Peoria Pundit

A show of hands please: Which of the 11 members of the Peoria City Council want to vote to take money away from the South Side of Peoria and hand it to a private charity that is more than capable of raising it’s own funds?

We’ll find out Tuesday.

Journal Star reporter John Sharp has an article detailing the efforts to divert $54,000 in federal stimulus money that the council previously told the federal government was going to sidewalk projects and instead giving it to the Center for Prevention of Abuse to fix a roof.

Councilman Clyde Gulley is quoted extensively in the article. Not one council member spoke in favor of the bait and switch. Not on the record anyway.

Pay attention folks: Sidewalks and drainage are segments of public infrastructure and are proper expenditures of taxpayer funds. A roof for a privately owned building is not. It is pork. The Center for Prevention of Abuse is a fine organization. But the city has no business spending scarce taxpayer cash on this, even if the city were flush with cash. But the city is just as fiscally challenged as other cities. There are far, far, far too many unmet public needs. And even if the council decides against diverting the funds and instead uses the cash for sidewalks, they probably won’t target the areas on the South Side most in need,

So, what excuse are they giving today for the inability to make the repairs that South Side residents need to be made? Why, it seems that the lack of adequate sidewalks and proper drainage has caught the city staff completely by surprise:

Gulley said he is concerned that other sections of Peoria need improvements sooner than those areas that city staff members have identified. One area at Humboldt and Griswold streets, Gulley said, often floods during heavy rains because of a lack of curbs, drainage and sidewalks.

City engineer Jeffrey Smith said that project requires more design work and is much more involved than the quicker fixes of removing and replacing sidewalks.

Oh, bullshit. Just pure bullshit.

First, Gulley has been agitating for this work to be done as long as I’ve been watching him on the council. Why hasn’t the city’s engineering staff done this work? Here is why: The city engineering staff has for decades had its nose buried up the butts of Peoria’s many developers, most of whom would rather die that have anything to do with anything on the South Side.

I had hoped that there would be a change after Steve Van Winkle retired to be replaced by David Barber.

But as far as I can tell, Barber hasn’t lit any fire under any asses in the engineering department. Think about it: Here we have a segment of town in which residents routinely do not have access to the front entrances of their homes, and it’s been like that for years, and no one in the engineering department thought it might be a just good idea to put pen to paper to design a way to fix the problem should some cash become available to fix it.

Of course, the Peoria City Council could at any time vote to instruct the city manager to make sure those plans were done. That didn’t happen.

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.