Arbor District, Bradley University, Business, City of Peoria

Whither goeth the Arbor District?

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The Arbor District is an historic neighborhood in the West Bluff bounded by West Main Street on the north, Western Avenue on the west, Bradley Avenue on the south, and Bradley University on the east. It has had its share of challenges. In the 1980s, the widening of Western Avenue made the housing facing Western less viable due to higher traffic volume, higher speeds, and less buffer between the houses and the street. So the neighbors decided to establish the Western Avenue Greenway Project, which purchased and razed the houses that fronted Western and replaced them with a linear park. Then in 2007, Bradley University wanted to expand their campus for additional parking, so they purchased all the homes along then-Maplewood Avenue (now AJ Robertson Circle and Clarissa Ct.), razed them, and put up a five-story parking garage to the north and a gravel lot used for parking and open-air storage of building materials to the south.

There are now about 116 improved properties left in the Arbor District, but not many are owner-occupied anymore. Bradley University owns six properties in the Arbor District, one of which they recently razed after letting it fall into disrepair. Ideal Rentals owns a few and rents them to Bradley students. But after Bradley’s campus expansion in 2007-8, Perry and Leslie Tate started buying up homes as they came on the market and putting them into land trusts. Today, they own 73 properties (about 63% of the homes), which they rent to Bradley students under their University Properties company. The acquisition cost of the properties is over $8 million.

Rental properties are an important market segment, and there’s nothing wrong with having some rental properties in a neighborhood. But when the rental properties outnumber the owner-occupied homes, and when they are predominantly rented by students who only stay a few months at a time and are constantly changing, you start to lose neighborhood stability. But the bigger issue here is that you have a single owner consolidating properties in a small, defined area. This opens up concerns that the properties are potentially being assembled for another purpose, and that the rental of them is just to bide time until all properties are acquired.

Adding to this suspicion is the fact that the properties are being put into land trusts. Land trusts are essentially non-profit organizations that actually hold the title to the property. It’s a private legal agreement that specifies a grantor (or owner), a grantee (or beneficiary), and a trustee. This means that in property records, you don’t see the name of the owner as specified by the private agreement–you only see the land trust as the owner. The land trust name and the trustee are the only public information available.

What this means is that the actual owner of the property can be changed without any public disclosure. All that has to be done is for the private legal agreement–the trust–to be amended. In public property records, it will still say that the trust owns it, but you’ll never know that the owner specified in the private trust document has changed. This makes it easy to transfer ownership of property with complete anonymity.

And it means that we don’t really know who owns 63% of the Arbor District. Nor will we know if that ownership ever changes hands as long as the trust holds title to it. And that anonymity and uncertainty makes the remaining homeowners in the Arbor District nervous.

Why? Because Bradley University has already expanded their campus into the Arbor District just 16 years ago and would be the most likely entity to want to acquire the rest of the neighborhood for future expansion. I reached out to Bradley and Perry Tate/University Properties and asked if Bradley was part of the trust that holds title to these properties, but received no answer from either organization.

The trustee for the Arbor District properties is William R. Kohlhase. He’s a partner at Miller, Hall & Triggs, LLC, with offices in downtown Peoria. Their published client list includes Bradley University, but not University Properties. That doesn’t prove anything, but it does fuel speculation and neighborhood concern.

I provided all the information I gathered on this issue to the local media, but they haven’t deemed it newsworthy, apparently. In the 1960s, a time when newspaper reporters were more curious, a reporter for The Sentinel Star (now The Orlando Sentinel) in Florida started to notice large tracts of land being purchased by land trusts. Rumors began to swirl over who might be the real owner of the land. Was it a car manufacturer? A space engineering firm?

Eventually, all the clues pointed to a California company: Walt Disney Productions. And on November 15, 1965, Disney made its official announcement that, yes, they were the ones who were the real owners, and that they would be building a new theme park in Florida: Walt Disney World. The reason they had kept their identity a secret was to keep land prices low. If landowners found out Disney was the interested party, they likely would have raised their prices.

It’s not unreasonable to speculate that something similar is happening here, although not as exciting as a Disney theme park coming to town. Who’s the mystery owner of two-thirds of the Arbor District? What plans are in store for it? Why all the secrecy? Why no comment from Bradley University? If you have any information on this, please let me know in the comments below, or email me directly.

Bradley University

Bradley University Should Sell Avanti’s Property

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In January 2023, Bradley purchased the Avanti’s property at University and Main for $690,000 according to Peoria County property records.

Bradley does not need property on the north side of Main. Bradley is on the south side of Main. What value does the Avanti’s property bring to Bradley? It will require either rehabbing or razing the property, and then it will require ongoing upkeep and potentially police monitoring (if they turn it into green space).

The stated reason for the purchase was to remove blight (Avanti’s is blight?) and make a more attractive entrance to campus. But that isn’t the entrance to campus. The entrance to campus is south of Main on the University S-curve where they have a beautiful stone sign with landscaping that was put in back in the 1990s.

The only reason the property would be of any real value is if Bradley wants to acquire more property on the north side of Main for future expansion. But that would decimate one of the oldest and most stable neighborhoods on the West Bluff: The Uplands.

If you want to see what Bradley expansion does to a neighborhood, look no further than the Arbor District, where Bradley razed all the houses on Maplewood and put up a five-story parking deck across the alley from residents on Cooper St. That resulted in most of the homes being converted from owner-occupied to rental housing. It’s not in the City’s best interests (nor Bradley’s) to destabilize yet another bordering neighborhood.

In July, Bradley announced in a press release that it has a $13 million budget shortfall for fiscal year 2023. Jobs are going to be cut. Programs have already been cut, and there will likely be more coming. It’s hard to see how the Avanti’s purchase did not contribute to this problem.

Part of the reason they are in financial dire straits is because they spent too much on another property–the business and engineering convergence center that replaced Jobst Hall, which cost more to build than they were able to raise. They are only exacerbating their financial woes by acquiring more property they cannot afford.

Alumni of Bradley have recently received direct mailings requesting donations to The Bradley Fund, something they describe as “our primary way for Bradley alumni and friends to grow and strengthen the university through their annual support.” Why would alumni give money to a university that buys property they don’t need at a time when they’re millions of dollars under budget?

No, I don’t think any alumni should give Bradley any money until they show some fiscal responsibility. The convergence center is already built and financed, and it’s a part of campus, so there’s no way to get any money from that. But Bradley could recoup their losses from acquiring Avanti’s.

A good-faith display of the university’s efforts to right the ship and show alumni they’re trying to be good stewards of their money would be to sell the Avanti’s property. Admit that it was a mistake to purchase it. Acknowledge that they can’t afford it. Sell it. Sell it now.

City of Peoria, Economic Development

One Technology Plaza up for auction

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If you’re looking for a bargain on an office building downtown, don’t miss the auction for One Technology Plaza October 16-18. Starting bid is $1.5 million. The marketing description indicates the office building is 148,055 square feet (contiguous space up to 22,441 square feet) and only 31.7% occupied.

The building sits at the corner of Fulton and Adams streets, where the downtown Bergner’s store once stood. The old Bergner’s building was razed in the fall of 1997 to make way for the new “Riverfront Technology Center” (as it was called before a naming contest came up with “One Technology Plaza”). Developed by Diane Cullinan, the project was slated to cost $32.2 million, $12.4 million of which consisted of public investment from ICC ($3.2 million) and the City of Peoria ($9.2 million for the parking deck). It also got $1.2 million from Caterpillar and a state grant for $500,000.

At the time it was proposed, the City had high hopes for the tech center. It was going to provide high-tech training and provide high-tech infrastructure for tenants. It was going to revitalize downtown, make us part of the “silicon prairie,” lure new technology businesses to the city, help create a home-grown high-tech workforce, and beautify a blighted corner in the center of town.

The training portion of that dream, a company called RiverTech Community Technology Center, folded just a year after it opened due to lack of business, leaving 6,000 square feet of empty space. And just like that, One Technology Plaza became just another office building downtown, and everyone moved on to the next big project that was going to revitalize downtown.

Journalism, Peoria Journal Star

Would Peoria support a new newspaper?

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The Peoria Journal Star was really starting to slide downhill fast when I started my blog, but now it’s reached the bottom of the hill. It’s tiny. There are hardly any reporters. They don’t cover critical government meetings. Their sports scores are printed two days after the game. They don’t cover the arts. I could go on and on, and so could you.

I have many questions, many of which I probably asked before, but I’m too lazy to look back through my blog and try to find them.

  1. Would a startup local newspaper be viable in this day and age? Is there a market for it?
  2. Would you subscribe to a newspaper if it were a full-service newspaper like the Journal Star used to be back in the day?
  3. Could it survive if it were subscription-only (no ads, higher rates)? Or would it need to be traditionally subscription- and ad-revenue-based?
  4. What if it were only offered in printed form (not online)? Crazy idea, I know, but it would mean no content being stolen by news aggregators.
  5. What if it were only offered online? Does that diminish it? Make it seem like a glorified blog?

Going back to question 1, we know that newspaper readership and subscriptions are down, but there’s a chicken-or-egg question I have about that. My parents would still be subscribers if the Journal Star offered any value. When you cut the content and outsource your customer “service” (I use the term loosely), naturally you’re going to lose subscribers. I wonder if a good newspaper would still be viable, even in 2023, because it would offer news that no one else is covering.

What are your thoughts? Both of you who might stumble across this post–what do you think? Please let me know in the comments.

Education, Peoria Public Schools

Not a single student proficient in math at Trewyn Primary School

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Courtesy of Wirepoints, Trewyn Primary School is on a list of 53 Illinois schools where not a single student can do math at grade level.

There are 386 students in Trewyn at $15,936 in tax money expended per student. And not a single student proficient in math. Think about that. That’s over six million dollars being spent with nothing to show for it. It’s even worse than it looks when you consider all the efforts the school district has gone through to inflate student grades. The lowest grade students can get on their assignments or tests is a 40 (out of 100). Even with this inflation, there is still not one student doing math at grade level out of 386 students.

And yet, all these children will get passed to the next grade level regardless. Why aren’t these kids being held back from advancing to the next grade until they master the material? Are we really helping children by inflating grades and practicing social advancement? Does the district administration care more about the money that comes from enrollment and reaching certain metrics (on paper, though not in reality) than they do about the education of children?

City Council, City of Peoria, Economic Development, TIF

Saving downtown one new hotel at a time

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I stopped blogging for several years shortly after the big Wonderful Development opened downtown. You may recall that they remodeled the Pere Marquette, opened the new Courtyard Marriott, and had plans to put in restaurants and bars and retail, and oh, goodness, that block was going to be hopping! And the best part was, it wasn’t going to cost taxpayers a thing because, “It pays for itself,” an exuberant Mayor Ardis said at the time.

As it turns out, not one restaurant, bar, or retail shop has ever opened in the storefronts along Monroe. In fact, the interior was never even finished; it still looks like a construction site inside. Taxpayers lost the $7 million loan and is saddled with ongoing lawsuits with developer Gary Matthews. And since the pandemic, the Courtyard has been closed, ostensibly due to low demand.

But no worries. It turns out that what downtown really needs to start bustling like it’s 1939 again is — wait for it — another hotel! Yes. The Peoria City Council has just approved another redevelopment agreement with another hotel developer that’s promising 70% occupancy, a national flag (this time it will be a Hilton Garden Inn), a restaurant/bar, and a convenience store. And it won’t cost taxpayers anything. It’s risk-free!

The new hotel is planned for Adams street, across the street from the new OSF Health Care corporate headquarters, in place of the former Sully’s bar and the former downtown Illinois Central College campus (also known as the Perley building). Plans call for the two properties to be razed to make way for the new development. Incidentally, artists’ renderings show Fulton Plaza replaced with two-way vehicular traffic again, but there’s nothing in the redevelopment agreement about it.

Oh, and it’s absolutely, positively, nothing at all like that Wonderful Development from a decade or so ago. Everybody says so: the developer, the developer’s attorney, various other people with a vested interest in the project, and the City Manager.

They have a point. There are many differences. This project includes apartments on the upper floors in addition to hotel rooms on the lower floors. That’s a new twist. The City isn’t loaning $7 million from underfunded pension funds this time. That’s a plus. They’re also not handing $33 million to the developer up front (backed by municipal bonds that we’re still on the hook to pay off), although they swore that was an awesome idea the last time. But hey, we all make multi-million-dollar mistakes with other people’s money now and then. Can’t remain bitter about that forever, am I right?

But on the other hand, there are a lot of similarities. It’s highly debatable that we need more hotel rooms downtown. As mentioned, one entire hotel downtown is still closed–try to book a room in the Courtyard. The occupancy predictions presented at the council meeting tonight (brought to you by Hotel & Leisure Advisors, a consultant for the hotel industry who reportedly did the feasibility study for this project) are unrealistically high, just like they were for the Wonderful Development. They’re also promising a new restaurant and retail, just like they did with the last hotel project, but which never materialized.

And there’s one more similarity worth mentioning: This does come with a cost to taxpayers. This hotel will be in the Downtown Conservation TIF (tax increment financing district), and the City has promised to pay the developer up to 100% of the redevelopment costs out of the increase in taxes attributable to the project site. That’s money that otherwise would go to other taxing districts, such as the County, District 150, the Park District, ICC, etc. That means taxpayers like you and me will have to take up the slack.

This also means the new hotel will be competing with the Pere Marquette and (still shuttered) Courtyard Marriott. The $33 million in bonds to build those hotels is supposed to get paid back out of revenues from those hotels. If revenue goes down due to increased competition for an (I would argue) over-supply of hotel rooms, then the bond repayment has to be made up from taxpayers like you and me. You can’t stop a private developer from building another hotel (that’s capitalism), but you don’t have to give them a sweetheart TIF deal that will likely harm your other investments, either.

True to form, however, the deal was sealed before the Council ever met, and it passed unanimously tonight. That’s okay. We’re finally going to get downtown moving again, just like we were promised with the Pere Marquette renovation. And the Civic Center expansion. And the museum. And the new Cat headquarters. And One Technology Plaza. And Riverfront Village. And….

Journalism

Objectivity in journalism under attack by journalists

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There’s a new report out from the Knight-Cronkite News Lab titled, “Beyond Objectivity: Producing Trustworthy News in Today’s Newsrooms.” According to the authors, objectivity is bad for a couple of reasons. The first is that some beliefs should never be questioned:

[W]hen misunderstood, journalistic “objectivity” or “balance” can lead to so-called “both-sides-ism” – a dangerous trap when covering issues like climate change or the intensifying assault on democracy.

You see, the cultural elites have already decided what the truth is on certain issues, such as climate change and the “assault on democracy,” and therefore there is no need to investigate opposing viewpoints. This sort of dogmatism sounds like the Catholic Church’s stance toward Copernicus. Now it’s the reporters who are the priestly class. They’ll let us know what the truth is, and we needn’t worry ourselves over the dissenting voices who contradict them.

But there’s a more insidious reason to reject objectivity:

Kathleen Carroll, former executive editor of the Associated Press, said she has not used the word objectivity since the early 1970s because she believes it reflects the world view of the male white establishment. “It’s objective by whose standards? And that standard seems to be white, educated, fairly wealthy guys,” she explained. “And when people don’t feel like they find themselves in news coverage, it’s because they don’t meet that definition.”

The mainstream media “has allowed what it considers objective truth to be decided almost exclusively by white reporters and their mostly white bosses,” Wesley Lowery, an influential 32-year-old Black Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, has written. “And those selective truths have been calibrated to avoid offending the sensibilities of white readers.”

Just flipping through newspapers of the past, I notice they cover things of local interest like schools, labor, city council meetings, transportation news, tax increases, weddings, obituaries, births, weather, sports, concert and theater reviews, as well as national and world news such as civil rights marches and legislation, news on hot wars and cold wars, and tons of other topics. Do these topics seem overly selective? Certainly there was some selectivity in that editors can’t cover all topics, so they picked topics that would be of interest to the most readers. Data compiled by Nielsen and reported by Pew Research shows that, from 1999 through 2014, white, black, and Asian ethnic groups all had nearly identical daily newspaper readership (and Hispanic readership was lower, but proportionate), so I guess editors did a pretty good job of providing what their readers of all ethnicities wanted. Yet this journalism school report would have us believe that only white people were served by objective news in the past. Even if that were true, which they haven’t established, that would not be an indictment on the principle of objectivity, but rather an accusation that past editors were not objective enough.

The answer, they say, is to strive for truth, not merely accuracy:

Accuracy starts with a commitment to verifiable facts, with no compromises. But facts, while true, aren’t necessarily the whole truth. Therefore, your journalists must consider multiple perspectives to provide context where needed. That said, avoid lazy or mindless “balance” or “both-sides-ism.” If your reporting combines accuracy and open-mindedness to multiple points of view, the result should still reflect the most honest picture of reality you can present – what Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein call “the best available version of the truth.”

These goals–accuracy, multiple perspectives, open-mindedness to multiple points of view–are actually the definition of objectivity. The whole report is basically arguing that editors and news directors in the past failed to be objective because they excluded certain perspectives (female, people of color, etc.). But rather than say we need to do better–to be more objective by making sure we’re including points of view that have been allegedly excluded in the past–to be more open-minded, they argue instead that we should be just as closed-minded as in the past, but just change our prejudices. Include women and people of color, but now exclude white males and perspectives we don’t like (“like climate change or the intensifying assault on democracy”). Let’s do the same thing we say we oppose, but just turn the tables a little, and then insulate ourselves against charges of bias by claiming that objectivity is patriarchal and unattainable anyway. That way, we’re just as biased as we accuse the past of being, but it’s okay now because we’re not claiming to be objective anymore. We’re not even claiming to be merely accurate. We’re going for truth.

“Bias is truth” is the new journalistic standard. Perhaps we can add that to the Orwellian platitudes of “War is peace,” “Slavery is freedom,” and “Ignorance is strength.”

Peoria Public Schools

Abysmal scores celebrated by D150, local press

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To read Peoria’s “newspaper of record,” one would think that everything is positive at Peoria Public Schools. They “got better marks on the Illinois State Board of Education’s annual Illinois Report Card this year.” “Nine schools received improved designations.” Two schools “were deemed exemplary schools.” The superintendent “celebrated the improvements in a statement issued by the district.” Hurrah!

Except.

Maybe it would be nice if journalists didn’t just reprint statements issued by the school district and actually did their own independent investigation. This is something that used to be standard practice in journalism. Journalists used to question everything. They weren’t just scribes for government agencies who take our tax money.

Let’s look at just one of the laudatory examples given in the Journal Star article:

Three schools located in the poorest areas of the city – Franklin Primary School, Harold B. Dawson Jr. Middle School, and Manual High School – were elevated from the lowest designation to “commendable,” meaning they had no underperforming student groups, a graduation rate greater than 67%, and were not in the top 10% of schools statewide.

Sounds great. Let’s look at Franklin Primary School’s report card on the Illinois Report Card website. Would you like to take a guess as to what percentage of the students are proficient in English Language Arts (ELA)? Six percent. That means 94% of the students at this school that “had no underperforming student groups” are not proficient in English. You might think it couldn’t get worse, but the percentage of students proficient in math is only two percent. That’s right: 98% of the students at this “commendable” K-4 school are not proficient in math. But they have a graduation rate greater than 67%.

Does something seem like it’s not right to you? Something that maybe would warrant a question or two from the fourth estate to the school board members? Maybe raise some concerns over how $14,000 per student at this school is being spent and why there is so little return on investment?

Not surprisingly, Harold B. Dawson Middle School (formerly Calvin Coolidge Middle School) turned in a proficiency rate of 3% in ELA and 2% in Math. They boast 11% proficiency in science. Booyah. They, too, are “commendable,” according to the State of Illinois. By the time you reach Manual High School, proficiency in ELA and Math are at 1%, and science is at 2%.

Can we state the obvious here? These scores are abysmal. They are not commendable. They are not a cause to celebrate. Our tax money is being wasted. Our city’s children are not being educated. Why isn’t there an independent investigation into why the performance of these schools is so appalling? Why aren’t the school board members (who seem to think that the most important work to be done is renaming our school buildings) being tossed out?

Here’s another question that has not come up during the teachers union negotiations: Why should the teachers get any more money? Why should there be no connection between their pay and the students’ educational outcomes? If your job is to educate, and only 1% of your students are educated, did you do your job? If the retort is that the teachers don’t get enough support from the administration for student discipline, then why don’t they threaten to strike over that issue? Why do they only threaten to strike over salary concerns?

One thing is for sure: the public school system is broken. Really, horribly, badly broken. And Peoria is fiddling while the schools burn.

The Peoria Chronicle

What’s Up With The Chronicle?

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Just for fun, I decided to log into my Peoria Chronicle blog again after being away for many years. I updated the theme and started reading the first few months I was blogging in 2005. That was quite the trip down memory lane. My son was born in 2005; now he’s 17 and a senior in high school. My youngest daughter who was two in 2005 is now a sophomore at the University of Iowa. And my oldest daughter who was five in 2005 (the one I blogged about getting her first bicycle) is a Bradley University graduate and is in Switzerland for the fall.

I read about all the places that closed in 2005: Hunt’s, Vonachen’s (the first time, when they became Bud’s Aged Steaks, which didn’t last long), Ben Franklin in Peoria Heights, Famous Barr (which became Macy’s, which then left the mall completely).

When I first started blogging, I wrote a lot more about my personal life. As time went on, it got more newsy and less personal. In fact, I got some personal threats when writing on certain subjects which made me decide to guard my privacy more and more as time progressed. Eventually, I was too busy to blog anymore.

I’m still too busy, actually. So I’m not going to be blogging very much. But I might throw up a post or two now and again, for old time’s sake. The things that got me started blogging way back in 2005 are still the things that make we wish I could take it up again now: When I read or hear news in Peoria, I’m left with more questions than answers. I just saw a report on WMBD-TV the other night about the Illinois Report Card. The reporter quoted the state superintendent of education as saying, “The report shows we are absolutely on the right track.” Yet the Wall Street Journal just published a shocking article on Illinois schools that reported, among other horrific stats, that “in 2019 7% of black third-graders in Rockford were reading at grade level, 11% of Hispanic third-graders in Elgin and 8% of black third-graders in Peoria.” But our local news channel is content to post a link to the report card and a quote from a bureaucrat that is clearly trying his hardest to get some lipstick on a pig. The reporter evidently didn’t actually read the report card or have enough curiosity to ask any follow-up questions. Everything is hunky-dory here.

Why can’t we have a more robust press? Why can’t we have investigations into why the schools here are letting down our children so miserably, just to name but one topic that warrants further scrutiny? Are people really that apathetic? Or are they just ignorant? I’d like to think it’s the latter, and that if they were more informed, they’d pick up their pitchforks and demand better. But I fear that it’s the former, and that no amount of information will inspire anyone to do more than shrug their shoulders and lament that “you can’t fight City Hall.”

One thing is for sure: A robust press can’t rely on free citizen journalism. It needs people who can work full-time on rooting out corruption and forcing a light on things that our bureaucrats would rather we not see. Is there anyone out there still interested in paying for this kind of service? If the Journal Star suddenly rose from the ashes like a Phoenix and started actually caring about real journalism again, would people pay for it? Or would they keep turning to Google News and other aggregation services to get their news for free?

Maybe someday after I win the lottery, I’ll have the time and resources to do more. But for now, I still have kids to put through college and food to put on the table–something that keeps getting more expensive these days. If you have any ideas on how we can (in practical ways) be the change we want to see, I’d love to hear your comments.