Councilwoman Van Auken expressed appreciation for the Peoria Police and defended their enforcement of laws against jaywalking.  She suggested that if people think jaywalking laws are stupid, perhaps they should work on repealing such laws.  And that was the last sensible comment made on the subject.

Following Van Auken, several council members scoffed at the police doing their jobs by acting on citizen concerns and issuing tickets to scofflaws.  Reasons? 

There are more important crimes on which they should be focusing, one said.  Yes.  And there are more important crimes than speeding and seat belt violators, but they set up stings for those all the time.  Not compelling.

Another was concerned that it will drive pedestrians away from downtown.  I never realized that running across a busy street while dodging cars was the definition of “pedestrian friendly.”  One wonders why we bother putting up Walk/Don’t Walk signals all over town with countdowns and everything if they’re such an impediment to a pleasant pedestrian experience.  Let’s be real friendly and require pedestrians to take their lives in their hands on all busy streets!

Still another council person thought it was too heavy-handed of a response to write tickets.  I suppose they could have handed out warnings, especially since they had never enforced jaywalking before, so I’ll give them that one.

But then there was my favorite reason:  the law is too difficult to understand.  Yep.  That was one of Morris’s and Sandberg’s complaints.  I guess there are some loopholes in the jaywalking law (what law doesn’t have loopholes?), and because of that, we need to throw the baby out with the bathwater, according to these two council members.  If this discussion hadn’t gotten completely ridiculous prior to this point, it crossed the line here.

But just when you thought it couldn’t get any goofier, “W. B.” Grayeb chimed in.  You know what the “W. B.” stands for, don’t you?  Yep, you guessed it: “Water Buyout.”  This is the only issue Grayeb cares about anymore.  All discussions come back around to the water buyout, somehow, some way.  We got our weekly report on how RWE (did you know they’re foreign owned?) isn’t going to be selling American Water Company in pieces.

I’ll revisit “W. B.” Grayeb in a future post.