From the Journal Star’s breaking news feed:
With no discussion, the Illinois Pollution Control Board voted 4-0 today to reject an appeal filed by Peoria Disposal Co.
Congratulations to the County Board and all the activists who worked to oppose this landfill expansion. Here’s a press release from Peoria Families Against Toxic Waste: Continue reading Peoria County Board vindicated in PDC expansion denial
Peoria County is looking for one. Jonathan Ahl is reporting on his blog that the new $300,000 Peoria County morgue was supposed to open a year ago, but has been held up by the county’s inability to find a forensic pathologist who would work for the salary the county is offering.
It’s a shame. Here they have a huge empty building that people are just dying to get into…. Sorry, I couldn’t resist….
(If you’d like to comment on this story, please go to Jonathan’s blog.)
Kudos to Peoria County for quickly cleaning up all the garbage on an abandoned portion of Big Hollow Road and sealing off access to it! Here are a couple of pictures showing the cleaned road and the barricades blocking access:
Also, kudos to HOI News for drawing attention to this situation and following up with city and county officials. This was a win for everyone. Hopefully the filthy pigs who dumped their garbage there in the first place will stay away now.
HOI News has followed up on the dumping that’s occurred on an abandoned portion of Big Hollow Road. It turns out that the abandoned slab is not a city road, but a county road. This, despite the fact that it’s located within the city. How confusing. Nevertheless, my apologies to the City for any disparaging remarks I may have made about the city’s code enforcement or litter-clean-up efforts on this stretch.
The county sounds a little reluctant to clean up the mess:
“We ask that the people maintain don’t throw their garbage on there. We do at times take some of the larger things out as a rule- we don’t- we’re so busy with maintaining the roadways we don’t really have the time or people to invest in proper clean up,” said Peoria County engineer Tom McFarland.
They also stated that they were considering sealing off the road. I think that would be a good idea. There’s no reason to give easy access to a highly-secluded, abandoned roadway. It just invites illegal dumping and possibly other undesirable activity.
I think someone mentioned this in the comments section of my last post on this topic, and I couldn’t agree more: the real villains in this case are the filthy pigs who dumped this garbage back there in the first place. I wish they could be caught and fined, or — even better — be given back their garbage, preferably on their living room floor.
Local resident Judy Stalling has been a vocal opponent of Peoria Disposal Company’s (PDC) application to increase the size of their hazardous waste landfill. This morning, she sent this message which found its way to area neighborhood associations:
Re: PDC’s Hazardous Landfill Negotiations
Staff from the Peoria County Board has been negotiating secretly with a few members of Peoria Families, Sierra Club and PDC to reach an agreement on PDC’s operation of its hazardous materials landfill.
Neither the content nor the reason for these negotiations has been made clear to the public.
Please call Bill Prather, Peoria County Board chairman, and request that a PUBLIC HEARING be held on any such agreement BEFORE the Board is asked to vote on it.
Bill Prather 274-2907 H 579-2206 W
Judy
This is a weird message, don’t you think? I don’t believe there’s any law being broken here, is there? I mean, “staff from the Peoria County Board” are not subject to the Open Meetings Act, are they? And the other parties are all private, so they have no requirement to meet openly either, right? And whatever is negotiated will have to come before the Peoria County Board, which means it will be published ahead of time on the agenda and discussed in an open meeting, right? So, why do we need another public hearing? Besides, the anti-landfill people are represented, so I’m not sure what the worry is.
Left unexplained is how Stalling knows these meetings are going on and why she objects to them.
Well, I just tried to contact my County Board member, James Thomas, based on the info on the Peoria County website and received the following response:
Your message
To: jthomas@icc.edu
Subject: County Public Safety Tax
Sent: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 11:41:41 -0600did not reach the following recipient(s):
jthomas@icc.edu on Wed, 28 Mar 2007 11:40:51 -0600
The e-mail account does not exist at the organization this message was sent to. Check the e-mail address, or contact the recipient directly to find out the correct address.
smtp.icc.edu 5.1.1
Nice. I suppose I can call, if that’s even correct. Nevertheless, anyone have an updated e-mail address for James Thomas?
On November 6, 1996, the Journal Star reported, “Peoria County voters approved a quarter-cent public safety sales tax Tuesday to pay for jail and warning siren improvements. With 96 percent of precincts in, the measure had 61 percent of the vote. The tally was 37,194 for the tariff and 24,047 against.” The tax went into effect January 1, 1998, and was expected to generate $3.3 million every year.
I wonder how many of those voters would have voted for that tax if they knew then what we know now: it apparently only applies to that part of Peoria County outside the City of Peoria’s corporate limits.
The City Council tonight deferred for one month a request to purchase a new Outdoor Warning System control system for $160,008.15. Why wouldn’t this system be paid for by the County out of that public safety tax? That’s what the City Council would like to know. According to City staff, the county won’t pay for it because the County Administrator said they won’t.
That’s right. Even though the City has almost 62% of the County’s population (112,907 City residents out of 182,328 total residents for the County), and we’re all paying the .25% County Public Safety Tax every time we buy any general merchandise in the City, the County thinks they shouldn’t have to use that revenue to purchase a new control system for our warning sirens, even though we live in Peoria County — even though that was the stated purpose of the tax when it was approved by the voters.
So, all of us City dwellers are already paying for warning sirens, but that money is only being spent by the County Board outside our city limits. Thus, we’re being asked to pay $160K more for the same service within our city limits!
Frankly, that’s an outrage. The City of Peoria is part of Peoria County, and we should be getting the services we’re paying for. We’re not. And it’s not just the warning sirens.
Remember the other thing the public safety tax was supposed to pay for? Warning siren improvements and…. A new county jail. Right. And in addition to City of Peoria residents paying the public safety tax for that, Peoria Police have to pay the County a booking fee of $20 for every inmate they want to house in that jail — the jail that we helped pay for! This last came up in the summer of 2005 when Randy Oliver suggested the City stop paying said fee. Well, we’re still paying it.
Enough is enough. Either city residents should get to stop paying the public safety tax, or we should get some benefit from it. But the current system is broken.
I encourage all of my readers to contact their County Board representative — or all the County Board members, if you want — and ask them to start providing the City the services it deserves for the money we’re paying in sales taxes for public safety. Here is a link to the County Board members and their contact information.
From a press release I received today:
Peoria Families Against Toxic Waste
(309) 339-9733
www.notoxicwaste.orgJanuary 22, 2007
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.
Please announce the following:
PEORIA DISPOSAL COMPANY HOLDING PUBLIC MEETING ON EXPANDING LANDFILL WITHOUT COUNTY APPROVAL — FRIDAY, JANUARY 26 AT 9AM!
PEORIA FAMILIES AGAINST TOXIC WASTE AND HEART OF ILLINOIS SIERRA CLUB ENCOURAGE EVERYONE CONCERNED TO ATTEND!
Peoria Disposal Company (PDC), owner/operator of the hazardous waste landfill located at 4349 Southport Rd in Peoria, just west of Pleasant Valley Middle School and the Sterling Avenue business corridor, is holding a legally required public meeting on Friday, January 26 at 9am, as part of their application to the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA) for a Class 3 permit modification. PDC is claiming they are a manufacturer of the waste, because they mix inert substances with some of the hazardous waste, in an attempt to circumvent state law requiring local governmental approval of an expansion.
Peoria Families Against Toxic Waste (PFATW) and Heart of Illinois Sierra Club (HOISC) will be in attendance. We strongly encourage all citizens of Peoria County to attend as well. Come and learn about PDC’s maneuver to bypass the County Board’s decisive “no” vote. Public questions about the PDC Class 3 permit modification will be allowed at the meeting:
Friday, January 26, 2007
9:00am
PDC Laboratory
2231 W. Altorfer Drive, PeoriaWe encourage concerned citizens to go to www.notoxicwaste.org for more information and directions.
Additional information:
PDC is asking the Illinois EPA to reclassify their hazardous waste landfill as a generator of waste rather than a regional pollution control facility, so they won’t need county approval to dump millions more tons of hazardous waste over our water source and upwind of Peoria. In fact, the EXACT same engineering drawings and plans put before the County in the expansion application have been submitted to IEPA for this Permit modification request. Peoria Disposal Company spent over $1,000,000 trying to convince the Peoria County Board to allow them to expand their hazardous waste site, but the County voted no based on the evidence. Now PDC is trying to claim they don’t need the county’s approval anyway. “It’s our backup plan,” said PDC attorney Brian Meginnes in a recent Peoria Journal Star article.Other issues:
PFATW and HOISC are watchful of the four fronts PDC is pursuing with their hazardous waste landfill, including the appeal to the Illinois Pollution Control Board regarding the County Board’s denial of the PDC expansion request, and PDC’s recent application to the US EPA to take in increased levels of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), despite having said during the 2006 hearings that this was not their intention. PCBs are known carcinogens banned from production by the US Congress in 1977.PDC has also applied to the Illinois EPA for a renewal of their operating permit, a renewal that includes two new 32,000 gallon steel silos and a new solids building with 9 underground holding tanks of 20,000 gallons each for their waste processing.
See our website, www.notoxicwaste.org, for our “Four Fronts” chart with more information on PDC’s latest activities.
Background on our group
PFATW is an ever-growing group of mainstream citizens who live and work in Peoria County and are concerned about the health and safety of our families. Like many other local grassroots organizations, the medical community and thousands of Peoria County citizens who voiced their strong concerns during the 2006 expansion hearings, we oppose Peoria Disposal Company’s (PDC) proposed expansion of its hazardous waste landfill so close to our homes as well as the new threat of toxic PCBs. We are compelled and unified by a common sense concern about the health and safety of our children. We seek to do what we see as our duty as concerned residents: to inform our neighbors and impact the public process.
We believe the long term negative affects of continued hazardous waste dumping right on the edge of our city are unknown and not worth the risk to our families’ health and investment in our good communities. Additionally, safety claims are unproven. Long-term benefits to our community are very low to non-existent. For these reasons we oppose the expansion and acceptance of PCBs.
We are citizens, taxpayers, parents and grandparents and we seek to protect our health and the health of our children.
Please go to www.notoxicwaste.org for more information.
Jennifer Davis reports in a front-page story today that the city can’t use their fancy new electronic voting machines for the council primary and election because they can’t handle so-called “bullet voting”:
The new electronic voting machines that the city spent millions on last year can’t count cumulative votes at the precincts, which is required by state law.
Peoria has a rather unique style of cumulative voting that only occurs every four years during at-large council elections. Voters can give all five votes to one candidate; or one each to five; or some combination in between. Some say it is that so-called “bullet provision” which makes our cumulative voting unlike any other nationwide.
Before the city and county went to electronic voting machines, they used a paper ballot which was counted with optical scan equipment. The difference between the county and the city, however, was that the county counted the votes at the precinct level — that is, they had counting machines at each polling place — whereas the city took all the ballots to the main election office and counted them all centrally. The Help America Vote Act (HAVA) requires that votes be counted at the precinct level, not centrally.
So, the question I have (and I haven’t called anyone to ask) is what happened to the machines the county used to use? Did they sell them? If they still have them, are they capable of counting cumulative votes? If so, could the city borrow them for their city council election, if there are enough to cover all the polling places?
I just wonder if this is a case where the city’s cooperation with the county would help, instead of having to go to the state to get special legislation passed.
I also wonder why this is just being discovered now, mere months before the city council election. Who dropped the ball on that one? One would think the election commission would have had the ability to count cumulative votes as a basic requirement of any new voting machine they considered; even if they couldn’t find any machines that offered that functionality, why was no back-up plan put in place? Now, all their hopes are pinned on passing emergency legislation.
The Journal Star reports today that “Area voter turnout for Tuesday’s election was the lowest in years, with about 47 percent of Tri-County registered voters casting ballots.”
Yet the establishment of “early voting” was supposed to increase voter turnout. Perhaps the expense and extra staffing incurred by the County to offer early voting can be put to some better use in the future.