Local: Glen Oak holdouts are holding taxpayers hostage

Peoria Anti-Pundit rightfully calls me to task for not raising a fuss about the situation described in this Journal Star article from two days ago.

Peoria School District 150 is just two properties away from having bought all the land it needs to clear to make way for the new birth-to-8th-grade school it will use to replace Glen Oak School, now located at the corner of East Frye and North Wisconsin avenues.

The home at 815 E. Frye, recently inherited has been gutted to be remodeled into separate apartments. The owner wants $750,000.

The other, a dilapidated rental property at 909 E. Kansas, was bought for less than $4,000 in 1999. The owners want $49,500.

Both of these buildings are unoccupied. They are investments, not homes.

Randall suggests that we all might have been better off night fighting the district’s original effort to build this new school in Glen Oak Park.

As you recall, my opinion throughout that mess was that D-150 didn’t need to replace the building as the quality of the education depended on the teachers and the support given them by the administration. BUILDINGS don’t educate kids, people do. I argued that new school buildings were not needed, and that it they were built, they need not be in the park-like campus setting the district envisioned.

Keeping Glen Oak (and the other schools) was not an option given us by the district. So, I argued for building the new school at the site of the current Glen Oak School.

As to the prices these people want for their properties … the only sane reaqction is to marvel at their audacity. There’s no what in HELL that home on Frye is worth three-quarters of a million dollars. And the dilapidated rental property on Kansas? The slumlord who owns it ought to take the $32,450 he’s been offered, since it’s ten times what was paid for it less than a decade ago.

I’m opposed to using eminent domain to seize property for use by private developers. But THIS is exactly why eminent domain exists, to protect taxpayers from greedy clowns who try to hold taxpayers hostage.

In a fair world, these investors would be handed checks that reflect the value of the homes according to the property taxes they paid.

But all this could have been avoided by building a new, taller building at the site of the current school. It would have been a better fit for the urban residential neighborhood in which it sits, rather than the rural, suburban design the administration had in mind from the very beginning.