I was reading the Journal Star article on the pending demolition of the old state armory and was surprised by two things:Â (1) the armory is owned by Chase Ingersoll, and (2) this revelation:
Ingersoll, who reportedly has moved out of state, couldn’t be reached for comment Wednesday.
Moved out of state? Unable to be reached? Is he an absentee landlord now?
Sorry I haven’t been able to blog the last couple of days. Things have been really busy and I just haven’t had a chance. I’ll be blogging again soon!
“The things that will destroy America are prosperity at any price, peace at any price, safety first instead of duty first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.”
–Theodore Roosevelt
I have refrained from commenting on this topic because I had high hopes of wading through the public hearing transcripts, site application, letters recommending passage/denial, etc., etc. But, alas, I simply don’t have the time to do that.
But there are some things I know about the landfill that I don’t need to read 5,000 pages to discover: it’s just outside the city close to residential neighborhoods, it sits over an aquifer that supplies most of our drinking water (or to be precise, “sands hydrolically connected to the San Koty aquifer), and it has hazardous waste buried in it including heavy metals like lead and mercury.
Based on those facts, plus things I’ve read on both sides of the issue (Journal Star, Bill Dennis, PDC, Families Against Toxic Waste, etc.), I think the common sense position is to vote this down. I’m primarily opposed to its placement, not the mere existence of it.
But there is one other thing I’m opposed to, and that’s the fact that they receive most of their hazardous waste from outside this area. Proponents of the hazardous waste landfill like to throw the n-word (NIMBY) at opponents, as if we Peorians are just creating all this hazardous waste and want someone else to take it off our hands.
In reality, the exact opposite is the case.
We’ve been taking on the toxic waste of ten other NIMBY states. 84% of the hazardous waste PDC collects is from outside of Peoria. I think we’ve been more than generous by having all that filth in our “backyards” these past 15 years. It’s time for other cities and states to step up to the plate and take responsibility for their own hazardous waste.
There’s plenty of legal justification for voting this project down based on risk to health and safety and the adverse impact it would have on property values. The county board should deny PDC’s request for expansion.
I’ve pulled no punches in my criticism of the Heart of Peoria Commission (HOPC) in the past, especially as it relates to Museum Square. I still think they dropped the ball in a big way when they didn’t make any recommendation for or against the site plan, despite its obvious non-conformity with the Heart of Peoria Plan, which the council adopted “in principle.”
But the city council is not without culpability for that failure. I felt a little uncomfortable last night listening to one council member use the HOPC’s failure as an scapegoat for letting this project proceed unhindered.
The HOPC is not an elected body. It’s appointed by the mayor. They don’t make binding decisions, but merely recommendations. The fact that the HOPC couldn’t produce a recommendation should have been a sign that there were problems within the commission that were preventing them from reaching consensus. At best, it should have been a sign that the site plan was controversial. And the council — our elected representatives — should have stepped up to the plate and shown some leadership on that issue.
It’s not like there’s no precedent for the council to take action against the recommendation of a commission. The Railroad Commission recommended preserving the Kellar Branch for competitive rail service, but the council overruled them and approved turning a half-million-dollar asset into a bike path.
The buck stops at the council. Like it or not, regardless of what the commissions recommend or don’t recommend, the council is responsible for the decisions. And the decision to approve this site plan for the Sears block was a poor one.
Why? As I said earlier, the council adopted “in principle” the Heart of Peoria Plan. If that’s going to mean anything, it needs to apply to every developer, not just developers who don’t have Caterpillar backing. And it should apply to every project — especially a project on the “crown jewel” of downtown Peoria.
This museum project doesn’t conform in any way to the Heart of Peoria Plan:
The worst part is, the council had a chance to challenge this site plan, even as late as Tuesday night. Nothing has been built yet. These buildings are still just on paper. I know there’s expense that goes into designing and engineering those drawings, but it’s nothing compared to the cost of actually building the structures.
Unfortunately, since the council won’t stand up to Cat and has a handy scapegoat in the HOPC, it looks like we’ll be stuck with yet another boondoggle.
Of course, the truth of the matter is that this underground parking deck isn’t for the Central Illinois Regional Museum at all — it’s for Caterpillar’s visitor center. As councilman Sandberg pointed out, Cat originally wanted an above-ground [underground] parking deck built on their portion of the Sears block and paid for with federal dollars. But they found out that federal rules prohibit the use of those funds for [public] parking decks on private property. Furthermore, the Heart of Peoria Commission strongly recommended there not be any surface parking on the site. So Cat, rather than doing away with the parking, now decides to put the deck underground on the public half of the property and use property tax dollars (through the TIF) to pay for it.
The rest of the council is, of course, perfectly okay with that. They had all kinds of justifications for it. Councilwoman Van Auken said that removing the cap on the TIF wouldn’t take money away from essential services like fire station staffing. Bill Dennis has the best response to that spurious argument.
But the most embarrassing justification was the “we- have- to- approve- this- plan- or- Cat- will- move- their- headquarters- out- of- Peoria” reason. To hear Chuck Grayeb talk, for instance, you’d think Cat was poised to pull up stakes and move out of town any second, and that Peorians should be sacrificing their virgin daughters on an altar outside Cat headquarters and paying tribute money to keep them here.
Let’s face it — Caterpillar is a very large employer and has been very generous to Peoria civic projects and charities. I’m all for giving credit where credit is due. But that doesn’t mean our council should just rubber stamp every Caterpillar request. To do so makes the council a mere figurehead government that represents Cat and not Peoria residents.
I got to thinking about the park and school districts’ plan to site a school at the corner of Frye and Prospect. Their justification for this is that they need 15 acres to build a new school, and thus the current campuses aren’t large enough. They also see an intergovernmental agreement as a major boost for civic cooperation, and the Journal Star has already patted them on the back for it.
Now, if you recall the long-range plan for the school district, they want to tear down 11 schools and build five new ones. This proposed school at Frye and Prospect is only the first one of five. So my question is this:
Where are the other four schools going to be sited?
Since all the schools to be replaced are in the older part of town where there’s very little greenspace left, and since intergovernmental agreements are seen as such a positive thing, I don’t think it’s any stretch of the imagination that the other four schools will be sited exactly the same way.
Thus, if your property abuts a park in the older part of town — you might want to make some contingency plans now. You may pick up the paper one morning and discover your house is the next to go.
I got an e-mail today from a neighbor working in her yard. She just went inside for a few seconds to get a drink, and when she came back her wheelbarrow was gone. That’s the second wheelbarrow in a month that’s been stolen from my neighborhood.
Am I the only one who thinks that’s a strange item to steal? Is there a large black-market demand for wheelbarrows in this city? Are the folks attending March Madness downtown being approached near shady alleys by guys in trenchcoats who say, “Psst! Hey buddy, wanna buy a wheelbarrow?” Or, to think the best of my fellow man, could there have been two recent gardening emergencies that demandeded the immediate commandeering of a wheelbarrow?
What’s the cash value of a wheelbarrow? Maybe we should call the pawn shops and see if there’s a trend — a spike in hot wheelbarrows. We could set up a sting operation. I wonder if it’s the work of a single bandit or if stealing wheelbarrows has become a new gang-initiation ritual. There are so many possibilities….
I really don’t mean to make light of this situation. I would be ticked off if someone stole my wheelbarrow. But I still think it’s the strangest item I’ve ever heard of being stolen.
My wife is at a “Hearts at Home” conference this weekend in Bloomington. It’s like a mini-vacation for her. She gets to hang out with grown-ups, not carry a diaper bag, talk about grown-up things instead of trying to arbitrate tinker-toy disputes, and eat in restaurants without having to cut up anyone’s food for them.
Meanwhile, I’m watching the three little urchins for a couple of days (right now it’s nap time). It’s been fun spending time with the kids, but it never ceases to amaze me how much time is spent preparing meals and cleaning up after them. I think if I had to stay home all day every day, I would accomplish little more than feeding my children and cleaning the kitchen. How my wife accomplishes anything else is a mystery to me.
As kind of a corollary to that, I don’t know why my wife’s hands aren’t chapped, cracked, and bleeding most of the time. After doing dishes all day and constantly having to wash up after wiping noses, changing diapers, and cleaning up poopy bottoms, my hands are raw.
After listening to my 5-year-old chatterbox all day, I also understand why my wife wants to call me at work frequently to have an adult conversation. It reminds me of Dave Barry’s contention that becoming a parent makes you stupider. He gave this example:
Albert Einstein Shortly Before The Birth Of His Son: “To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms — this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness.”
Albert Einstein Shortly After The Birth Of His Son: “Daddy’s gonna EAT THESE WIDDLE TOES!”
With a 5-year-old, you get peppered with questions that seem to come out of nowhere: “If you go to jail, do you have to stay there forever?” “Do bugs think I’m a giant?” “Can I poke you with this tinkertoy?” After you answer a couple hundred of those questions, you long to hear a grown-up question, like “you wanna beer?”
Well, I never doubted for a second that my wife was superwoman, but my belief has been reinforced once again. I think I’ll take her out to dinner more often.
And, I hear footsteps… I fear nap time is over….
Thank goodness the grandparents have taken pity on me and offered to have the clan over for supper last night and tonight. One less meal to prepare.
Remember when I called up Bonnie Noble because I was surprised that the Park District came out in favor of the proposed PDC landfill expansion? Well, apparently, I wasn’t the only one who was surprised by that — so was the Park Board.
The Journal Star today reports that Noble’s letter, even though it was on Park District letterhead, did not reflect the park district’s view:
The Park Board voted at its Feb. 22 meeting not to take a position on the proposed landfill expansion. Trustee Jim Cummings said then that Noble’s letter doesn’t represent the official position of the park district.
That actually makes me feel better about the park district as a whole. If Noble wants to express her own opinion, that’s fine — she made some interesting points. However, to print her personal feelings on park district letterhead misrepresents the Park Board to Peoria County.
I hope county board members are aware that Noble’s letter is not a park district endorsement of the landfill expansion.
(P.S. In the category of “things that may be of interest to other bloggers,” my blog was actually quoted in this Journal Star story. Â If they’re reading my little opinion columns, you can bet they’re reading other Peoria bloggers, and it’s gratifying to know they’re listening to us.)