Tag Archives: City of Peoria

Peoria Mayor, Peoria Public Schools

Ardis asks Sec. Duncan for help for D150

28 Comments

Arne DuncanFrom the Journal Star:

Mayor Jim Ardis said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is pledging his department’s assistance to help Peoria turn around its schools…. Ardis, along with Lee Graves, CEO and president of ELM Group, and former state Sen. George Shadid made a whirlwind visit to Washington, D.C., this week, meeting with Duncan, a former CEO of Chicago Public Schools who once served under CEO Paul Vallas….

There’s no easy answer, Ardis admitted, noting that Duncan believed it will take a combination of Race to the Top, strong emphasis on charter schools and performance-based teaching as well as more municipal involvement to get poorly performing school districts headed in the right direction….

Ardis said he wanted to find out what’s available and what Duncan would recommend for improving school performance.

“We haven’t seen any movement by this board or past boards to go out on their own initiative to speak to with the secretary of education, or anyone else,” he said.

A couple things about this story:

First, kudos to Mayor Ardis for taking initiative and doing what he can to help District 150. It’s unfortunate that his past efforts (to bring in Paul Vallas for some consulting advice) have been rebuffed by District 150 administrators and board members. The district should be welcoming the mayor’s overtures.

Second, Secretary Duncan’s reported response is interesting: “…it will take a combination of Race to the Top [additional federal funds allocated to school districts through state governors], strong emphasis on charter schools and performance-based teaching [emphasis added] as well as more municipal involvement to get poorly performing school districts headed in the right direction….” Doesn’t this sound like the Secretary is implicitly suggesting union-busting? Performance-based teaching is a repudiation of the tenure system, and charter schools can hire teachers who are not union represented.

Well, as it turns out, teachers are catching the same vibe. In a speech to the National Education Association (NEA) in July, Education Week reported that Duncan said “[t]eachers’ unions must be willing to reconsider seniority provisions, rework tenure provisions, and work with districts to create fair ways of incorporating student-achievement growth in teacher evaluation and compensation.” As you might expect, this wasn’t well-received by teachers:

Delegates applauded Mr. Duncan’s calls for continued federal funding for education, better training for administrators, and for improved teacher-mentoring experiences. But in an indication of the challenges that the federal government will face as it pushes for reforms to compensation and evaluation, they booed and hissed through those parts of Mr. Duncan’s address.

Booed and hissed! And here I thought incivility was invented by Rep. Joe Wilson just a few weeks ago. Imagine teachers booing and hissing (the hissing is what really gets me) the Secretary of Education during a speech. One more quote from the Education Week article: “‘Quite frankly, merit pay is union-busting,’ said another delegate, to applause from her peers.”

So, my guess is that District 150 will have a similar reaction. They will likely embrace efforts to capture more federal dollars through the Race to the Top Fund, but efforts to implement performance-based teaching initiatives will be rebuffed in teacher contract negotiations. Realistically, that would mean Peoria would receive no benefit because the Race to the Top dollars are tied to just the kinds of reforms teachers unions find objectionable. As for charter schools, the only one proposed recently — the Math, Science, and Technology Academy — has yet to have its charter authorized by District 150.

However, teachers will be happy to hear that Duncan is no fan of No Child Left Behind. Here’s his assessment, according to a recent report from ABC News:

“It unfairly labeled many schools as failures even when they were making progress,” he said. “It places too much emphasis on raw test scores rather than student growth. And it is overly prescriptive in some ways while it is too blunt an instrument of reform in others.

“But the biggest problem with NCLB,” he added, “is that it doesn’t encourage high learning standards. In fact, it inadvertently encourages states to lower them. The net effect is that we are lying to children and parents by telling kids they are succeeding when they are not.”

That’s certainly been true in District 150, as recent changes to the district’s grading scale can attest.

City Council, City of Peoria

Liveblogging the City Council 9/22/2009

5 Comments

It’s Tuesday evening, and time for another Peoria City Council meeting. I’m coming to you live from Peoria City Hall, Council Chambers. I’ll be updating this post throughout the evening, so refresh often.

Absent tonight are Mayor Ardis and 5th District councilman Dan Irving. Mayor Pro Tem is At-Large councilman Eric Turner.

Continue reading Liveblogging the City Council 9/22/2009 →

City of Peoria, Peoria Mayor

Mayor Ardis asks for feedback on budget

5 Comments

I received this yesterday but haven’t had a chance to post it until today:

September 15, 2009

As many of you know, the City Council has been wrestling with our 2010 budget for several months now. We have been working to balance the City’s budget like you have to balance yours……. Identifying needs vs. wants and being more efficient with the income you have available. During this challenging economic situation, the process has not been easy.

To this point, the City Council has already trimmed over $8.5 million dollars from next years budget. If sales tax revenue continues to come in below our expectations, it may be necessary to trim another $4 to $5 million to balance our budget. We’ve made significant reductions in our operating budget next year and identified over 40 positions that will not be filled throughout all city departments, including police and fire. In the coming weeks, we may find it necessary to lay off 20-30 more employees. This all equates to a drastic cut in service to our constituent taxpayers.

During this process we have focused on being open and transparent. With this in mind I’d like to solicit your input as we move towards making final decisions on next years budget. This will not be a scientific poll by any stretch, but an opportunity to provide me with your thoughts on a few budget related questions. I will share your responses with the rest of the City Council and the City Manager.

These are tough times but I am confident the City Council will make the right decisions to get us through this with the least amount of additional cost to you. And we hope to get this done with the least amount of job losses possible. Thank you for taking the time to respond. Feel free to pass this on to other concerned citizens.

Please click here to take this short, 3-question survey

Jim Ardis

City of Peoria

Quote of the Day

2 Comments

Think about that next time there’s a burglary in your neighborhood, or when you hit a huge pothole this winter. Maybe you can call council member Ryan Spain and ask him to send over an economic development specialist to help.

—Billy Dennis, in response to the City’s decision, upon Spain’s motion, to spare an Economic Development Specialist while simultaneously cutting police and public works personnel.
City Council, City of Peoria, State of Illinois, Taxes

City Attorney says nothing more can be done to protect against erroneous sales tax collection

3 Comments

Back in July, I reported on some overtaxing that was taking place in Peoria. I discovered first-hand that when businesses erroneously charge too much sales tax, the citizen who is overcharged pretty much has to fend for himself to get reimbursed.

A communication from the city’s legal department to the city council more or less confirms that state of affairs. Councilman Gary Sandberg had requested that the city draft an ordinance that would impose penalties on businesses that collected more sales tax than they are statutorily authorized to collect. The memo to the council is in response to Sandberg’s request.

In a nutshell, the memo states that sales tax collection is handled at the state level — the city has no power to enforce collection or impose penalties for collecting the wrong amount (whether too little or too much). A plain reading of state statutes confirms this, unfortunately. However, City Legal then goes on to state:

A review of the State sales tax statutes, however, reveals that, in fact. there is a specific provision, 35 ILCS 120/2-40, which provides that purchasers are entitled to refunds from retailers who erroneously collect Retailers’ Occupation Tax and further provides that any erroneously collected tax not refunded must be forwarded to the Illinois Department of Revenue. 35 ILCS 120/2-13 provides for civil and criminal penalties for those who file fraudulent returns, who collect Retailers’ Occupation Tax and do not forward it to the Illinois Department of Revenue and who do not properly collect the tax. In short, the State sales tax statutes cover the field for civil and criminal penalties for sales tax violations.

The thrust of this and subsequent paragraphs, as I see it, is to assure the council that citizens are adequately protected by state law, and thus a local statute would not be needed even if it were permitted (which it’s not). But I would argue that it’s not adequate. Yes, 35 ILCS 120/2-40 does provide that, if the seller collects too much sales tax, “the purchaser shall have a legal right to claim a refund of that amount from the seller.” But this puts the onus on the purchaser to prove to the seller that they collected the wrong amount in the first place.

That might be easy if dealing with a local merchant (of course, a local merchant probably wouldn’t make that mistake in the first place), but when dealing with an out-of-town company, the local manager will generally give you a blank look and say, “the sales taxes are put in the computer by our corporate office.” So then you have to try to contact the corporate office, and the red tape only gets worse from there. Bottom line: it’s not worth your time to fight it unless you’ve purchased a big-ticket item and the difference in tax is significant.

Furthermore, the civil and criminal penalties listed under 35 ILCS 120/13 (not 35 ILCS 120/2-13, which doesn’t exist) only covers deliberately fraudulent acts and the failure to remit to the state all sales tax money collected. It doesn’t cover a situation like the one that happened in Peoria in July. We already knew that because I called the state and was basically told that as long as the business is remitting the money, the state isn’t going to do anything to correct the problem. It falls on the citizen to call the business and somehow convince them that they’re charging the wrong tax rate.

And that’s where this system falls apart. When you, Joe Citizen, complains that a business is charging the wrong tax rate, you are the one who has to prove it. From personal experience this year, I can tell you that the seller is going to defend the tax rate the store is charging. They get official documents from the home office in Chicago or Minnesota or wherever that says the tax rate is X, and by golly, the tax rate is X. Why should they listen to you? You’re probably just uninformed or a general complainer about how high taxes are.

There has to be a way for official notification to be sent to places that are charging the wrong tax rate. The city did do that this past month in order to clear up confusion with a number of businesses. But there is no policy in place that would require the city to do that. I would argue that they only did it because of the media spotlight that was put on the issue, because they certainly didn’t offer to do that for me when I complained, before the story got picked up by the local mainstream media.

If nothing else can be done (and that appears to be the case), the city should at least establish a procedure wherein citizens can notify the city of erroneous tax charges, and the city will notify the company of the correct rate. Someone needs to go to bat for the citizens of Peoria. Why shouldn’t it be the City?

City Council, City of Peoria

Where’s the outrage?

53 Comments

We’re all enjoying the calm before the storm. We’ve heard the warnings — the city council is going to have to make some deep cuts in order to close the $10-12 million budget gap. They’re trying to plug the gap without raising taxes. That means the cuts will have to be made “with a chainsaw, not a scalpel,” and will be “bloody,” to quote the mayor and another council member.

Yet, at the same time, the council had absolutely no trouble raising taxes to collect $40 million for a private developer. Think about that — they raised the sales tax (granted, for an area restricted to downtown — the so-called “Hospitality Improvement Zone”). They will collect money from that sales tax, and they will hand it over to Gary Matthews, a private citizen and developer, so he can build a huge hotel addition to the Pere Marquette. Matthews will, in turn, give the lion’s share of that money to Al Zuccarini for the properties he owns on the block shared by the Pere.

So, at the same time that the council is talking about cutting police officers, eliminating raises for employees, cutting back on code enforcement and road maintenance, and other draconian cuts in public services, they’re giving $40 million to Gary Matthews for a private development. At the same time the council is unwilling to even consider raising taxes for public services, they had no problem raising taxes to benefit a private development. In fact, they approved that deal with nary any discussion and absolutely no public input!

The council wants concessions from everyone — except in the area of developer welfare. The one area that primarily benefits only a handful of people gets a free pass, while those areas that affect everyone in the city get the axe.

And my question is: Where’s the outrage? Do Peorians really not care? Do they think this is good public policy? Do they really think that we’re spending too much on public services and not enough on developer favors? Or are they uninformed? Do they not know this is happening? Or have they given up? Have they become jaded and numb to fiscal irresponsibility coming out of City Hall?

If this hotel deal were a good business decision, the developer would have already gotten his private financing lined up and started construction. But he hasn’t. He can’t get private financing. And you know what that means? I guarantee you it means this: He’ll be back to the city asking for more money in one form or another. Count on it.

Maybe that will be enough to wake up Peorians and cajole them into expressing outrage to their city council members. Then again, maybe not.

City of Peoria, Crime, Peoria County, Peoria Police

David Kennedy methods rolled out in Peoria

15 Comments

The Journal Star reports that the Peoria Police Department, in cooperation with the State’s Attorney’s office, is rolling out a Drug Market Initiative/Intervention strategy here in Peoria. Although he’s not named in the article, this is the program developed by David Kennedy on which I reported back in March, with a follow-up article in April. In March, Chief Settingsgaard said that he had “a team being trained by Kennedy and his staff.”

The paper summarizes the program thus:

The Drug Market Initiative/Intervention strategy targets geographic drug markets and involves prosecuting the most violent offenders. Low-level offenders are offered a second chance through interventions and help from social service agencies, along with the warning that another crime means jail time.

I applaud the police for trying new methods to reduce crime, and I’m especially pleased to see the police working with the State’s Attorney’s office. Too often there is an adversarial relationship between these two agencies. Best of luck to everyone involved in implementing this new strategy.

City of Peoria, Illinois Dept. of Transportation, Village of Morton

IDOT passes over Peoria, puts a quarter million in Morton’s coffers

28 Comments

You be the judge. Which sidewalk and curb do you think is in worse shape? (Both images are courtesy of Google Maps.)

Is it number 1:

Grundy-Elementary
Grundy Elementary School, Morton, Ill.

Or is it number 2:

Trewyn-Middle
Trewyn Middle School, Peoria, Ill.

If you picked number 1, then you probably work for the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT). That’s the one they picked, too. They decided the sidewalks and curbs at Grundy Elementary were crumbling and in disrepair, and allocated part of a $253,460 grant to help repair them. For Trewyn Middle School in Peoria? Zip. Zero. Nada. Not a penny of grant money for that fine piece of well-maintained urban fabric.

Here’s the bad news from a recent Issues Update released by the City of Peoria:

The City received notice that it was unsuccessful in its grant application request for a Safe Routes Grant from the Illinois Department of Transportation…. The Infrastructure portion of the grant application included $235,000 for sidewalks and curbs around Trewyn Middle School and Rolling Acres Edison Junior Academy…. Communities in the area that were successful in their grant applications include Morton, which received $253,460.

Yes, Morton — because we all know how run down and short of funds Morton is. According to the Journal Star, they wanted the money to pay for “replacement of crumbling sidewalks, curbs and gutters, installation of new sidewalks, and new crosswalks in an area that includes Grundy Elementary School, Blessed Sacrament School and Bethel Lutheran School.”

Apparently the grant award process didn’t include a physical site inspection.

City of Peoria

Scroggins: Deficit could be $12 million

5 Comments

At the policy session Tuesday night, Finance Director Jim Scroggins was speaking and casually said something about a “$10 to $12 million deficit.” Councilman Sandberg stopped him mid-sentence after that and said, “Did you say $12 million?” Scroggins: “Ten to twelve.”

Can I just state the obvious here? The difference between ten and twelve million dollars is not trivial. Two million dollars can pay for a lot of city services. The council has been proceeding on the assumption that the deficit is going to be $10 million, and there’s already rhetoric that budget cuts are going to have to be made “with a chainsaw, not a scalpel” and it’s going to be “bloody.” I shudder to think how much worse it will be if the deficit grows another twenty percent.

One thing we can be sure of, though, is that the city will continue to protect unnecessary and expensive developer welfare like the $39.5 million they’re planning to give Gary Matthews to build a huge addition onto the Pere Marquette and affiliate with Marriott Hotels. They’re going to continue to protect money-losing “quality-of-life” amenities like the Civic Center and the proposed downtown museum, neither of which have been asked to sacrifice a penny. And they’re going to continue to annex more land to the north and west even though four decades of annexation has never produced the gravy train of revenue that was promised.

Instead, they’ll cut basic services, like police protection, code enforcement, animal and litter control, road maintenance, and the like. In tough economic times, it’s important to have priorities, you know.