Peoria Pundit

In my City Beat column in this month’s Community Word, I speculated a bit on upcoming Peoria City Council elections. I wrote:

In the 3rd District, there’s a chance Bob Manning won’t run because he wants to spend more time with his family. Fourth-district councilman Bill Spears almost didn’t run last time, but ended up running for the state legislature two years ago. Barbara Van Auken is almost certainly going to run for re-election in the 2nd district. And more than one person has discussed the possibility of running against her, but I’m not at liberty to say who they are. Randall Emert, an employee of the U.S. Postal Service and a volunteer at Manual High School, is on the record on his blog and elsewhere that he’s considering running for Clyde Gulley’s 1st District seat.

Apparently, there’s speculation by people in a position to know that Gulley isn’t going to run. Last time around, Gulley faced four opponents in the primary, but he easily dispatched June Moore and Frank Lewis, then faced Greg Banks in the general election.

I would think Gulley would be hard to beat. A decision to NOT seek re-election would bring out lots of candidates.

Blogs played a role in the last election, as they gave voice to dissenting opinion that wasn’t showing up in the mainstream media. Blogs also played a fact- and fairness-checking role. There are more blogs now. And more people are aware of them. So, I predict that no matter who runs, blogs and bloggers will have a BIG impact.

This entry was posted on September 18, 2008 at 11:34 pm and is filed under Politics with tags Clyde Gulley, elections, Peoria City Council. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.