I had a strange sense of deja vu last night.
I attended an open house meeting Wednesday at the Gateway Building to look at plans for Washington and Adams Streets (Route 24) from I-474 to Hamilton Blvd. There were lots of artist’s renderings of how it could look in the future, with wider sidewalks, on-street parking, street trees, shorter crossing distances for pedestrians, etc. But I got the distinct feeling I’d been through this exercise before.
Oh, that’s right — I have. I remember seeing the same thing at the Sheridan Triangle open house meetings. I see a pattern emerging here. The city gets finished with the feasibility study for these projects, then they don’t appropriate money for the engineering or construction of them, so they wither on the vine.
There’s $10 million in state construction money earmarked and set aside for Peoria to use. This was money that was secured years ago to move the S-curve where Adams and Jefferson meet north of downtown. That project never materialized either, so now the money is available for another project. But no one’s tapping into it.
Instead, lack of money is cited as the problem for pushing off these projects. Improvements to Main Street were put on the back burner by second district council member Barbara Van Auken because it’s estimated to cost $10 million. And in November of last year, the council decided to delay five large capital projects — including the Sheridan Triangle redevelopment — until some time in the future when they might possibly issue bonds to pay for them. No word on when that will show up on the agenda.
Meanwhile, the council has had no problem finding money or issuing bonds to give $39.5 million to a private hotel developer. Nor have they had any trouble spending $55 million overbuilding the Peoria Civic Center. There’s plenty of money to go around for non-necessities — and taxes imposed to pay for them. And these deals get through the council lickety-split.
So the problem isn’t money. It’s priorities.
No. Probably not unless there is a shift in priorties that is maintained for more than a month.
Was there not a whole bunch of meetings and other assorted crap ten years ago on the north end for a similar load of bullsh*t.
Raoul: Same old same old insanity cycle repeating….. sigh …. again.
I have an original copy of what was known as the “Peoria North Corridor Study”, dated 1970 (70 pages), prepared by the Graduate Design Studio, Dept. Of Architecture, U of I, C-U.
It contains a number of proposals for what was then called the “near north side”, and new routes from the airport, through town, to connect to Galena Road.
One of the plans shows a large campus at Woodruff, with a “new school”, several adjacent blocks turned into parkland and a large community center on the other side of Abington.
Pages 63-70 are about the new “Convention Center Complex”, which was along the river from Franklin to Fayette. It also included a large arena between Washington/Water and Franklin/Liberty, connected by sky-walks to the rest of the complex. The auditorium and convention buildings included large decks that hung out over the river.
I don’t know how much this study cost, but none of it was completed (as shown).
no
What is new , any thing the city touches dies on the vine. except the civic center oh wait they never have made a red cent just more and more and more TAXES .And they think that the other hotels wont be hurt when the new ones gets built They will be hurting wait and see. then they (city of peoria) will have to raise the H.R.A. taxes or come up with a new way to pay for the 39 million bond they gave the idiot across the river . keep him over there it will be cheaper for the people of peoria . Oh and did you know once he gets the 39million bond put together he gets 9million for his share .Talk about corporate welfare