Peoria Pundit

I received a copy of the following email, which is apparently being sent to Bradley University students. I’ll reproduce it, then add my comments to the bottom:

To All Bradley Fraternity Presidents:

My name is Jeff Hall & I am one of the attorneys representing Sigma Nu in the case against Barbara Van Auken. As you may know, the election is coming up on April 7, 2009. There are some important dates I need you to inform your members about. It is imperative you do all you can to drive your members to register and vote. I send this email today with no time to spare. /

There is no secret that I am a strong supporter of Curphy Smith. I feel he would do a great job for ALL residents in his district, especially for Bradley students. That is why we need him elected. If Barb Van Auken wins, she will exact revenge on the Greek system at Bradley. You think it is tough now, just wait if she remains your council woman. Rumor has it that she is a very vengeful person and it would behoove every member of every fraternity to take 30 minutes out of their day tomorrow and go down to register and vote for “grace period voting”.

Tuesday 3/24/09 (tomorrow)

This is “grace period voting” meaning if you are not registered to vote you can register and vote at the same time. If you are registered already, you can still vote.

We will have transportation from the Student Center from 10am4pm (ish) to the election commission downtown. (it closes at 5pm). Students need to bring a driver’s license AND something with their Bradley address on it, such as: a bill–credit card or utility, or their Webster page from Bradley.

Saturday 3/28/09

This is “early voting” only. You must already be registered to vote at your Bradley address.

We are encouraging student car pooling, but will be providing transportation from the Student Center from 9am-2:30pm to the election commission. (it closes at 3pm). Students need to bring a driver’s license AND something with their Bradley address on it, such as: a bill–credit card or utility, or their Webster page from Bradley, or their voter registration card with their BU address on it.

I implore you to act. Now is the time to stand up and allow the city to hear your voice. If you vote with the drive and impetus we know students can possess, BVA will be voted out and no longer will Bradley students and Greek Members be underrepresented. You will make it easier for your successors. You will actually have real political power. That is a big thing to possess, especially around Peoria and Bradley.

We need at least 500 BU voters out of this election to win. Currently voter turn out is very low, but BVA’s supporters will vote for certain. You and your members are the secret weapon. Please take the time to go down to the election precinct tomorrow. It will only take 30 minutes. Further, grab 5 of your friends that aren’t in a fraternity/sorority and get them to go with you. We need all the help we can get.

Thank you for your time and I look forward to seeing you at the polls.

Respectfully,

Jeffrey R. Hall

My two cents: Of course, Bradley students have the right to vote. That should go without saying, but to avoid any silly comments suggesting I am implying the opposite, I’ll say it here. BU students have the right to vote and I support that right.

The question is: Where do they vote? Do they vote here, in Peoria, where they are attending college, or do they vote where they live? When I attended Eastern Illinois University, I slept in Charleston, but I was still a resident of Peoria. I voted absentee. I never cast one single vote for any local race in Charleston (although I do recall registering). Not that I didn’t care or didn’t have an opinion. Simply stated, I considered myself a Peoria resident and cast my votes in Peoria. My stay in Charleston was going to be temporary and I knew it.

I knew that Charleston residents would — and had every right to — resent transient student votes deciding who held local offices. And I strongly suspected that some EIU students who did cast votes in Charleston did nothing to cancel their hometown registrations, meaning they remained registered in two counties, which is suspect is not exactly legal. And I would not surprise me if one or more of my classmates did the absentee ballot thing AND voted in person in Charleston. I know that IS illegal.

So, while Bradley students have the right to register locally and vote locally, I would encourage them as a matter of personal honor and integrity to vote in the communities in which they actually consider themselves permanent residents.

Second: Curphy Smith has every right to ask any eligible, registered voter to vote for him. He campaign has the right to register any eligible voter. His campaign has the right to drive voters to the polls. This is the stuff of grassroots politics.

Third: Permanent residents of Peoria are no different than the residents of Charleston and just might resent temporary occupants of dorms and student rentals helping to decide who sites on the Peoria City Council and other elected bodies long after these students have moved back to their real homes. People have the right to base their vote on anything they want to base it on. So while the Smith campaign has the right go after the student vote, permanent 2nd District residents have the right to decide to vote against Smith because he is going after the student vote, and would thus be beholden to them if he wins.

Fourth: If you were wondering whether the Sigma Nu fraternity’s lawsuit against Barbara Van Auken and others was politically motivated, I guess learning that that their attorney is electioneering for her opponent pretty much answers that question.

UPDATE: C.J. Summers beat me again and had a post up about this before I did (I decided to get 8 hours of sleep, instead). He also links to a PDF file that shows an anonymous anti-Curphy Smith flyer that’s going around, accusing the Smith campaign of violating election rules. A conversation with a Peoria Election commission official left me convinced it is not.

From a press release:

MEDIA ADVISORY

For Planning Purposes

March 4, 2009

Contact: Jeffrey R. Hall, Hall, Owens & Wickenhauser L.L.C.

(309-231-9980)
News Conference Tomorrow

Attorneys file civil lawsuit against Peoria Councilwoman

Barbara Van Auken for drunken abuse of power last fall

Peoria…Attorneys for the Sigma Nu fraternity are filing a civil lawsuit against Peoria City Councilwoman Barbara Van Auken for her drunken escapade last fall abusing her power, insulting Bradley University police and willful trespassing on the property of the Sigma Nu fraternity.

At the news conference the attorneys and leaders of the fraternity will discuss the particulars of the lawsuit and hand out supporting evidence to members of the media. The incident occurred on September 29, 2008 and now that the process of discovery—which was made difficult by the City of Peoria—is complete, the lawsuit is being filed.

News Conference:

Location: Sigma Nu Fraternity

(1300 W. Fredonia), Peoria

10:30 am

Thursday, March 5, 2009

And after I received the above “media advisory,” I received the following email:

This is also a request to not report this story tonight as we have yet to file the lawsuit today. Please embargo the story until our news conference tomorrow at 10:30 a.m. at the Sigma Nu Fraternity house as reported in my previous email.

Jeffrey R. Hall

Sorry. Both emails arrived in my inbox unsolicited. I didn’t agree ahead of time to not report on it. This is news, and I’m reporting on it.

And yes, I know that I’ll be criticized for it. And I know some folks will say that I’m just protecting a friend. So be it. And I’m sure that folks will assume that this lawsuit was filed a month before the election just to hurt Van Auken’s el-election chances, So be it.

My earlier posts about the issue:

Local: Van Auken fights for neighborhood, hands foes an issue
Local: Sigma Nu incident was simmering for months
Local: A few new details about Sigma Nu incident

UPDATE: From the lawfirm:

On the media advisory, the date given for the incident occurring was September 29, 2008.  That is incorrect.  The incident began around11:33 on September 19, and continued into September 20, 2008.

Regarding embargoes, from PRWeek:

“(Embargoes) are not a particularly ethical arrangement from a media standpoint, argues Gary Hill, head of the ethics committee for the Society of Professional Journalists, and an broadcast investigative reporter in the Twin Cities. “People will just kind of feed you the information and slap something on the top of it that says this is embargoed until such and such a time. We didn’t ask for the information; they just ship the information, and then they ask us to act in a certain fashion, when our ethics say we should act in a different fashion. Its not necessarily ethical on our part to honor the embargo.”

The best journalists will tell you their first loyalty lies with the public. If information is viewed as important for safety or welfare, embargoing can come across as self-serving. And honoring the embargo becomes a greater ethical breach than publishing the information.

“The embargo may be illegitimate if it is merely serving the interests of the organization releasing the information, points out Bob Steele, head of the ethics program at The Poynter Institute. “The ethical issue of embargoes has to do with the importance of the information to the public.

If what’s being withheld is of value to the public, then journalists could very well be unethical by failing to serve the citizens to whom they owe primary allegiance.”

This is one of my concerns with the mainstream press. It tends to define what is ethical by what makesw their job easier to do.

Am I worried that somehow I’m gonna stop getting press releases. Not really. But if I would have to lower my standards to g3et press releases, I’d just as soon stop anyway.

Word on the Street is especially newsworthy today, with comments abut dissatisfaction with American Water Company, candidates for the 4th District City Council and Peoria’s lack of clout in the state legislature.

Some 60-plus people got ticketed for alcohol-related violations at house near Bradley University this weekend. Most of them were BU students and many of them were student athletes. My two cents: Bradley University is no different that any other colleges, including the one I attended in the 1980s. There is a culture that encourages binge drinking. I think serious thought needs to be giving to lowering the drinking age to 18, or even 16. It would remove the aura around it, make it less of a rite of passage, and it would allow for students to take their first drinks of alcohol under adult supervision without making criminals of the adults.

Here is a list of those ticketed.

And here I thought Journal Star reporters lived in fear of getting mentioned on Peoria Pundit.

More on that in a moment.

I was a guest in former Journal Star religion writer/copy desk maven Mike Miller’s journalism class at Bradley University. Also guesting was current JS courts/military affairs reporter Andy Kravetz.

We were invited to discuss online journalism. In addition to writing full time for the paper, he also maintains a blog, called InFormation, in which he writes about military issues.

Andy was there to present the mainstream media approach to online. I was the providing the citizen journalism perspective.

Andy and I agrees on quite a lot. He’s is far less enthusiastic about the value of comments, as he finds that comments seem to inevitably denigrate into flamewars. I cannot help but think about how my readers often provide insight and knowledge on many issues.

We mostly agreed on the need for blogs operated by the mainstream media to maintain the same standards of objectivity they aspire to follow in print or broadcast. I agreed, but added that blogs provide another voice that is often opinionated, and that opinion is also journalism. Objectivity, I noted, is NOT a state of mind but is a process that includes making sure that multiple sources are used to provide balance and expertize. What readers want, I said, is fairness.

The students asked interesting questions about how and when to moderate comments, and how to deal with the fact that some people hate what you write. ‘They can kill you, but they can’t eat you,’ I replied.

I didn’t get a chance to tell the ‘Yo, Pundit” story.

But both Andy and Mr. Miller expressed disappointment that I don’t mention them much. Miller said the only time I even mentioned his name was when I reported that he was taking the buyout.

Usually, the only feedback I get from JS people is when they express, well, unhappiness that I mentioned them. And the hour passed quickly, and I didn’t get to interact as much with the students as I would like.

So I’m looking forward to visiting John Sharp’s class on some Tuesday.

I annoyed some people with a line at the bottom of this post, which noted that a member of the Peoria Chiefs who tossed a baseball an oposing player and instead hit a fan could get 16 years in prison. The line I added was:

Which is longer than some college athletes get for killing their roommates with fire.

Sorry, critics. It’s true. The drunken Bradley s/soccer players students who killed their classmate/teammate/roommate served a few months each. And the loudest sentiment expressed so far is that all must be forgiven, it was an accident, and so forth. There was outrage that Bradley refused to let the killers re-enroll at BU. The often stated reason for this sentiment is they were “good kids,” a term usually applied to white teenagers from middle-class class families who’ve never gotten in trouble before.

And this, I believe, is why people are annoyed at that line, not because it didn’t apply. Obviously these are both cases of athletes acting badly and being made to face the legal consequences. My comparison of the two cases therefore is completely legitimate.

Still some people object. They say it’s unfair — to the former Bradley students. You know, the ones who actually DID kill someone. Not unfair to the pitcher, who didn’t kill anyone and yet might face a far longer jail term.

People never cease to amaze me.

In today’s column, Phil Luciano lets readers know that he is a member of the faculty at Bradley University, a fact he did not mention in two recent columns that sided with BU students regarding the last week’s incident in which an allegedly intoxicated city council member confronted members of Sigma Nu over multiple noise complaints stemming from a late-night outdoor drinking party.

And I have to hand it to Phi. He graciously conceded that this fact should have been included in the columns and then he apologized for not doing so.

Just kidding. His apology consisted of one word, “oopsie.” He then devoted the rest of the column ridiculing anyone who suggested he was Bradley’s “stooge.” He cited several obnoxious phone calls and emails to prove his point about his critics.

I’m betting as least some of those emails and phone calls were more lucid and sincere (at least more sincere than Phil’s apology), but he won’t share those because they don’t prove his point that anyone who would criticize him is a moron.

My message to Phil: You’ve dipped your toe into the cleansing waters of journalistic transparency by revealing the potential conflict of interest regarding Bradley University. Why not dive in and share ALL your emails on the subject?

Phil Luciano once again discusses the conflict between Bradley University students and neighbors. And once again, he essentially sides with students by claiming that the problem isn’t the noise, litter, public drinking, fireworks, public urination and the occasionally fatality. The problem is that the permanent residents and property taxpayers aren’t making the students feel welcome.

This is Luciano’s second column in as many days about the issue. And for the second time, he failed to mention that he gets a paycheck from Bradley University. That’s a potential conflict of interest at least as large as the fact that I’m friends with Barbara Van Auken.

Some observations on this matter:

• Many of the folks who are criticizing Van Auken for confronting Sigma Nu over its outdoor drinking party would be criticizing her if she had done nothing about the problems these residents are trying to fight. City Council elections are coming up, and battle lines are being drawn. I fully expect the editorial and news pages of the Journal Star to pimp for whoever runs against Van Auken.
• I’ve lived next door to a crack house. I’ve lived a few blocks from a frat house. If I had to chose between the two, with no other options, I’d be hard pressed to come to a decision.
• Luciano quotes an anonymous father of some anonymous frat kid, upset that the neighbors are picking on his precious little snowflake. This speaks volumes to me. Would Luciano quote a permanent resident anonymously? Doubt it.

Randall Emert, the blogger and commenter known as Emtronics, has castigated Peoria City Council member Barbara Van Auken following the Sigma Nu incident. He’s used the comments section of this blog and his own site. To summarize his position: The frat members are being maligned, Van Auken got away with being drunk and belligerent because the police did her favors, and State’s Attorney Kevin Lyons has no balls because he won’t prosecute his friends (Van Auken and Andrew Rand).

And myself? “Candy coated this because of no balls,” he writes.

I’m the first to admit it’s difficult to be critical of a friend. But believe me or not, I think that if former Marcella Teplitz got liquored up and tore into a rowdy frat house, I’d have posted something along the lines of “give ‘em Hell, girl.” And believe me, Marcella would have had NO problem putting pressure on either BU or city police to sit on rowdy college students.

Go read the post and my comment.

Better make it quick before he deletes it all.

The Journal Star’s Leslie Fark got a look at a Bradley University campus police report on this weekend’s incident outside the Sigmu Nu frat house. There are a few incidents I didn’t have, including allegations of shoulder poking and finger waverying.

And the headline: “Report: Van Auken tried to use position.”

Oh, the horror. Next thing you know, someone on the council will be using their position to mitigate a zoning dispute or, heaven forbid, helping a neighborhood organization get a stop sign.

At least she was doing it on behalf of constituents. I seems to recall allegations some former council members tried to “use influence” to defect domestic abuse charges, protect the son of a city manager from robbery charges, get out of traffic tickets, etc. But that was back when John Stenson was chief of police. Stenson moonlighted as a security guard at the the Journal Star. It’s a small world.

So what is it that Barbara Van Auken did that was wrong? She was intoxicated, some say. She was beligerent, according to some reports. There is a video, I hear. No one I’ve spoken to has seen it. If the video backs up the campus police version, she should apologize. Hell, it’s probably a good idea to apologize now.

But with more than 50 tickets issued in the past several months on this block, there’s something going on that needs to be addressed by Bradley University. The full-time residents who invested in homes in this neighborhood know they live among college students. They don’t expect a suburban lifestyle, and I doubt they are complaining this loudly about minor stuff. They don’t have to put up with drunk school children tossing bear bottles from roofs, or lighting fireworks every night.

I wouldn’t have bought the argument about the mean city council member picking on the poor innocent BU students four years ago when someone else represented the 2nd District. Joanne Glasser needs to live up to promises she made to the entire community — including the worried parents of BU students — that an end was coming to the binge drinking culture that contributed to two deaths last year.

And THAT should be the issue here, not whether some city council member poked a campus cop and used salty language.

And next time, I suggest Van Auken call one of her (apparently) teetotaling critics to respond to constituent who call in the middle of the night seeking help to quiet their neighborhoods.

Yeah, I used to do Newsbytes on an almost daily basis. I let is slide a couple of times, then got out of the habit. Well, hopefully, it’s back for good. All links via the Journal Star unless noted.

• They’re down to just three candidates for Peoria City Manager. But the juicy paragraph in this article is word from Mayor Jim Ardis that there may be interest in adding a candidate to the mix who has yet to be interviewed. Could that candidate be current interim Peoria City Manager Henry Holling. Yes, I’m aware that Holling took himself out of consideration when he accepted the temporary gig. But  I have found Holling to be  soft-spoken  manager who hasn’t ruffled any feathers.  Maybe that appears to some on the council. Just speculation on my part.
• I’m extending my best wishes to Officer Ann Ruggles, who is retiring at police information officer for the Peoria PD.
• I’ve been a critic of both Peoria School District 150 and Bradley University. Yet I have a hard time working up any outrage over news that the two may team up on the proposed math, science and technology academy. The school would be a charter school created by District 150, but operated by a different entity and not subject to some of the same restrictions most public school’s operate under. I have expressed concern that any school chartered  under District 150 auspices would be under too much control by the district. But Bradley University is a strong enough entity to resist the subtle pressures that could be applied District 150. And while I certainly have been a critic of how Bradley University treats it’s neighbor homeowners, it cannot be denied that the school has an excellent academic reputation. It’s certain that nearby Whittier School benefits from the student teachers BU provides. So, at first blush, this seems a win-win.
• Likewise, I’m bullish on the future of Manual High School, now that curriculum changes mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act are in place. Too bad that with all the highly-paid administrators and consultants employed by District 150 lacked to mental  brain power to figure out how to adequately staff the school. The principal is begging for more teachers. Here’s an idea: But some of these administrators to work doing something useful. Apparently, they instead decided to move the students elsewhere (WEEK) because they didn’t have the proper paperwork. Huh? So they DO have adequate paperwork for Woodruff and Central?