is the city’s requirement that he hire an off-duty city police officer at $30 an hour to act as a security guard from 2:30 p.m. to midnight, when the store closes. He wants to change that to 8 p.m. to midnight.

The big story in the media is that he wants to lower the requirements. But to me the bigger question is: Why is the south side not supporting this store?

Here’s one possibility. Billy Dennis visited the store and reports that the place stinks like rotten meat and has no fresh vegetables. If that’s the case (and I don’t know if it’s a chronic problem, or if it was a fluke the time Billy visited), then Abud is never going to get loyal customers, and he’ll be back regularly asking for relief from other regulations to which he enthusiastically agreed just a few months back.

Perhaps another health inspection is in order.

City Council, City of Peoria

Gateway building for sale

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Sell It!

The City Manager reports that the Budget Committee has “requested that an RFP be issued for the sale or lease of the Gateway Building. The RFP will be issued in October with response due in early December.”

This is great news. It’s a pretty building and it looks nice on the riverfront, but it’s certainly not an essential service. The money the city spends on utilities, upkeep, and other expenses for the Gateway building could be better spent elsewhere.

Kudos to the council for being willing to put it up for sale.

City Council, City of Peoria

Policy session planned for tomorrow night

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Tomorrow night, October 2, the Peoria City Council will have a special meeting to discuss the use of Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds for projects such as ornamental street lights in the Orchard District. Since it’s during the regular council meting time, I wonder if it will be broadcast on WCBU and/or Insight channel 22. Anyone know?

Here’s the official agenda:

SPECIAL CITY COUNCIL AGENDA
POLICY/WORKSHOP SESSION
CITY HALL, COUNCIL CHAMBERS
6:15 P.M.

ROLL CALL
INVOCATION AND PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE
PETITIONS, REMONSTRANCES & COMMUNICATIONS

POLICY SESSION
ITEM NO. 1 Communication from the City Manager and Director of Public Works Regarding a POLICY SESSION Pertaining to SPECIAL ASSESSMENT GUIDELINES Regarding ORNAMENTAL STREET LIGHTING and the USE of CDBG FUNDS with These Projects.

EXECUTIVE SESSION
ADJOURNMENT

City Council, City of Peoria, Peoria Police

4 a.m. liquor license proposals flawed

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I’m not inherently opposed to expanding the 4 a.m. liquor license area, which is on the council’s agenda for tonight. But the two proposals on the table — one from the liquor commission and one from the police department — have flaws.

The proposal from the liquor commission is a transparent attempt to grant 4 a.m. liquor licenses to two bars that cater to African American patrons. The reason is because black patrons perceive they are being excluded from current 4 a.m. bars by those bars’ dress codes. To me, if there is discrimination taking place, then the city should deal with that issue head-on, rather than try to resolve it through de facto segregated liquor licenses.

The proposal from the police department almost makes sense, except that it excludes the area bordered by Kumpf, Adams, Oak, and the river for no apparent reason. If you’re going to extend the area and make it easier to patrol, why not make the area contiguous? Is it to exclude certain bars that are located within the excluded area? The other flaw is that, if the whole point of extending the liquor license area is to include two African American bars, and those bars are not included in the police department’s proposal, what is accomplished? Nothing.

I recommend rejection of both proposals. The 4 a.m. area should be left as is for now. And I further recommend a full investigation into whether there is racial discrimination occurring at current bars with 4 a.m. licenses. If so, those bars should have their licenses revoked.

City Council, City of Peoria

Townhouses on riverfront deserve consideration

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At first glance, putting urban townhouses along the riverfront between the Riverplex and Spring Street seems like a crazy idea. But is it so crazy that it just might work?

I stopped by the Economic Development department and took a look at their proposal for this stretch of land. It would only displace about 100 feet of park land, which they plan to replace — yes replace — by using sediment dredged from the river to extend the shoreline. Thus, no park land would actually be lost. It would cause minimal disruption to the park, requiring only that the sand volleyball courts and Constitution Garden be relocated a short distance away and that a small portion of the bike path be rerouted. The city owns the land, one of the few parks not owned by the Peoria Park District.

The townhouses and home listings would face outward toward the park and the river, and a new road would be built (it could just be an extension of Water Street, or it could be given a new name like Riverfront Drive) between the Riverplex parking lot and Spring Street. The city itself wouldn’t build the townhouses or the road, but would put out bids to developers instead. The idea is to get private dollars reinvested downtown.

The development would not be merely residential. It would be mixed use. So the ground level of the complexes would include a retail component which could include things like a deli, restaurant, grocery store, etc.

There would be an added bonus to this development, too. It could help the city with its combined sewer overflow problem. The combined sewer intercept runs underneath the park. If the city were to put in a larger intercept pipe or additional pipe storage, it would have to dig up some of that land at the city’s sole expense. But if a private developer were building a new neighborhood there, the excavation costs could be shared to the city’s and developer’s mutual benefit.

Reaction to the idea on the Journal Star and Peoria Pundit sites has been negative because of two things: Taft Homes and PMP Fermentation. So that was one of my first questions when I visited the Economic Development Department.

The city has been in contact with the Peoria Housing Authority, and the PHA is planning to replace Taft Homes with River-West-style housing in the future. They may be able to move up implementation of that project to roughly coincide with the building of townhouses along the riverfront. As far as crime is concerned, the argument is that having up to 200 new residential homes will make the area safer because it will provide more “eyes on the street” in that part of town. It will combat the culture of “I didn’t see nothin'” that is prevalent among lower-income residents.

PMP Fermentation is owned by Fuso Chemical Co. of Osaka, Japan, and within the past year they’ve shut down half of their physical plant. They closed two buildings and laid off 16 workers in September 2006 because “the company can buy its chemical products cheaper from China rather than produce them in Peoria,” according to Journal Star archives. This has mitigated the impact PMP has on the livability of the area.

Furthermore, there’s a bit of inconsistency in arguing against townhouses here, but in favor of park land. If crime and industry are so terrible down there, one would think no one would want to play volleyball, ride bikes, walk around Constitution Garden, etc., in that area of town. Yet people do. Wouldn’t townhouses further improve the area? And couldn’t it be the start of more renewed investment on the near north side?

I think the idea has some merit and should be given fair consideration. I’m looking forward to Director Craig Hullinger’s presentation to the City Council this evening. I’m sure he’ll get plenty of tough questions about the location and its challenges.

City Council, City of Peoria

City recommends keeping Fleet Management in house

City Manager Randy Oliver has been looking for ways to save the city money, much to the chagrin of some council members. He suggested outsourcing the city’s Fleet Management services — the mechanics who maintain and repair the city’s many and various vehicles, like fire engines and snow plows. This caused several council members to balk. It also made for a very stressful situation for the mechanics whose jobs were on the line and their families.

That may be coming to an end Tuesday night. The City Manager is recommending that Fleet Management be kept in-house. The reason? It’s not worth the money that would be saved by outsourcing (emphasis mine below):

Cities contract out services generally to reduce costs and/or improve services. Seeking proposals serves as a measure to compare costs between in-house and private service delivery. While a change in service delivery may be justifiable on the basis of any cost savings, as a practical matter, however, the cost savings should be sufficient to justify the organizational change.

The proposals from Penske Trucking and First Vehicle Services are both excellent proposals and would exceed all the City’s fleet maintenance requirements and provide a higher level of service. Based on the financial analysis, however, the improved services do not justify the additional cost in dollars and the organizational disruption caused by changing to a private contractor.

Thus, the recommendation is to reject all bids and keep things in-house. I can’t help but think that this could have gone either way, and what tipped it toward staying in-house was at least partially influenced by all the push-back from certain council members. Nevertheless, I’m glad to see the mechanics won’t be losing their jobs (assuming the council approves this action, which I have no doubt they will) and this will maybe cause considering some alternative ways to use vehicles, like marketing and advertising (somebody, call Fleet Wrap HQ, it’s finally the time!).

City Council, City of Peoria, Peoria Public Schools

Meeting of the minds reveals division

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The Peoria City Council and District 150 Board of Education met at Valeska-Hinton School Tuesday evening to reopen the lines of communication that had become strained over the past seven years. It’s easy to see why — the two bodies are working from different philosophies of school design.

District 150

First, we’ll look at District 150’s point of view. School Board President David Gorenz and District Superintendent Ken Hinton kicked off the meeting by giving a “State of the District” address. In the course of that presentation, it was explained that the single biggest challenge the school district has right now is poverty. Seventy percent of the students in District 150 are considered to be at poverty level, and that’s just the overall number. Some schools have a poverty rate over 90%, leading Gorenz to observe that our schools are more segregated today than they’ve ever been — not racially, but economically.

Furthermore, there is a strong negative correlation between poverty and achievement; i.e., as poverty goes up, achievement goes down. This was compellingly illustrated using a scatter chart.

The School Board concludes that the course of action they need to take is to “strive to eliminate high-poverty schools.” They want to accomplish that by offering “school choice” within the district through the use of larger magnet schools. Each school would have a “strong core curriculum with specialized programs at individual schools.” Specialized programs are things like math/science/technology, fine arts, Edison, career tech, university lab, and language studies. Parents would have the choice of sending one child to the school that specializes in Fine Arts, and another to an Edison school, etc.

This would allow children from wealthier areas of town to attend school in poorer areas and vice versa. The model for this strategy is Valeska-Hinton Early Learning Center. Superintendent Hinton mentioned that there’s still a waiting list to get into that school, and that they at one time even lost their Title I funding because the level of poverty had dropped so low — even though the school is located in a high-poverty area.

City of Peoria

The council was not unanimous in their opinions. Several of them simply asked for more data and information so they could study the issue more closely. First District Councilman Clyde Gulley was in total agreement with the school board, and said that not only was Valeska-Hinton a success, but so was the development that grew up around it (the Southtown urban renewal project begun in the ’80s). He feels that it should be the model for the city to follow.

But several council members felt that neighborhood schools should be the model in the city’s older neighborhoods, and they pointed to Whittier School as the model that should be replicated. Strong neighborhood schools stabilize neighborhoods, they argued. Second District Councilwoman Barbara Van Auken explained, “We’re not going to have middle class families moving into areas without strong neighborhood schools,” and that busing kids into and out of high poverty areas of town isn’t a true solution, nor does it fit with the city’s vision for its older neighborhoods.

Mayor Jim Ardis didn’t mince any words when he said, “We acknowledge there already is school choice and one of those choices is the one to leave,” and “we need to change the choice that we’re seeing.”

My Take

The School Board never misses an opportunity to remind everyone that “it’s all about the kids.” This is usually used as a trump card during discussions to imply that all opposing opinions are merely self-interested whereas the school board is focused on the children and what’s best for them. But I question how “eliminating poverty schools,” per se, helps the children individually. It doesn’t make their parents any more involved — in fact, it could potentially mean the school is too far away for a poor parent to be able to attend parent/teacher conferences and other events. It doesn’t change the negative influences in the neighborhood where the student spends his or her non-school time. In fact, if they lose a neighborhood school because of the consolidation, the neighborhood is further destabilized, which is arguably worse for the students. On the other hand, I can see how it would help the school in the aggregate — by diluting the number of poor students in each school, you can raise overall achievement on standardized tests. But how does it help those poor children individually?

Superintendent Hinton mentioned several things the school board is doing to try to reach individual children (education geared to needs of the individual student, build upon volunteer partnerships to provide a mentor to each student, teach behavioral and social skills, etc.). These are excellent interventions that can all be done in neighborhood schools just as easily as they can be done in community magnet schools. The only advantage of the magnet schools appears to be to improve school aggregate test scores so the district can meet Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) as defined under the No Child Left Behind Act.

Next Steps

The school board and city council will be establishing two subgroups that will work on these two issues: (1) The effect of choice/magnet schools on District 150 and neighborhoods, and (2) community school sitings and facilitating community development around them.

City Council, City of Peoria, Peoria Public Schools

City Council and School Board to meet

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AgreementAs I was reading the Word on the Street column this morning, it reminded me that there’s an historic meeting coming up tomorrow night. The Peoria City Council and the District 150 School Board will sit down and try to establish a more positive working relationship. Here’s the official notice and agenda:

NOTICE AND AGENDA

NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN THAT A SPECIAL JOINT MEETING OF THE PEORIA PUBLIC SCHOOL DISTRICT #150 SCHOOL BOARD AND THE CITY COUNCIL OF PEORIA, ILLINOIS, WILL BE HELD ON TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2007, BEGINNING AT 6:00 P.M. AT VALESKA HINTON EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION CENTER, 800 W. FIFTH AVENUE, PEORIA, ILLINOIS, AS FOLLOWS:

ROLL CALL

INVOCATION & PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE

INTRODUCTION Dr. David Gorenz, President, of District #150 School Board and Mayor Jim Ardis

ITEM NO. 1 Presentation and Discussion Regarding State of the District, Vision for Our Future, and Ideas to Address Goals.

ADJOURNMENT

Exciting stuff, huh? It will be interesting to hear the presentations from each side. In the past, the school board has asked the city for money and support while simultaneously telling the city to butt out whenever they made any suggestions or requests of the school board. Hopefully, this will open up a new chapter of true cooperation — one where the school board does some giving and not just taking.

Arts Partners, City of Peoria

ArtsPartners makes its case for public funding

ArtsPartners LogoCouncilmen Bob Manning and Ryan Spain listened to ArtsPartners representatives make the case for continued public funding of their organization this morning at City Hall. Although the meeting was called by the mayor, he did not attend. Instead, Dr. Peter Couri led the meeting.

Couri gave a brief history of ArtsPartners and then turned it over to others in attendance to give their views on the importance of continued funding.

Julie Russell, past president of ArtsPartners, distributed an official statement (PDF) that answers many of the objections that have been raised. One point she stressed was that ArtsPartners relies largely on city subsidy so as not to compete for donations with other arts groups.

George Brown, Department of Theatre Arts Chair at Bradley University, stated that he believed the funding was not only necessary, it wasn’t enough. He cited a report released by Americans for the Arts in May of this year (titled “Arts and Economic Prosperity“) which states, “the nonprofit arts and culture industry generates $166.2 billion in economic activity every year — $63.1 billion in spending by organizations and an additional $103.1 billion in event-related spending by their audiences.” He argued that the arts don’t just provide “quality of life” in Peoria, but have economic impact as well.

Brent Lonteen, Executive Director of the Peoria Area Convention and Visitors Bureau (PACVB), explained that PACVB does not rely exclusively on city funding, but is a member-based organization. Nevertheless, they allow any arts group affilitated with ArtsPartners to utilize PACVB services because they recognize the arts community is struggling financially. He said the suggestion to combine PACVB with ArtsPartners did not originate with the bureau, but that they are willing to help in any way the city and/or ArtsPartners would request.

Manning explained that the reason for the meeting was to explore whether giving $75,000 to ArtsPartners is the best way to leverage those funds, or if there might be a better way, such as giving funding to arts groups directly. He also said there was some confusion over whether this was originally meant to be a permanent subsidy or simply seed money to get ArtsPartners established.

Spain was a strong supporter of continued funding, saying he thought the work of ArtsPartners was critical to the economic health of the community.

Several different funding ideas were suggested. One was combining ArtsPartners with the PACVB; another was to bring it under the Heartland Partnership umbrella. Another attendee suggested establishing a Public Arts Commission and funding it directly from the city budget (similar to the way the Municipal Band is funded) instead of receiving funding through HRA taxes.

The meeting lasted about an hour. ArtsPartners Executive Director Suzette Boulais attended but did not speak during the meeting. The city council will decide whether and how to continue funding ArtsPartners at their October 9 meeting.