Recently, Peoria County did a web-based survey regarding the proposed downtown museum with this explanation:

Your Peoria County Government is interested in your opinion regarding public funding of the Peoria Riverfront Museum. Museum partners have requested public funding to complete the project, so the County Board must decide whether to proceed with a referendum to increase the sales tax rate one quarter of one percent. Your participation in this brief survey will help with that decision.

And as part of its “National Citizen Survey” in 2008, it asked this question:

The Peoria Riverfront Museum project – with a focus on education, history, arts, and sciences – has fallen short of its public and private fundraising goals. To what degree would you support or oppose a voter referendum to increase the sales tax rate by .25 percent (for example, from 8.0% to 8.25% for the City of Peoria) to fund the remaining cost of constructing money?

The question is, can the county do this — legally? The municipal code (as required by state law under 5 ILCS 430) appears to prohibit this kind of political activity. Sec. 2-29(b)(1) and (2) states, “No officer or employee shall intentionally perform any prohibited political activity during any compensated time, as defined herein.” There’s a whole list of what is considered “prohibited political activity,” but here’s the one about surveys from Sec. 2-29(a) [emphasis mine]:

Prohibited political activity means [. . .] (5) Surveying or gathering information from potential or actual voters in an election to determine probable vote outcome in connection with a campaign for elective office or on behalf of a political organization for political purposes or for or against any referendum question.

Isn’t this precisely what the county has done? The web survey and the National Citizen Survey question are clear attempts to determine the probable vote outcome of a sales tax referendum for the museum. They were both done at county expense, on county time, by county employees. What service does this provide citizens of the county? None that I can see. The only thing it appears to provide is taxpayer-funded market research for the museum group.