Here’s something interesting.

The City of Peoria recently voted to annex 715 acres of land — the largest annexation since Peoria added Richwoods Township to the city. Developers are planning to create new subdivisions on this property that will eventually add a total of 1,408 dwelling units. As of June 2004, it was reported that there are 41,300 households in the city. Adding 1,408 more is an increase of 3.4%.

The 2006 budget calls for the city to spend $56,029,955 on police, fire, and public works combined. If we assume that those costs will need to increase by the same percentage as the number of dwelling units/households, we can times that figure by 3.4%. The result? $1,905,018.47. We can call it $1.9 million for easy reference.

Will this new addition to the city pay for itself? According to the city’s study, the new dwelling units will have a market value of $450 million (that would be an average of $319,600 per dwelling unit, incidentally), and this would result in an increase in tax revenue of — are you ready for this? — $1.9 million.

So, theoretically, it will break even from a city-services perspective. That means it will not give the city any net gain. It also won’t help us put a truck back into service at Fire Station 11. And it won’t do District 150 any good, but will infuse Dunlap School District 323 with lots of property tax money.

When will the city learn that we cannot annex ourselves into prosperity? We’ve tried. Over and over. And over. It doesn’t work.

I’ve been reading about the controversy over possible pay raises for Peoria Public School District 150 administrators Dr. Fischer and Dr. Hannah. Bill Dennis — who originally broke the story two days before it was picked up by the Journal Star — has another post on it today, and I added my comments to it.

You may remember that this all started when the district booted out Kay Royster. They hired Chuck Fabish out of retirement to be interim superintendent. He quit at the end of 2004. Everyone wanted Deputy Superintendent Ken Hinton to have the top job, but he wasn’t qualified; i.e., he didn’t have state certification. So the school board appointed Dr. Fischer and Dr. Hannah as co-interim-superintendents who were legally the top dogs, but the deputy superintendent (Hinton) actually took care of the day-to-day duties of the district business. Meanwhile, Hinton attended Western Illinois University to get his superintendent certification. In July 2005, he was certified and made permanent superintendent of District 150.

Now, what’s the fate of the co-interim superintendents, Drs. Fischer and Hannah? Well, I found this tidbit in the official District 150 minutes (available online here):

“REPORT FROM THE SUPERINTENDENT — Mr. Hinton expressed that he would like to thank Dr. Fischer and Dr. Hannah for stepping forward and that he was pleased to recommend that they be named Associate Superintendents. Ms. Butler stated that she appreciated all the reports they have prepared and that their primary interest is the students. Mrs. Ross stated that she supports the recommendation, but would like job descriptions before they change titles. Mr. Hinton reported that the administrators would have more job responsibilities and their job descriptions are being prepared.” (7/1/2005)

It seems clear from this information that the position of “Associate Superintendent” never existed prior to July 2005 and was created specifically for Drs. Fischer and Hannah. That sort of thing has always been looked down upon at every private company I’ve worked for. You don’t create a position for a particular person. That aside, I could not find anywhere in the subsequent minutes any mention of the job description being completed.

Why does this matter? Because, whatever the job description and additional responsibilities they are supposed to have, it supposedly is worth a salary increase of 28% more than what they were making as co-interim-superintendents. For a school district strapped for funds, planning to close schools, and maintaining a wage freeze for other administrators, this does not look good to the public. It also doesn’t look good that it took a Freedom of Information Act request from a private citizen to bring the situation to light. If these raises are defensible, why the secrecy?

At least one person has speculated that they could be trying to boost their pensions. As you may know, under the Teachers’ Retirement System of Illinois, pensions are 75% percent of a member’s final average salary (“the average salary for the highest 4 consecutive years within the last 10 years of creditable service,” according to P.A. 91-0927). That means that Drs. Fischer and Hannah, who according to the Journal Star’s report made more than $92,200 as principals when they entered administration in the fall of 2004, could (if they qualify for full pensions — I don’t know this for sure, but I would guess they will) receive an annual pension of at least $97,500 (75% of $130,000) if this pay raise goes through and they retire after four years.

The school board has yet to vote on the pay hikes. If they plan to vote in favor of the hikes, it would be in their best interests to reveal and defend the new job descriptions and accompanying pay increases. Otherwise there will be speculation, rumor, and general public distrust for the school district that it can’t afford in addition to all its other problems.

Communication from the City Manager and Corporation Counsel Requesting Adoption of an ORDINANCE Proposing the ESTABLISHMENT of GROWTH CELL 1-A SPECIAL SERVICE AREA, Proposing the ISSUANCE of BONDS, in an Amount Not to Exceed $6 Million, for the Purpose of Paying the Cost of Providing Special Services in and for Such Area, and SETTING a PUBLIC HEARING for FEBRUARY 14, 2006, at 6:15 P.M.

If you haven’t seen it yet, check out the new website on Museum Square (hat tip to the Journal Star’s midday update for the link):

http://www.peoriamuseumsquare.com/

Macromedia Flash is required to view the site. There’s general info on the front page, plus two more pages with artists’ renderings — one of the “Central Illinois Regional Museum” and one of the “Caterpillar Visitor Center.”

Initial observations:

It’s very pretty, isn’t it? It looks unique, and I especially like the picture where the whole structure glows at night on the riverfront.

However, it’s not what one would call “urban.” And it definitely isn’t consistent with the surrounding architecture. Clearly, the whole idea of New Urbanism and the Heart of Peoria Plan were thrown out the glass arcade when this was designed. Here’s the “crown jewel” spot in Peoria and there’s no hint of the plan the council voted to follow “in principle.” Oh, I take that back — they did put the parking (which is not needed) underground. Here’s my suggestion: if the council is not going to actually follow the advice of the high-priced consultants they hire, please just save us the money and stop hiring them.

My other concern is the name: “Central Illinois Regional Museum.” I thought we were going to have a Peoria History Museum. Isn’t that how this project was sold? In fact, wasn’t the whole block going to be a Peoria History Museum? Why can’t we call it that? Who decided to change it? Are we changing the content of the museum to include the history of other communities? Are those communities contributing any money toward the construction of this “regional” museum? Which other communities are encompassed by “Central Illinois”? Galesburg? Bloomington? Lincoln? Decatur? Putnam County? What precisely is the vision for this museum?

I can’t help but notice there are no pictures of the inside of the Central Illinois Regional Museum, but there are numerous pictures of the inside of the Caterpillar Visitor Center (and it looks like there’s a lot of very interesting, interactive content). I suppose that says something about where the architects are spending most of their time at this point. Not surprising, since Cat is fronting a hefty amount of the money for Museum Square.

Well, I’m sorry I’m not more excited about it. But frankly, if I’m a tourist, I’m not going to be drawn to the “Central Illinois Regional Museum” anymore than I would go to the “Central Montana Regional Museum” or the “Central Iowa Amalgamated Museum.” Furthermore, I wouldn’t look for the “Central Illinois Regional Museum” in Peoria. I’d look for it in a more central location, like Bloomington — right next to the Central Illinois Regional Airport.

I wonder whatever happened to Peorians’ civic pride. Perhaps we should rewrite “Peoria Pride,” our official city song. All together now: “Oh I’m proud to live in Central Illinois . . . .”

UPDATE: I found artists’ renderings of the inside of the Central Illinois Regional Museum on the Journal Star’s Special Sections website. Why they’re not included in the peoriamuseumsquare.com site, I don’t know.

There’s an interesting story in the Neighbors section of the Journal Star today. Apparently there’s a walking path in the East Bluff that runs between Frye and Thrush. Usually when the Journal Star writes about walking paths, it’s always a positive thing. Walking paths add quality-of-life to the city, they say. They make it more liveable and more attractive to young urban professionals who might want to work at Renaissance Park (f.k.a. the Med-Tech District). We need more, more, more walking paths in the city!

Yet this story isn’t positive at all. The city and park district aren’t praising this walking path. In fact, they want to close it down! I read with incredulity:

Over the years however, as the community has been taken over by gangs and people in the drug trade, the walkway has become a haven for those seeking to evade police or to easily carry out their clandestine activities.

Huh. Imagine a walkway being used by gangs and drug dealers for nefarious activities. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but at the same time the city is removing this short, troubled path from the East Bluff, isn’t the park district working to build a long walking path that will connect Taft Homes with the near north side and eventually meet up with the Rock Island Trail? Does anyone think that maybe, just maybe, there might be a similarity between these two trails, particularly where they traverse a community that’s been “taken over by gangs and people in the drug trade”? Is anyone connecting the dots here?

I’m just asking.

There has been no small amount of discussion about handicapped parking lately. Bill Dennis has had several posts on it. And it even came up in the City Council meeting Tuesday night (the last one of the year). Bill called it “the tyranny of good intentions,” and that’s a good name for it. I’m not at all bothered by handicapped spaces at these new developments with their huge swaths of land dedicated to parking. It doesn’t bother me to walk a little farther — probably because I grew up with a father who was overprotective of his car and we always parked a mile away from everyone else anyway.

But the trouble with this “one size fits all” rule (as Gary Sandberg calls it) comes when you try to apply it to neighborhood businesses in the older part of town — businesses that already have severely limited parking. Gary explained at the council meeting that if one of these places only has four parking spaces, and then you require them to have one space dedicated to handicapped parking, then you leave them with only two non-handicapped spaces and one handicapped space (double-wide by definition) that will go unused a majority of the time. And then, the building is probably not handicapped-accessible anyway, so you’ve just made them make the parking lot accessible for nothing. In the attempt to make things more accessible, you’ve actually made it less accessible overall.

But parking isn’t the only place where that’s happening. The FCC has mandated that all new programming must be closed captioned starting January 1, 2006. There are a few exceptions (parades, high school games, “non-news programming with no repeat value”), but most programs will have to be closed captioned starting in a couple of weeks.

Now, I’m all for closed captioning. But the problem is that it’s expensive. The first thing you have to do is transcribe your program. You can do it yourself (labor-intensive) or hire a professional stenographer (or “stenocaptioner”) at $1.50 to $3 per minute, or $90-$180 per one-hour show. Then you have to get it into the video stream using an encoder. Encoder services can run you $300-$400 per one-hour show. Alternatively, you could buy encoding equipment and do it yourself, but then you have your own labor costs, plus equipment that can cost as much as $20,000. Your closed-captioning cost is now almost as much as the fee you’re charged to broadcast the program on a local TV station. So what do you think smaller operations are going to do? Stop broadcasting their programs, of course. Or at least remove them from some smaller markets, like one show in New York is doing.

Thus, once again, in an attempt to make things more accessible, they’ve made them less accessible. In the case of some smaller operations, in the FCC’s effort to make programs accessible to all, they’re making them accessible to none. The tyranny of good intentions, indeed.

(I realize blogging about work is a no-no in the blogosphere, but just so there’s no misunderstanding or errant reading between the lines, let me just say briefly that Grace’s program is staying on the air and will be captioned.)

I may not be posting quite as often as I was before, at least initially, because it takes a while to get back in the swing of things. But I’ve finished editing Grace Family Christmas, so I have some free time again.

Incidentally, if you want to watch the show, it’s on at 10:30 Christmas Eve and repeated at noon on Christmas Day on WEEK-TV, channel 25. It’s our church’s Christmas concert, which is televised every year.