City of Peoria, Parking

The only “free parking” is in Monopoly

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Free ParkingWhen we used to play Monopoly at my house growing up, not only did landing on Free Parking mean you didn’t land on someone’s hotel on St. James Place, it also meant a windfall of cash, since any Chance or Community Chest fees went into the “kitty” and were awarded to the next person to land on “Free Parking.”

But in the real world, there’s no such thing as free parking, and there is no windfall of cash, either. Gary Sandberg explained it best on Tuesday’s Outside the Horseshoe program on WCBU.  Someone is always paying for parking, even in the suburbs.  The only difference between downtown parking and suburban parking is who’s paying.

Those huge surface lots out by, say, the Shoppes at Grand Prairie, didn’t just descend from the sky.  Somebody bought the land, somebody built the lot, somebody maintains the lot — and that all costs money.  At the Shoppes, or Metro Centre, or Northwoods, or Sheridan Village, the business owners pay for it.  It’s part of their rent structure.  The patrons don’t have to pay (directly) for parking because the business owners have decided to provide “free” parking for their customers.

Now let’s go downtown.  Who owns the land, builds the decks/lots, and maintains them?  For much of downtown, it’s the city.  Can businesses downtown provide free parking for their patrons?  Sure!  All they need to do is work out an arrangement where they validate parking tickets from a nearby city-owned deck or lot.  Then the business pays the city instead of the customer.

But why is the city providing parking (other than street parking) at all?  The city doesn’t build lots or decks in the suburbs for any of the businesses out there.  They didn’t build decks or lots downtown until about thirty years ago.  Before then, downtown developers had to build and maintain their own parking structures.  Remember Sears?  They had their own on-site parking.  Bergners?  Carsons?  The city didn’t provide parking for these businesses.

So, it will be nice having free two-hour parking on the riverfront now, but one has to wonder why the city is providing “free” parking to some businesses and not others.  When Gary Sandberg says the city should get out of the parking business, I think he may be on to something.  If the city sold all their decks and lots (which are not making the city any money), they could get a tidy influx of cash and no longer have the maintenance headaches.

Then businesses downtown would be on an even playing field with the suburbs as far as parking goes, and the city could focus on providing other, more essential services.

City of Bloomington, Heart of Peoria Plan

Bloomington to give form-based codes a whirl

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Some of Bloomington’s older neighborhoods are concerned about what kind of houses might fill-in vacant lots between their pre-World-War-II homes. Traditional zoning only regulates the use, but not the form of the structures. So you could have a beautiful, Italianate-style home next door to a McMansion, or a split-level, or a ranch, or something else that’s single-family but completely incongruous with the neighborhood.

To help these neighborhoods, Bloomington is going to try form-based zoning, just like Peoria is in the middle of doing. Peoria recently had charrettes to get the public’s idea of what they want the built environment of their neighborhoods to look like. Bloomington isn’t calling it a charrette, but they are having an open meeting this Wednesday to get public input.

If you want to keep up-to-date on the progress of Peoria’s form-based code, check out the Heart of Peoria website (a link also appears on the sidebar). You can also see the results of the recent charrettes, including artists’ renderings of how the Prospect Road and Sheridan Road corridors could look.

Bradley University, City Council, City of Peoria

Supermajority restriction fails

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Only three council members voted in favor of the zoning commission’s recommendation to require a supermajority of the council to expand the boundaries of an institutional district. The general consensus was that the system isn’t broken, so they didn’t want to “fix” it.

One of the council members trotted out the popular notion that there’s no harm being done by Bradley because they’re buying out their neighbors at above-market prices — in some cases, five times the property value. It sounds like they’re a really good neighbor, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t you just love to get a cool half-million for your $100,000 house?

The problem with this reasoning is that it doesn’t take into account the whole neighborhood. Take the example of Bradley University buying the houses along Maplewood across from the Fieldhouse. Yes, the people on Maplewood are getting a great deal, but what about the rest of the Arbor District? What about the properties on Cooper or Rebecca?

The answer is that the neighborhood as a whole is destabilized.

Why? Because who wants to buy in a neighborhood when the university is expanding west and that beautiful historical house on Cooper may be the next to be acquired within a few years? It’s not the family who wants to put down roots in the neighborhood and raise their kids there. It’s someone looking to buy a property for $100,000 and hopefully get $500,000 for it when the university decides it wants it.

And for those neighbors who are already there, how many of them want to put new landscaping around their house? Or put in new windows? Or new siding? Or even a new paint job? If the residents reasonably expect the university to keep moving west, it would be silly to put a lot of capital improvements into their houses.

Speculative purchases. Deferred maintenance. This is what happens when institutions disregard the boundaries of their institutional district.

But the council, judging by the rhetoric of the “nay” voters, thinks everything is hunky-dory with Bradley’s property acquisitions. They’re not interested in taking any action against Bradley’s encroachment into the Arbor District, let alone enacting the modest proposal that came before the council tonight. As far as they’re concerned, Bradley’s doing the neighborhood a favor by disobeying the city’s own ordinance.

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.

City Council, City of Peoria, Peoria Public Schools

School debate contentious enough without cynicism

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I finally figured out what it is that really gets my goat in the debate over where District 150 wants to put its new school. It’s cynicism.

A letter printed on the Journal Star editorial page today (under the misnomer “Another View,” since it’s the same view as the JS Editorial Board’s) is a good example. Even though I disagree with her, Dawn Gersich of Peoria makes some good arguments in favor of the Glen Oak Park site for the new school. Those are appropriate and helpful to the debate. What is not helpful is the cynical eye she casts on those who disagree:

Regarding the proposed school site in Glen Oak Park, I have yet to hear, “What’s best for the children?”

And:

The fate of our neighborhoods, indeed our nation, is dependent on the investment we place in our children. It’s a shame that some people get caught up in politics and forget that we should be focused on what is best for kids.

See? Those who oppose the Glen Oak Park site are not concerned about what’s best for the children and are “caught up in politics.” This attribution of ulterior motives is known as cynicism.

Ms. Gersich is not the only cynical one. Garrie Allen said in an interview on WCBU last week that he believed the city council and others have “an agenda” to “clean up” the East Bluff. In other words, he thinks they’re more interested in urban renewal than what’s best for the children’s education. Mr. Matheson has made similar remarks.

This kind of rhetoric is horribly misleading, and it is not healthy for the debate.

First of all, Peorians want District 150 to succeed. They want the best for their children and all children in the city. They want the schools to be second to none so people want to move into District 150 instead of out of it. The debate is not between those who care about the children and those who care about politics. We all care about the children.

Secondly, doing what’s best for the children cannot be divorced from considering what’s best for the city and what’s best for the financial health of the school district.

You can dismiss city cooperation as “politics” if you want, but the school is not an enclave, uneffected by and not affecting the city. If urban flight continues, if crime increases, if property values continue to go down, it’s not just the city that loses, it’s the school district. They lose students, performance, property tax revenue, and federal funds. Similarly, if schools are in disrepair and test scores are low, it’s not just the school district that suffers, it’s the city, because what young family wants to live in a failing school district? The city and school district must work together for their mutual success, and that directly affects the children.

Another unpleasant subject when determining “what’s best for the children” is money. You know what would be best for my children? The best private tutor(s) money can buy, then college at Harvard or Oxford. Are my kids going to get that? No. I don’t have the money to do that. When you want to do what’s best for the children, you have to what’s best for them within your means.

The school district is in bad financial shape. Contrary to popular belief, their ambitious plan to build new schools was not based purely on “what’s best for the children.” The plan came about as a way for the district to save money. The idea is to eliminate old, inefficient buildings, and consolidate into fewer, larger, but more efficient buildings. Educational experts will tell you that “what’s best for the children” are small, neighborhood schools — not large, consolidated schools. In fact, a District 150 subcommittee headed up by Bradley professor Bernard Goitein reported exactly that to the school board before the master building plan was put together.

I say all this, not to say that the school board doesn’t have the best interests of the students at heart (I believe they do), but to point out that the issue is not as black and white as some letter writers would have you believe. Both sides in this debate want what’s best for the children, but have different views on how to accomplish that within the financial means of the district and in cooperation with the city.

Bradley University, City Council, City of Peoria

Zoning committee recommends supermajority to change institutional boundaries

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The City Council will decide Tuesday night whether to require a supermajority — a 2/3 vote — to change the boundaries of an institutional zoning district.

Institutions such as colleges, hospitals, and universities have a special zoning designation in Peoria. It’s known as “N1,” or “institutional,” and it has advantages for the institutions and the city.

For the institution, it gives them a self-contained campus area within which they are free to do almost anything (there are some limits, of course). They can set up restaurants, libraries, book stores, parking, athletic fields, etc., without having to go to the city for permission.

The city, on the other hand, benefits from, first of all, not having to deal with every little change or request that these institutions want to do within their campus area. But more importantly, this arrangement provides stability to the neighborhoods surrounding the institutional district. People can purchase homes in abutting neighborhoods with a reasonable expectation the institution won’t be encroaching into their subdivision.

Currently, to change the boundary of an N1-zoned district requires a simple majority of the council. But the zoning commission is recommending the council change that to a supermajority for institutional boundaries that have been in effect less than 10 years.

The zoning commission’s rationale for this change is to promote even greater stability:

Requiring a super majority vote of the Council will promote stability in the Institutional District and abutting neighborhoods. An inter-reliance between the Institution and the adjacent neighborhood exists: a stable institution suggests a more predictable market place in the adjacent neighborhood, which promotes stability; a stable adjacent neighborhood likewise encourages stability for the Institution. An example of an unstable, unpredictable market place is one of speculative purchases, and deferred maintenance.

Even though this change affects several institutions (Bradley University, Illinois Central College, Methodist Medical Center of Illinois, OSF St. Francis Medical Center, Proctor Hospital, and Midstate College), I have a suspicion that the reason for this change is because of Bradley University’s not-so-subtle acquisition of houses in the Arbor District and plans to expand their campus west.

The text of the proposed ordinance states (emphasis mine):

12.3.1 An amendment which adds territory to an existing institutional district, which territory is contiguous to a boundary which previously has been changed less then ten (10) years prior to the date of the amendment, shall require the affirmative vote of two-thirds (2/3) of Council Members actually voting, but in no case shall an amendment be passed by less than the affirmative votes of six (6) Council Members.

Just two months ago, Bradley’s institutional boundary changed slightly to allow them space to put in a transformer as part of an electrical upgrade to their Global Communications building. Given the wording of this ordinance, it appears the ten-year provision will be counted from May 2006 when that last boundary change was put into effect.

In any case, when Bradley comes to the council asking for their institutional boundary to be extended to the west, it would take a 2/3 vote of the council (that’s 8 votes, assuming everyone is present) to approve it, if this ordinance passes Tuesday.

Nevertheless, neither Bradley nor the other affected institutions appear to be worried about it. They didn’t even respond to the zoning commission’s request for input.

Television

Watch the 9:00 news July 18 on UPN 59

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I’m going to be on TV!

I’ve agreed to be interviewed on “News 25 at 9 on My59” a week from Tuesday, July 18. This will be a live interview with Mike Dimmick, and I have no idea what the topic will be yet. I’m glad Bill Dennis is going to be interviewed first, so I’ll get some idea what to expect.

Be sure to watch! I think I’ll dress business-casual for the occasion… maybe put on a sport coat. I sure hope I don’t sound like a complete idiot — always my greatest fear when being interviewed….

The Peoria Chronicle

Gone fishing

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Well, I mean that metaphorically, actually.  I’ve only fished once in my life, and didn’t catch anything.

I need to unplug for a little while.  I’ve been getting a bit too obsessed with the blog lately, and, frankly, I’m unhappy with how my posts have been getting more and more negative.  So, it’s time to get away from it for a few days, clear my head a little, and contemplate the future of the Chronicle.

In the meantime, please enjoy the other fine writers on my blogroll, and have a great weekend!

City of Peoria, Pushcarts

How to solve the “pushcartel” problem

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Downtown restaurants are complaining that they just can’t compete against the pushcarts for lunch business. The Journal Star highlights Fahey’s, which just closed its doors for good, saying the carts pushed them out of business there.

My first thought was, they were located in the basement of the Commerce Bank building. Doesn’t that sound like a great place to go for lunch on a beautiful summer day: the basement? You think maybe location had something to do with their demise?

But then, on second thought, I can see their point. Here you have downtown businesses that have brick and mortar buildings, pay property taxes, and every day they have these pushcarts swoop in and steal the lion’s share of their business. I would be pretty ticked, too.

So what’s the answer? Outlaw pushcarts? No, here’s my suggestion: let the downtown restaurants set up their own pushcarts for free. In other words, define a perimeter and say, any restaurant within this perimeter is free to set up a pushcart on courthouse square. They have to get a permit, but there’s no charge for the permit. Wouldn’t this level the playing field?

My theory is that people like the pushcarts because (a) they like eating outside in the summer, (b) they like being able to have a wide selection of restaurant choices conveniently located near each other, (c) they enjoy the atmosphere of courthouse square where there are regularly-scheduled musical acts, and (d) the pushcarts have really tasty food.

So, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. But businesses that have invested in downtown shouldn’t have to pay an extra fee to join ’em, in my opinion.