Category Archives: Peoria Journal Star

Abortion, Peoria Journal Star

Middle ground impossible in abortion debate

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The Journal Star’s editorial today included this line: “…rather than seize on intentionally divisive issues, pro-choice and pro-life forces ought to be working together to reduce the number of abortions.”

Wishful, simplistic thinking.

Consider this quote from the National Abortion Federation: “Opponents of abortion often portray abortion as a negative problem that society should try to eliminate. While we work to reduce the number of unplanned pregnancies, abortion is a valid and acceptable reproductive choice.”

And now compare that to the mission statement of the National Right to Life Committee: “The ultimate goal of the National Right to Life Committee is to restore legal protection to innocent human life.”

It may seem at first glance that these two groups want what the Journal Star says, i.e. “to reduce the number of abortions.” But that’s not really accurate. Their positions are more nuanced than that.

NRLC isn’t satisified to simply reduce abortions from, say, 800,000 per year to 650,000 per year. They want to eliminate it as an option, and for this reason: they believe that abortion kills a person — a living human being with a constitutional right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Pro-life advocates often compare abortion to slavery, pointing out that just because something is legal and sanctioned by the Supreme Court doesn’t make it right. So to them, the Journal Star’s idea to work with pro-choice advocates to reduce abortion but not eliminate it is as morally repugnant as if they were living prior to the Civil War and were asked to reduce slavery but not eliminate it.

NAF, on the other hand, isn’t really interested in reducing abortions at all, per se. They want to reduce the number of unplanned pregnancies. The thought is that if there are fewer unplanned pregnancies, then there will be less demand for abortion. But if unplanned pregnancies went down but abortion demand stayed the same, they would still feel their goal was achieved.

In the final analysis, there is a gulf fixed between pro-choice and pro-life forces — one sees abortion as a “valid and acceptable reproductive choice” and the other sees it as the destruction of “innocent human life.” Hoping for middle ground is a pipe dream.

Peoria Journal Star

Casual Comment

Note to Journal Star:  I know you’re new to the whole blog scene, so it’s understandable that you would call Molly Parker’s collection of posts a “web blog” on your front page.  However, you should know that this is incorrect.  “Blog” is short for “web log,” so you should either call it a “web log” or “blog,” but not “web blog.”

I also know you probably don’t consider blogs reliable authorities on what they call themselves, so I’ll quote the AP Stylebook:

blog  Internet jargon; if used, explain that it means Web log or Web journal.

Keep blogging, though.  It’s a nice addition to your site.

City of Peoria, Museum Block, Peoria Journal Star

Luciano is right about museum

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In a move sure to make his bosses unhappy, Phil Luciano wrote a scathing column criticizing the city’s plans for a new downtown museum. He doesn’t think it will be much of a draw:

Think of it this way: Peoria is about the same size as Allentown, Pa.; Evansville, Ind.; and Waterbury, Conn. Would you pack up the kids, gas up the van and head to any of those places to drink in their rich history?

I think Phil makes a good point. But I don’t think having a downtown museum is the problem per se — it’s the scale of the project. Why is the whole Sears block going to be devoted to the museum? Isn’t that putting all our eggs in one basket? What happens if the city’s tourism projections don’t pan out? Aren’t we left with a multi-million dollar millstone?

This is why, as I’ve argued before, it would be better to make the museum square more densely developed, as all our handsomely-paid consultants have been telling the city for years. Add retail, restaurants, and especially a residential component. By including private development on that block, the city collects property and sales tax revenues to offset the costs of maintaining and managing a museum on part of that parcel.

Plus, if people are living, shopping, and eating down there, the block will be buzzing around the clock throughout the week and weekends. Without those components, the block after 5:00 and on weekends will look exactly as it does now before a single brick has been laid: a black hole.

In short, I think there is enough interest in Peoria and its history to support a museum, but not a “museum square.” Scale it back and allow private development.

Kellar Branch, Peoria Journal Star

Why should city allow park district to destroy $565,000 asset?

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That’s the question the Journal Star’s editorial doesn’t ask or answer.

Pioneer Railcorp has a standing offer to purchase the Kellar Branch for $565,000 or accept a long-term lease on it.  The Peoria Park District wants to lease the right-of-way for $1 per year for 99 years and remove the rails and ties, thus destroying this half-million dollar asset owned by the city.

The city is going to begin budget negotiations soon.  On their plate: figuring out a way to fully staff fire station 11, increase police protection, and comply with GASB 45, all without raising taxes or spurious “garbage fees.”

Maybe one would argue that the trail will be more profitable than the rail line.  Of course, that’s patently ridiculous, but even if it were true, who says you have to have one or the other?  Pioneer has also offered $100,000 as well as equipment to help build the trail next to the Kellar Branch rail line.  Between that money and the state grants the park district has already applied for and received, there’s no reason we can’t have both.

In the Journal Star’s world, they would rather rob the fire department to fund the police department and give the park district a half-million dollar asset to squander.  Hopefully the city will come to its senses and not continue pursuing such short-sighted and ruinous advice.

City of Peoria, Peoria Fire Department, Peoria Journal Star, Peoria Police

Journal Star: Better to burn to death than be murdered

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Does that headline sound silly to you? Me too. But the Journal Star’s editorial Tuesday argues just that. Instead of fully staffing Fire Station 11, we should spend that money on police protection, they said. “Firefighting and other emergency response are important, but every penny spent on reopening Fire Station 11 is one that won’t go to added police protection.”

Fire and police protection are both among the most essential, basic services a city can provide, and their funding comes pretty much exclusively from the city. So police and fire protection should not be pitted against each other for funding. Something is wrong in a city that can’t fully staff their fire stations and provide adequate police protection at the same time.

There must be other places where the city could cut truly unnecessary spending. (Fire protection is not what I would call “unnecessary.”)

This may sound like sour grapes, but the more I think about it, the more I question the money the city spends on District 150. Think about it. The school district is its own taxing body, and the city has gained nothing by trying to cooperate with the school board, so why are we sending them over a million dollars a year in operating, capital, and debt service support? The fire and police departments can’t tax the public directly for their needs, so it would seem to me that the city’s money would be better spent on fire and police instead of the school board.

If we have to start picking and choosing, I don’t know how the city could responsibly cut fire protection while still spending money on a school district that is essentially double-dipping our tax dollars.

Peoria Journal Star, Village of Peoria Heights

Dear Alexis, xxoo, Love, Phil

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Alexis KhazzamPhil LucianoIf I were Elizabeth Khazzam, I’d keep an eye on Phil Luciano. He wrote another love note to her husband Alexis in today’s paper.

Forgive me for not crying big crocodile tears over Khazzam’s ill-fated basketball court on Grandview Drive. If a schmo like me built a basketball court on an easement, I’d buy the contention that it was just an innocent mistake. But this guy is a developer. He knows about easements. He knows about permits. He should have known better.

His offer to tear out the basketball court at his own expense if the village ever needed to use the easement is silly. First of all, there’s no guarantee he’s going to live there forever. Would this agreement be transferrable to the new owner?

Secondly, the crux of the argument that he deserves our sympathy is that he was making this for the public good — it was going to be a little public park he’s creating out of the goodness of his heart for the poor little children of the neighborhood. Yet when the villiage asked him if he’d deed the property to the villiage to officially make it a public park, he blinked.

He can’t have it both ways. If he wants it to be private property and control the use of the land, then he has to abide by the villiage’s laws. As a developer, he should certainly have known that. When it comes to municipalities, the old axiom that it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission never works.

Kudos to the village board for treating Alexis just like any other citizen. Hopefully he won’t take his ball and go home, as Phil suggests. Hey Phil, even nice guys have to fix their mistakes.

Peoria Journal Star

Blogs fill void other city’s newspapers offer

2 Comments

PJStar.com LogoQ: 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.

City of Peoria, Peoria Journal Star

Don’t take it so personally, PJS

1 Comment

I know this is old news, but I didn’t get a chance to comment on this at the time, and B.J.’s recent post about Ann Coulter reminded me of it again….

The Journal Star was all out of sorts on Thursday when syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts said in his column that Ann Coulter’s book “plays in Peoria.” They were so incensed, you would have thought the guy personally called up the editorial board and told them, “eh, your mother wears army boots.”

My advice to the PJS: let it go. He wasn’t talking about Peoria, Illinois, or the fine people who live here. The Miami-based Pitts probably can’t even readily locate Peoria on a map. “Does it play in Peoria?” is just a generic phrase that means “does it appeal to mainstream America?”

The JS said, “We tried to reach Pitts, without success.” Thank goodness! I hope they stopped trying. Can we please stop embarrassing ourselves by attempting to cleanse the English language of this phrase? Does the Indianapolis Star get incensed every time someone in Missouri uses “Hoosier” in a derogatory manner?

Pitts isn’t hurting Peoria’s reputation. Journal Star columnist Phil Luciano did more to embarrass Peoria when he appeared on the nationally-broadcast “Michael Feldman’s Whad’Ya Know” program on NPR in 2000 (“Peoria is 20 road houses and a strip joint”), but I don’t remember any hue and cry over that in the editorial page….

City Council, City of Peoria, Peoria Journal Star, Peoria Park District, Peoria Public Schools, Ray LaHood

LaHood mediation meeting not inspiring confidence

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Nothing cures distrust like more secrecy.

Today’s Word on the Street column reports that the public won’t be allowed to witness Ray LaHood’s mediation skills when he tries to broker a compromise on the location of a new school in the city’s East Bluff. LaHood will be meeting behind closed doors at 9:30 a.m. this Wednesday, May 31, with officials from the city, school board and park board. They’ll have a press conference after the meeting.

It appears I’m not the only one who wonders why LaHood is getting involved in this issue. In a letter to the editor that was also published in today’s Journal Star, Donald R. Jackson says:

It is too bad LaHood didn’t make himself available to mediate the conflict between the School Board, Dr. Kay Royster and members of the community who supported her then and still do. LaHood was asked to intervene, but he declined stating that he had no control or influence over the board.

In one sense, these two situations are different: the Royster issue involved one public body that was internally divided — the school board; the school siting issue involves three public bodies — the school board, park board, and city — who are at odds with each other, but are not internally divided.

But in another sense, the situations aren’t different at all. In both cases, it’s a local government issue that doesn’t warrant the time of a U.S. Congressman to mediate. What’s next? Will he be mediating a compromise between the city council and the county board regarding jail fees and election commissions?

And if that weren’t enough, he’s also related to the park board director. Doesn’t that bother anyone? I’m not trying to impugn his integrity, but LaHood seems to have a real blind spot when it comes to the appearance of his actions. He should have enough judgement to see that his in-law relationship to Bonnie Noble gives at least the appearance of impropriety and bias when he’s trying to mediate a dispute that involves the park district.

Then to have the meeting behind closed doors is just the icing on the cake. As the WOTS column points out, decisions made in closed-door meetings are one of the biggest points of contention! And I loved this line:

Tim Butler, LaHood’s spokesman, defended the decision to have the meeting closed, saying there would not be any decisions or determinations and therefore still plenty of time for public input.

There won’t be any decisions? What exactly is the point of this meeting? How do you resolve a dispute without making any decisions? Is Ray just going to do one of those little team-building exercises — like having Councilman Manning fall backwards while Ken Hinton and Tim Cassidy catch him so they can all build up trust for each other?

Despite all my reservations, I nevertheless hope that something good comes out of this meeting. I hope LaHood proves wrong all my fears. But most of all, I hope Glen Oak School remains in the heart of the East Bluff, and that the school board will learn to be more transparent in the future so we don’t have to go through all this rigmarole.