Good evening, everyone. It is Tuesday, March 28, 2023. I'd like to call the meeting of the Peoria City Council to order. I'd also like to welcome everyone in our council chambers and everyone who's watching our City Council meeting on WCBU and the audience watching on cable channel 22.
Madam Clerk, the
Councilmember Allen. Councilmember Sear. Councilmember Graham. Councilmember Jackson.
Here. Councilmember Jensen. Councilmember Kelly. Here. Councilmember Euler. Councilmember
Rickenbach. Councilmember Ruck Riegel. Councilmember Vell Pula. Present. We have a
Corrin present Madam Mayor.
Great, thank you Madam Clerk.
It is with great sadness that we observe
the recent passing of Timothy J. Newland.
Tim replaced then Councilman Ryan Spain
for several months as an appointed member
of the Peoria City Council in 2017.
During that time, Tim served passionately and productively.
Tim was an accomplished attorney, a loving husband, a dedicated father and grandfather,
and a devout man of faith.
He was also a great friend to many, yours truly included, and a very respected community
volunteer.
As we take a moment of silence, I'd like for you to ask, I'd like for you to keep
Tim, his wife, Laurie and their family in your thoughts and prayers.
Tim Lulan, take your rest and thank you for your service.
Everyone, please join me in stand for a moment of silent prayer or silent reflection
followed by the Pledge of Allegiance.
I'm
going to save a little bit of my voice and ask for a couple colleagues to help me
with the proclamations today, the first proclamation recognizes fair housing month, I'd like
to ask Mrs. Cheryl Boswell, the vice chair of the housing commission to come forth and
for Councilman Sid Ruck-Riegel to share the proclamation.
Boswell, welcome.
Thank
you Madam Mayor.
Whereas the month of April has been designated as National Fair Housing Month by the United
States Department of Housing and Urban Development.
And whereas this year commemorates the 55th anniversary of the passage of the Fair Housing
Act, the landmark civil rights law signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson on April 11, 1968,
making discrimination in housing transactions unlawful.
and whereas the Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, gender, identity, sexual orientation, disability, familial status, national origin, military discharge status, physical or mental disability, and sources of income in all aspects of real-estate transactions, including renting, policing, home sales, mortgage lending, insurance, advertising,
practices such as restrictive covenants and new construction.
And whereas ending housing discrimination and expanding equal access to housing promotes
equity and fairness while contributing towards the economic stability and community health
of Peoria, Illinois.
And whereas our entire community benefits from diversity and integration, acts of housing
discrimination and barriers to equal housing opportunities are unacceptable to a common sense of decency and fairness.
Now, therefore, Rita Ali, Mayor of the City of Piori, Illinois, does hereby proclaim the month of April as National Fair Housing Month in Piori, Illinois.
I dated this 28th day of March, 2023.
Thank you, Mayor.
Thank you.
Merrily, City Council members, City staff.
Thank you very much for recognizing the importance of Fair Housing Month and
my issuing this confirmation.
Again, my name is Cheryl Boswell and I'm Vice Chair of the Housing Commission.
And if there are any commission members or
say I'm on it.
The Housing Commission changed its name in November 2021 to best reflect the overall housing
community and it's these with our discussions and recommendations to the city. Illinois is a
fortunate state and Peoria is fortunate to be a city to have so many walks of life protected
by its human rights and coordinates. April is the month when we reflect on the highlight
National Fair Housing Month and this month we feel grateful for the Fair Housing Act that was
passed in April 11th, 1968.
The law, as you stated, was designed
to protect Americans from facing discrimination
in selling or buying housing.
Fair housing is a basic human concept.
As a community, we have the right to be free
from any form of discrimination.
But the struggle for our community
and across the nation is ongoing outside of the month
of April.
The housing commission will be releasing
and informational infographics and bulletins throughout the month of April via the City
social media, website, and our Housing Commission page.
We invite you to participate in raising awareness of the housing needs within our community.
Again, on behalf of the Housing Commission, we thank you for the proclamation and the
reckoning.
Thank you.
Thank you, Mrs. Boswell.
Our next proclamation recognizes childhood abuse prevention month, and we have Stephanie
Johnny Johnson, the Director of Administrative Operations of the Pediatric Resource Center
and Child Abuse Pediatrics, as well as Jason Killian, the PCR Board President.
Welcome.
Is Jason also here?
Okay.
All right.
Thank you.
And I'm going to ask Councilman Andre Allen if he would please share the proclamation.
Thank you Madam Mayor, and as a former proud board member of the Pediatric Resource Center I think it's appropriate that I do read this proclamation so thank you for the opportunity.
Whereas, child abuse is a complex community problem and finding solutions depend on involvement among people throughout the community and whereas the effects of child abuse are felt by all communities and therefore need to be addressed by the entire community.
And whereas effective child-previewed prevention programs you see because of partnerships created among the courts,
social service agencies, schools, religious organizations, law enforcement agencies, and the business community and private citizens.
And whereas awareness to support families of abuse is heightened in April by the Pediatric Resource Center,
a prevention and medical services program offering positive alternatives to help break the cycle of abuse.
The Pediatric Resource Center is sponsoring the 11th annual Kick Abuse 5K Run and Fun Walk at Donovan Park on Saturday, April 15th, from 6.30 to 8.30 a.m.
And whereas we call upon all citizens to increase their participation in efforts to prevent child abuse,
thereby strengthening the communities in which we live.
Now, therefore, Rida Ali, Mayor of City of Peoria, Illinois,
due by hereby recognized April, 2023, as Child Abuse Prevention Month and Peoria, Illinois,
day to this day, the 28th day of March 2023-AD.
Johnson, thank you very much.
I'm the Executive Director of the Pediatric Resource Center.
That's a service program with the University of Illinois College of Medicine.
And we're in a unique position when we talk about child abuse prevention
because actually our services are when prevention isn't possible.
We provide medical services to kids from the City of Peoria,
but also 37 counties throughout Illinois.
We have a specialized team of or certified child abuse
pediatricians, nurse practitioners, and social workers
who provide outstanding medical services to kids
who may have been abused or neglected.
We coordinate care with the Peory Police Department,
Illinois Department of Children and Family Services
and the Peory State's Attorney's Office
to help adjust us for these kids.
Sometimes we're the only ones who are providing
medical information about their complex injuries. We take child abuse prevention month very seriously
and we coordinate with other organizations within the community and I would really like to
encourage you to look around in April for all of the different opportunities to highlight child
abuse prevention month. Awareness and prevention are possible and I really would encourage each one
of the YouTube to look in our community for those opportunities. I always say
child abuse prevention April and always we'd love to work ourselves out of a
job too busy. Thank you. Ms. Johnson. Madam
Clerk. We're at approval of the
minutes.
Thank you Madam Chairwoman. I moved to approve the minutes of the
City Council meeting held on March 14th 2023 as printed. Seconded by Council
Assemblymember Allen, any discussion?
Please cash your ballots.
Motion passes unanimously, Madam Clerk.
We are at the consent agenda.
23-088 is a communication from the Mayor and Corporation Council
with requests to approve the Declaration of Local State of Emergency.
23-089 is a communication from the City Manager and Director of Human Resources
with request to approve and authorize the execution of a contract with resource management associates in the amount of $39,075 to administer the Fire Battalion Chief Promotional Examination.
23-090 is a communication with request to approve a professional services agreement with roadway asset services LLC in the amount of $109,778 for the pavement condition index update.
2023 project, 23-091 is a communication with request to approve an intergovernmental agreement
between the City of Peoria and the Greater Peoria Sanitary District and support of
Pringle Technologies for the Haven on the Farm Development, 23-092 is a communication
with request to approve an intergovernmental agreement between the City of Peoria and
as well County regarding the tri-county multi-jurisdictional
guard rail improvement.
23-093 is a communication with requests to approve
an inter-governmental agreement with the East Peoria Fire
Department for Mechanical Services and Repair Work
on fire apparatus.
23-094 is a communication from the city manager
and director of community development
with a request concur with recommendation
from the Planning and Zoning Commission and staff, to adopt an ordinance approving a special use in a class R3, single family residential district, for a short term rental for the property located at 3218 North Isabel Avenue.
23-095 is a communication with a request to concur with the recommendation from the Planning and Zoning Commission and staff to adopt an ordinance approving a special use in a class.
C2 large-scale commercial district for an assisted living facility for the property located at 2020 West War Memorial Drive.
And 23-096 is an appointment by Mayor Lede to the Peoria Public Library Board of Trustees with a request to concur of Christopher Gandhi.
And that concludes our consent agenda.
Thank you, Madam Clerk.
Are there items to remove from consent?
Council Member Ruckery-Gill?
Thank you, Madam Mayor. 23-091.
9-1. 9-1. Oh, same one. Okay.
Council Member Sear.
Can I just make a motion for the rest of them? I don't have any. I need to do that. I think there's still items. Okay. I'll come back. Thank you. I'll come back to you. Council Member Jensen. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Item 23-090. Are
there other items to remove? Council Member Sear. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Moved to approve. The balance of the these projects. Seconded by Council Member Ruck-Revel.
in the other discussion? Please cash your ballots.
Motion passes unanimously.
Madam Clerk. 23-090 is a communication from the city manager and director of public
works with a request to approve a professional services agreement with roadway asset services
LLC in the amount of $109,778 for the pavement condition index update 2023 projects.
Councilmember Jensen? Thank you Madam Mayor. I have a couple questions about this. It's a very important program so I'm glad we're still utilizing it but my question is whether this is a new company that we're going to use and we've used in the past doesn't say that in the communication and there's no description of the other bitters and no comparison with them like there usually is in the memo.
Mr. Manager, thank you. I'll turn it over to Director Powers to answer these questions
for you.
I hate that I'm going to have to do the new guy thing here, but I was not here for
the last either, so I'm going to have to defer and get back to you, Councillor.
I do not know if it was there.
I couldn't, I couldn't quite hear you, sorry.
He needs to get back with an answer.
Correct, I'm not sure. I'll actually send a text here shortly and have an answer.
I just don't know if it's the same vendor if we use last time or not.
Because I'm curious why we're using a different vendor if we are.
I mean, maybe it's cheaper, but I thought we were satisfied with the prior one.
So I'm just curious, who else bid on this and if we are moving on to a different vendor why?
Well, it would have been via the competitive bidding process would be.
Right, but we don't have an analysis of what factors each bid or had.
There's none of that information contained in the memo.
I understand and I will get back to the next meeting council.
Sure, I'll make a motion to defer.
Seconded by councilmember Euler, any other discussion?
Move to defer.
Please cash your ballots.
Motion passes unanimously.
Annemquart.
23-091 is a communication from the City Manager and Director of Public Works with a request
to approve an inter-governmental agreement between the City of Peoria and the Greater Peoria
Sanitary District in support of Pringle Technologies for the Haven on the Farm Development.
Member Recreagle?
Thank you, Madam Mayor.
Please let the record show that I'll be abstaining from this vote due to a conflict of interest.
Okay.
Thank you.
Council Member Valpola?
Madam Mayor, I need to abstain as I am involved with the Pringle Robotics.
Okay.
Thank you.
Council Member Euler.
Thank you, Madam Chairwoman.
I move to approve.
Seconded by Council Member Sear.
Additional discussion.
Council Member Jensen.
Thank you, Madam Mayor.
I'm just curious, it says that the expenditures will be funded from account 4013001.
523655, but it doesn't say what the expenditure will be, what the cost is.
The cost is going to be about $2.6 million.
We do have $2 million of American Rescue Plan funds plus a $600,000 earmark from Senator
Durbin that will be going to support this project.
So we don't think there will be any city costs, is that right?
No.
Okay.
Thank you.
Do you have a motion?
I think one was already made.
No, it's already made, right?
There was another question, is it gone?
Okay.
and we have a motion to approve on the floor.
No more discussion, please cash your ballots.
Motion passes with two abstentions.
Ruck Riggle and Valpula.
Amclerc?
We are at presentations.
23-097 is a presentation by members
of the Greater Peoria Leadership Council
regarding talent attraction strategy.
I would like to welcome Mr. Doug Oberhelman.
He's the chairman of the Gilmore Foundation Board of Directors, probably better known as the former CEO of Cannapillar.
We also have Laura Cullen in the President of the Gilmore Foundation and Miss C. Dykema, the principal of Samantha.
So thank you all for being here. Welcome.
Thank you Mayor Alley and good evening to you and all the City Council members believe
or not I've lived in Peoria almost 50 years and I've only been in this room one other
time.
Oh my goodness.
I'm very happy to be here but I'm especially happy to be here in two roles tonight one
as chairman of the Gilmore Foundation which I'll describe in a minute and the other one is
the chairman of the Greater Peoria Leadership Council which the mayor talked about just a
a minute ago. You may not all know Gilmore Foundation or Bob Gilmore, who it's named after.
But Bob was one of my early mentors in my caterpillar career, started in the shops in East
Peoria, pulled himself up by the bootstraps, became president of the company in the 80s,
which was a very tough time. And as you recall, got us through the influx of the great Japanese
competition of Kamatsu when they first arrived here in the late 70s and early 80s.
Bob was born in the North Valley, lifelong and loving person for Peoria, passed away
a little over two years ago at just over a hundred years old, left a sizable endowment
to be used solely in the Peoria area, the Greater Peoria area.
So far, as chairman of that group, since it's in, since its formation, the Gilmore Foundation
has contributed a little over $12 million, strictly to Peoria causes, not to mention Greater
Peoria, but strictly to Peoria, and I can tell you the corpus of that fund is, will bring
a lot more, many more multiples of that to us here in the Peoria area.
Bob was a World War II hero, 30 combat missions at a B-17 over the English Channel, and
he told stories that would shake you to your roots about how he felt in those days.
He was a great storyteller.
He survived all of that, signed up for five humanitarian missions, also known as the Berlin
an airlift and talked about that at length. A true American and Peoria hero that was really
only interested in his legacy being to help Peoria and the greater Peoria region. And we
on the foundation are very happy to be a part of that and oversee that. Diane and I,
Diane's more well-known in here by far than I ever was.
So I was happy to say that she delegated me to become before you tonight.
But we are also, she's a lifelong resident of Peoria.
I'm happy to say I am the only current, or the only caterpillar chairman in CEO to live here.
This is our only home.
We do not have a winter residence.
experience, we don't leave and we're so happy to be here and enjoy what's been a wonderful
experience over my almost 50 years of in and out of Peoria during that period of time.
So some of us thought as part of the business community in the last year or so that Peoria
needs to, we all need to punch more than we're punching our weight around the community.
and the region. We all know we have so many things to offer. We all know what
the geography is here. We all know the things that have gone on. We've all been
down on ourselves a little bit with the with the departure of Caterpillar,
the leadership of Caterpillar. And that's been six years already because I retired
six years ago Friday and that announcement was made in my last after I was CEO
before I retired which I did not appreciate I did not agree with and I told the
board accordingly that and made my feelings known but be that as it may we
needed to move on we need to move on and we've sorted on us in the business
community a malaise maybe in the in the community and we asked some
mantle to do some research and you know what we found out that was one of the most
interesting things was in comparing other communities on the internet, most of the negative
comments about Peoria were from Peoria residents.
I don't know about you, but I and I go to
Rochester, Minnesota often. You arrive there. The first thing you feel is how proud those
people are and what they are in life is to help out the world. They are all on the same page
about what they wanted to do. So the business community, and I'm going to say the proxy
of the business community directly behind me and we've had an amazing group to come together
to say what do we need to do as a business community to step up, make ourselves known,
what we think we can do to help and make greater peoria a better place to be.
I would point out a couple of things here that I think are very significant.
Rick Swan is here from East Peoria representing Mayor John Kyle, who has been very helpful with us
and recognizes that this has to be a regional issue.
And if you draw a large regional boundary,
you get to a million people pretty quickly.
That's a lot different than the Peoria website
that says we're 100,000 people, for example,
among other things.
We have both CEOs from OSF and UnityPoint on our team.
And we've had them in the same room multiple times,
all trying to get to one thing and that's unified our voices and how can we kind
of talk to Peoria and all of you and others on things we can do what we can do to
punch above our way and there's others here the educators are with us just
everyone has really been helpful it's a I'm going to say the vast majority of
private employment in the greater Peoria area,
beacon insurance, East Peoria interests.
So it's a regional aspect we've put together.
And as we sat down and talked about
what we think we really need to do,
thank you for advancing that slide for me.
I guess I've got to click right,
but not a practice on that clicker.
I used to do that for a living.
But what we said that we wanted to do
as we came together, we can concentrate it on three things.
And these are shared by everyone, there's no question, but the number one thing this
group is challenged with today is attracting and retaining talent.
You probably all know, but there are thousands, thousands of white collar job openings in
the Greater Peoria area today. Thousands. The hospitals alone have thousands. You
talk to every one of our CEOs that are here that represent these businesses. They
are challenged every day with attracting talent to come to Peoria. Once they
get here it's a lot easier to keep them and they like it here as we all do. The
second thing we found as we got into it was this thing I mentioned maybe a
bit is our brand needs uplifted. It's a great place to be.
And the third
thing was a positive thing that I did mention is a positive puria campaign. So
we all got together, we raised this group and others behind us, raised over a
million and a half dollars to this effort. If you'd back up one, Misty, and have
incorporated really what I would call the big five groups already involved in
sharing some of these things and doing a lot of this already and they've been
very helpful with this and and are on board and going forward. So what I'm
going to do is turn this over to Missy to give you a little more teaser about the
things that we think we can do but the idea being is we think we can do better we've
We've got to act quickly, we're competing every day with, not with San Francisco, not with New York, but with Rockford, with Moly, with Champaign, with Bloomington, with Madison, with St. Louis.
That's our regional draw, and we've got great things to offer, my God, over Bloomington, Illinois, and others.
Let's sell it, and so what we put together with Samantha is a program that will unveil April 20th to the community, and all of you are invited.
And I think you'll see kind of what we're talking about to give our employers some help.
They can recruit for their company.
They have a heck of a time recruiting for Peoria.
So we can hopefully bridge that gap.
So I'll let Misty talk about that a little bit and share some of those details and then
we'll have time for a few questions at the end.
Hello everyone.
My name is Misty Dyke.
My one of the
So, we have different principles and owners of semantle. We're a marketing firm here in town. And as Doug mentioned, I've been honored to be at the center of this with all of these great business leaders really driving the future of puria. So what Doug didn't mention is that we have established the greater puria leadership council. You may hear us say GPLC. Many of the members of that group are here today. And the intent of that organization is really just to collaborate with all of the civic organizations that exist today and really lean in from the business community to provide those priorities.
that strategic guidance and that funding.
So it's been a great group to be a part of.
And as mentioned, our primary focus right now
is bringing top level senior executive level talent
to the region.
As Doug mentioned, we did a lot of research.
We have upwards of 70 positions,
even with the handful of organizations
that we've interviewed today.
We hope more jump on board.
But there was a recognition by the business community
that we have great jobs here,
but we need help selling the power of peoria.
So we're really looking at this as a full-scale initiative.
We're calling Choose Greater Peoria.
We are targeting C-suite and senior professional talent.
If you look at your slides, you can see
that we have some demographics there in terms of salary
and age range we're targeting.
But probably more importantly is the research we did
about their mindset.
They really want quality of life outside of work.
And that really applies to sort of any generation, right?
and we think that we have a ton here in Pioria to offer.
The challenge is the HR leaders themselves are claiming
they can't do it on their own.
There's not enough funding with any individual organization
or not enough resources, but if we all come together
and helps all ship rise, we can really cut down the amount
of time it takes to get that talent here,
the amount of costs that it takes,
and really just sort of fill the pipeline more quickly.
And we believe if we can bring talent here,
we can bring business here.
So we think this is the right place to start and I want to also acknowledge this wouldn't have happened without the efforts of the civic organizations kicking off GP 2030.
We really sort of use that as a pilot and use that as fuel to drive this campaign forward.
The campaign will launch in two phases.
The first phase is what we're calling our live greater awareness campaign.
That will take place in May and through July.
You're going to see a lot of really strong, powerful branding for choose greater Peoria.
And then that will transition into testimonial campaign later in the summer and into the fall.
We're asking leaders in this community to step up and talk about their experience here,
or folks who have moved here to talk about how great that experience has been.
So we're going to be doing videos, we're going to be doing digital media.
We are building a Choose Greater Peoria website.
We've actually sunset some of the websites that weren't functioning as well.
And we've been working with the civic organizations to make sure that's a powerful handoff.
We're also building a nurture campaign to make sure that anybody says that they want
information about Peoria we can keep in touch with them.
I'll end by noting that we're really working with HR leaders as our customer, we're providing
them all the tools they need if they get those candidates in the pipeline to communicate
with them effectively.
That will all be available on the website and hand it out on that April 20th date.
And finally, kind of a fun thing, as I mentioned, we're using a series of ambassadors to talk
about Peoria, so we're working right now to actively identify those individuals within
the key industries that we're targeting.
How will we work together?
We really want to underscore this piece.
This is a collaborative effort.
We have the business community collaborating.
We have the civic organizations collaborating and we want to grow the tent.
We want to have as many groups and individuals collaborating here because we need help and
we need a unified front.
We're building a movement here and there's a lot of positive energy behind that.
So we're working with the Peoria area chamber.
That's our main point of contact.
They're helping us make this campaign visible
with over 75 of their annual events.
And they're helping us roll out with their members.
So helping us encourage the adoption of the branding
and message.
Discover Peoria is also a partner.
They're sharing regional content, video and photography.
The EDC is a partner.
And they're working with us on alignment with their jobs board
and on industry clusters.
holding
ourselves accountable, like to underscore this piece as well. We've taken
strategy and direction from the business community and the number one thing
that they have we've come up with together is we will hold ourselves accountable.
We have GPLC oversight with regular reports and monthly meetings. We've
developed a KPI scorecard tracking candidate leads and high-level business
outcomes. We have a lead tracker which is a tool for HR professionals to report
candidate status and finally we've built a model which incorporates a lead
representative and that's an actual human being. That's a person that will live
within semantle and with Gilmore and they'll help HR professionals to maintain
the database and close the feedback loop. I'll give it to Misty to close.
So we'll
end just quickly summarizing the timeline. We are well underway in asset
development. We are on target to launch our website May 1st. We are going to do a community event
on April 20th to make sure that the entire community regional stakeholders are aware, the media,
and everyone get really excited to know how they can get involved and do their part.
And as I mentioned, the phase one will launch through the summer and we'll pick up with that
testimonial campaign in the fall. So thank you. We'll open it up for questions.
Well thank you very much. I would like to add that this campaign started as a
conversation about six months ago and it's been taking a very aggressive
approach and a very fast timeline so I'm just really pleased to see all the
development that has taken place since what was it September of last year and
and have been pleased to be a part of this process.
Thank you, Mayor.
We would recognize that, but we're frustrated
it's taking so long.
We're used to doing things a little quicker,
but we've really worked on consensus
to bring the community together to shape what we're doing
to make sure we've got buy-in from everyone.
And I think we do.
We've really had great success with that.
Very happy about that.
I know that there are questions from around the council.
I'm just going to kick off with the first one
because I know that you're providing some training
for HR departments throughout the city
and even possibly with the city of Peoria, HR department.
How's that going?
Thanks for asking.
I just talked to Stacey and she said
she had her meeting today actually.
So we are reaching out almost on an individual basis
for organizations that want to be involved
and making sure that, as Laura mentioned,
that reporting mechanism and that lead funnel
actually works for each individual organization
but also allows us a level of parallelism to report back and meet that ROI.
So those conversations are underway, we will also be meeting with marketing folks
and we want to be able to arm the CEO's to be able to launch this to their organizations
and make sure that all employees who want to talk about the power of puria
have what they need to tell their story in all their social spheres
since we know that's important too.
This campaign will not only reach executives but it will reach well beyond that
so we're excited about it.
Thank you. Council Member Jackson. Thank you Madam Mayor. Well first of all I'd just
like to say thank you everyone for this wonderful presentation and I have to say as the lifelong
peorian growing up I've always had a global mindset and didn't realize until just a few years
ago that Peoria would continue to be my home.
I'm excited that Doug Oberhelmon has chosen and his family to stay in this area.
And we appreciate all of the hard work that you all are doing.
And I'm happy, and I hope my colleagues around the horseshoe, I'm sure they're happy to be
able to help in any way we can.
My first question, as a lifelong Peoria, and as someone who left Peoria for 11 years and
And decided to return, probably about 25 years ago when my mom got sick, I've always wondered
about the lack of people who look like me in corporate positions in and around the city.
And I've met some wonderful people.
I have a diverse group of folks that I work with, but my question is, what are we going
to do to have a real conversation and training around this whole issue of diversity and inclusion
because we are still not where we should be in terms of full inclusion.
Yeah, thank you, Denise.
I can tell you that when I led caterpillar, this was high on our list and I will also tell
you that the first time that rating came out that made Peoria that top one or two worse
people or worse cities for African Americans, I was answering to the board in the next
meeting.
How can that be in Peoria, Illinois or anywhere else? And it's a very good question.
And that is an image problem we have here that we've got to solve. Now our group, we are
We have solicited just about every African American, we're looking at Hispanic restaurant
community, which is large, but it's hard to find CEO's, frankly, to help with us.
And we've worked on that, and mayor for first-feeding encourages us to do this very same thing.
And we have some representation, we have, as you can see, a lot of female representation
which we're proud of, but it is an issue for this commute in many others, but certainly for this one.
But if we could get rid of that ranking, somehow it would help us immensely.
And that might be beyond our scope of ability here, but I agree with you completely.
Thank you.
Just as a follow-up, and we don't have to have a show of hands that it would be interesting.
I was challenged. I'm in a program. I since I left my communications profession. I've been substitute teaching and I am looking to become certified.
But in class last week, my professor challenged us to a bias exam.
I had never taken one, and as I sit here, listen to your comments, it's a question I had never taken one, but I would like to pose a question for everyone in the room how many of us have undergone such training, because a lot of times we have biases that we are not privy to.
And while we say, oh, I'm not this or I'm not that,
but sometimes those subconscious biases have become ingrained
into our thinking and our psyche.
So, I had to challenge myself.
And I would like to just throw that question out there
for all of those CEOs and HR department heads
and to do the same, because a lot of times we don't realize
that we're that we're using those biases subconsciously so diversity training.
This is the hottest topic in the nation right now that everyone is working on.
Probably can't do enough and it starts at home, I think that's your point.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Thank you Madam Mayor.
Thank you for this great presentation and initiative.
I think it's a good news for PORS, talent acquisition and retention.
I really like the idea of attracting the talent, but I also have one suggestion.
You know, I would like to request to consider, you know, making our own talent, growing our own talent.
We are more focused on getting people to move to PORS.
But what I was working was to how do we retain talent in the area.
So that is one of the initiatives that, you know, a prototype, I have a couple of stakeholders
in this room, Dr. Iyer and Dr. Bailey, we've been working on a prototype which is more
to retain talent by creating a talent workforce in the medical community.
But I believe that that could be taken to the next level in the manufacturing or any community,
Any job force that you like, the suggestion that I wanted to make is to make sure that
we don't miss our own people that wanted to stay in Peoria and besides bringing the
talent to Peoria.
Thank you.
If I could make an editorial comment.
We have one of the, I think, nearly unparalleled jewels in this community and that's Illinois Central
College, that Diane and I have had personal knowledge with.
We backed the Diesel Training Program over there for years.
It's a hundred percent placement.
And I've also learned as a part of this process, which I did not know, that the jewel we all
talk so badly about is right under our noses and that's District 150.
to hear Steve Standifer, the president of Bradley University, talk about his experience
with his two daughters in District 150 will bring tears to your eyes.
And we don't hear
that part at all. And why is that I don't know? But we need to, that's part of the image
I think that we have to work on. And to have Steve talk about, to have Chris Riddles talk
about it who moved here with children that absolutely loved 150 and some of the programs
they have would 150 I'm sure has all kinds of problems but these are the things we
need to talk about. The bad things will get talked about. The good things need focus.
So I couldn't agree more with you and I think over time if that could happen a lot of talent
would stay here because there's like I say thousands of job openings today that we need
to fill.
So, this group behind me needs to fill out others. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Thank you, Councilmember Allen. Thank you, Madam Mayor. This is just an excellent example of collaboration over competition. As we move forward to achieve this goal of talent acquisition and attraction for our region. When you look around the cities in America that are growing, they're doing this well, so we appreciate the investment that is happening here. As a board member of the Pure Area Chamber of Commerce, I witnessed the
of this work as we launched the GP 2030 initiative about a year ago with the Chamber and the EDC and the CEO Council and various other community partners here in our area.
And I remember that sunny day in April, we were all at the Pure Riverfront Museum and it was a great day.
The weather was beautiful, but we were humble and realistic because I believe the seed money we had at that time was $75,000.
And we knew that that was going to be like throwing a rock in a notion and it wasn't going to do a lot.
And then there was some recent investment, the Chamber was able to leverage $500,000 per
leader, state representative Jahangor and Booth in the fall, and we were excited.
But then we also knew that that wasn't sustainable.
And now that we have the amazing Gilmore Foundation, part of this initiative, other business partners
that have joined this initiative, this is amazing, this will take Peoria and the right step.
So no questions, but just comments of excitement.
I'm like you.
I'm excited. I'm ready to get to work. I wish it didn't take as much, but sometimes a good thing takes a little while
So thank you all so much for your effort and we look forward to seeing what great talent comes to Peoria and then also to how we can retain talent as well
Thank you. Our vision really is one of the Gilmore Foundation being the catalyst
with the business community and in the civic groups and
And I hope within a fairly short time disappear because it gets its own wings and takes off.
And at that time we will know where we're where we want to be.
So that's sort of the end game for Gilmore of the beginning maybe of the good things to come.
But this group behind me and our leadership council couldn't be more loud and more aggressive on this point.
Councilmember Riggum-Bock? Thank you Madam Mayor and a big thank you to Doug
and Diane and Laura and Misty and all of all of the leaders here in this room
this is so exciting to see and for so many of us who live here and raise our
families here to see you locking arms in this common cause it's really really
exciting to see and I love the thing great or live great or choose greater you
know so there's a lot of synergy there that I think we can we can grab hold of
we talked a lot about economic development and to see this targeting the
senior professionals in CC weeds I think is really the sweet spot that oftentimes
gets overlooked so I'm excited to see what's gonna happen on April 20th as this
gets unveiled and I would also say that I had the privilege of meeting Bob Gilmore about
10 years ago when we were doing some work in the East Bluff, some homes, new homes we
were building and he was a generous benefactor of that so I'm sure he's smiling as he's
looking.
He was only about 90 then.
So, and I see several Peoria Public School families represented, even in the gallery there
whether we're talking about the Gulf of Rich, which is high school, Mr. Hammerton, or
the jazz ensemble that my son's involved in, there's a lot of good things here, and we
help you write that list of those secrets of district 150 in Peoria Public Schools that
but remarkable things really are happening there as well.
So thanks again and we'll look forward to seeing
how this unfolds in the spring.
Great, thank you, Tim.
Councilmember Euler.
Thank you, Madam Chairwoman.
I don't have any questions, I want to say thank you.
You and your team for doing something
that's incredibly necessary and important
for our community, you know, Doug,
when you and I departed Caterpillar
about the same time over similar future visions of where our community needed to go and where the company was going.
We've had a number of discussions about the vacuum that's been left in our community and the talent challenges and
the vision challenges and the narrative challenges that we've tried to fight our way through the vacuum that's come since then.
And I think this is exactly what we need to put us on a different direction.
And I recall a conversation I had with former State Representative David Leach a couple
years ago, and he was reminiscing about his time in Springfield and the differences between
the community then and the community today, and he went through example after example
of the CEOs in our community that were engaged in our community and all of the different things
that they were doing, and he was asking me where are they now and what are they doing now.
Now, this is completely what we've been waiting for, it's what we need, it's what got me partially into public service is wanting to drive this community somewhere to see action happen, to see us grow our business community so that we can turn ourselves back into an economic engine, so thank you and your team for the millions of dollars that this is going to bring to our community in the long time commitment that the CEOs will give us in the future, thank you.
Yeah, thank you Zad. I'm going to just take a minute if I may may or I'm coming a little bit more about catapillar
On our committee is Henry Vickery who is probably the jewel
Between us and and the company. I have good relations with my successor at
Catapillar, but Henry's the glue here that holds it together and he's been part parcel with us all the way through
While caterpillar moved its headquarters twice in the last six years, there are still 12
or 13,000 people in this community that do great things every day.
And these are scientists, these are PhDs, these are lawyers, these are CPAs, foundry workers
and maple to make it go on and on, but there's 12,000 families still employed here that have been
untouched by the move of the headquarters. And everywhere I go on every civic organization or
charitable organization there are some great caterpillar people pulling their weight. And sometimes I
think the baby got thrown out with the bathwater. The baby went to Chicago and then Texas and the
The math water here is still rising so nicely with all the good talent that are still with
us doing great things with our charitable organization.
So I want to recognize that I especially want to recognize Henry, who's obviously in
the first couple of years had a pretty rough goal putting his finger in all the holes in
a die.
But he's been so great with us in representing caterpillar as you would expect a caterpillar
executive to do.
Thank you, Zach.
Thank you, Madam Mayor, I just want to thank you Doug and it's just awesome to see all of you here and to have this report.
You know, I'm not a native purine but I moved here 28 years ago and I've loved being here. I love puria.
Your focus on the quality of life issues is so important.
I mean, moving here is a 25-year-old in my husband's from Michigan, not from here.
We bought an old house on Mars Avenue that we never would have been able to afford, and
we're still there.
It's been an incredible place to raise our two sons.
We were both busy lawyers.
I was on the city council, but I never missed a soccer game.
I never missed a, you know, a scholastic bowl tournament or a violin concert, because you
We can do that in puria and work full time and be involved in the community.
I think that it's so important to focus on that, and that's what people in their mid to late 20s, that's what they start to realize.
So I've always said maybe we should do a little campaign, come back to puria, to also all those kids, you know, that leave, go away to college, do some things.
But when they're ready to raise a family, this is the best place to do it.
So, it's good to hear that already enforced.
I'll put another good word for pure public schools.
Both our boys are graduates of Richwood's High School.
The IB program is fantastic.
And it's such an asset for Peoria, where the only down state,
I think city in Illinois, the only city outside of Chicago
that has a program, an IB program in its high school.
And when kids are applying to colleges,
It's very good for them to have been in an IV program.
So my kids are thriving in college, and I thank Peoria Public Schools for that.
And one other thing, don't forget the arts community, because that's thriving here.
I see one of my neighbors here on Masa Avenue, and he knows we've had a lot of people just
in the last three or four years move to our neighborhood that aren't from Peoria.
They're artists, and they've heard that this is a good place.
You can actually afford to live and be an artist and not do another job and it's a thriving community
And I'm just so excited that you guys are here to help push this forward. So thank you. Thank you
I know that Dr. Karat listens to all these council meetings so she's smiling here and all the good things about pure public schools
And she's a part of this initiative as well council member
Recreagle
Thank you Madam Mayor and
Doug, thank you for here in Diane's involvement.
Thank you to the Gilmore Foundation
and thank you for the Greater Peoria Leadership Council
on bringing this all together.
A couple of things that you said really stuck out.
One thing I've spent a lot of time in Rochester
and I know that feeling you're talking about.
They all, whether it be the person
who is running the Uber cab,
to the person at the restaurant or the hotel or the hospital,
they are all know that they're part of a system to welcome you.
same things that happens in Charlotte, North Carolina.
It seems like every time you're there,
you're feeling that same feel.
And we have just as great of things
to be able to tell about here.
Recently talking to somebody
over the past couple of months
about why their business should be here
versus where they were looking at,
we could talk a lot about the numbers
because we know the housing prices are better here.
We know that there are so many things
that we could put on a piece of paper.
And then when we started talking about the feeling of what it is a pure, what
peoria can offer, that I think is what really could seal the deal and he felt
that as well. One of the things that Peoria gives, and you know this, your family
knows this, is that in a town like Peoria, in a community like Peoria, and that
whether it be the city or the region, whether you are from here or whether you
move here, you can actually find a place to be able to make a difference and to be able to
call this home very, very quickly. And that is something that I would challenge any other community
to be able to find that welcome that you can actually feel a part of the fabric. So around
council, you've got some people who grew up here, some people who haven't, and yet each and every
person is a peorian. I've got a hundred questions, but most of them are just because I'm so excited
about what I'm hearing and I'm going to wait until April 20th for that, but one of the
things that I really like about what is being presented here, what will be fully presented
to the community on April 20th, used to be where if you got a job, that was what kept you
in a community.
And now people have choices.
And just like we're attracting to here, people have a choice once they're here whether they
keep that job, whether they'll talk to their friends who may be in other areas, or for
those that are growing up here who have the opportunity for a job here somewhere else
to be able to decide to stay here.
And everything that I'm hearing that you're pulling together, all of our advocates that
are going to be out there talking about why they choose Peoria, all lend for those people
to be able to decide to make this their home.
And I think that's fantastic.
look forward to seeing great progress on this. Congratulations to each and every person involved.
Thank you. Councilmember Kelly. Thank you, Madam Mayor.
And thank all of you. I am very, very excited about this initiative, especially about the innovation,
the creativity of the ideas coming forth.
We have often, I think, looked a little bit like many other in our marketing,
like many other smaller to mid-sized cities.
I think this initiative stands out.
This is such a great community.
I spent my entire career working for companies whose headquarters were in New York, and of
course we'd have people come out every now and then.
And they always knew that they were coming to someplace like Youngstown, Ohio.
They knew they were coming to Smokestack City, and they were universally amazed at what
this city had and just just rather naturally and we're we're all very used to it we're you know but
they they were just they were just amazed and I've never forgotten it we can always do better
of course but I am I'm just thrilled with the direction we're going I'm thrilled with the
leadership, I think great things are going to come out of this and thank you very much.
Thank you. Well, this, this team behind me is just first rate in and together. And as I
often said, if we can get this group and this group and the other million people around
is pulling on the rope at the same time, imagine what happens. And that's the challenge we
have and if we pull that off and get 80% of them pulling, we'll feel pretty good about
Counts a minute.
Thank
you very much for the presentation. I think that the city of Peria is already in a renaissance. And I think we are so close to the trees that we can't see the forest. One of my heroes is Steve Spain.
He has done so much to recruit members of the creative class professionals here to this community.
community. He's been, yes, I'll use the term, not pejoratively, a cheerleader. And I
remember when I got here in 1995 and sat over there where Denny Sirius and Dave
Kailer was on my right. We had a mayor. His name was Jim Maloof. You will remember
him, Diane. That's for sure. And many of you in the chamber. And being a new candidate
it for office. Sometimes I thought, well, maybe Jim Maloof is going overboard with this
cheerleader role. He's cheerleading for Peoria all the time. And I can remember nights when
people would be providing negative critiques in some cases they were deserved, but he would
have it as fingertips. All the great park programs we have, school program, and he'd go right
down the line and he'd have it right there. We're ready to go. And through time, I
developed such a respect for him. And this manager, this city manager knows that there's
a whole lot going on right now, but we need to tell the story. It's to the point where
I'm somewhat overwhelmed with the redistricting to be able to tell the story of all the things
that are happening just in the part of District 2 that's downtown to where I ask City Manager
Yuri, hey, will you help me? Because I got a list here that's a mile long and he's
filling in other things. So we are in a rebirth. We are in a renaissance. Our best days are
ahead. Puray will never look like it did when Eisenhower was present, when I was a little
kids shopping at block and calls. That's now the OSF Ministry headquarters. That's not bad.
We're changing. We're changing as a community. And what were we talking about in the mid 90s?
Well, we were worried. We were nervous about our dependence on heavy manufacturing.
And so we set about the business of diversifying as much as we could without discounting the importance
of heavy manufacturing or manufacturing in general, to diversify this economy,
professional, technical, health care, just a stone stroke from where we are right now,
over $3 billion is spent just by our hospitals.
We have a cancer center that's going to have the proton beam that's going to increase
cure rates for cancer. Peoria is moving forward, but we've got to get the message to
everybody out there. Now when I go out into my district as I listen and believe me, I do listen.
Basically everybody's happy with where they live and they're thrilled with the fact that for
the first time merely we actually have some money to do some things to rebuild this terrible
infrastructure that you and I dug up talked about when you go to other countries kind of disgraceful
the way some of our airports are and some of the infrastructure in this country.
And we're beginning to reinvest in this country.
Drs.
Absolutely nothing wrong with construction cones.
Let me tell you that.
That's right.
And we actually have money to hopefully rebuild our control tower out at the Greater
Curie International Airport.
There are so many different things but we've got to tell the story and that's why your presentation
night is so crucial, and so pivotal toward our future progress.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, and lastly, we have council members here.
Thank you Madam Mayor, Mr. Manager.
Now that I know that Chuck's used to sit here, I need a new chair, but next meeting please.
I thought this one was kind of full air, I'm just teasing you, just teasing you Chuck.
Doug and Diane, thank you very much for being here tonight and
Thank you for I got to recognize some of my friends over there from PNC Bank and the Venocans and in Henry and and the hospital
Thank you very much for being part of this great team. We need you guys very much
Just one question for Doug or Misty about some of the partners we have right here
And maybe I'm missing it in the presentation
It would will the Peoria area of missing
Convention Bureau and civics and would be part of this partnership to talk about the quality of life and people
Who is the first one, Dennis?
The PACVB Convention Bureau.
Oh, yeah, I'll definitely, I missed you.
The part of it, we haven't talked
to the Civic Center directly,
but we are opening up conversations
to stakeholders all around the region.
We're talking to the Morton Chamber of Commerce,
East Peoria, Pekin.
So absolutely, we'll put the Civic Center front and center
that we are working with.
And the Convention Bureau, okay.
Thank you very much, answering this question.
And again, I know you're all very, very busy.
Thank you very much, taking some of your time
to come and talk to us tonight. This is great. Obviously, we're all very, very exciting and looking
forward to the debut in June. Thank you very much. Thank you. The Greater Peoria Leadership Council
recognizes that our people are our greatest assets and we need more. We need to track more. We need
to retain more, but we can do anything through collaboration and that's what we have right here.
a strong collaboration and a growing collaboration. We thank you for your
presentation, very well received. You said it's been your second time in council
chambers, so Doug we're going to invite you to come back for third time. Maybe
give us an update in a few months how things are going. That would be
wonderful. Just kind of on that point Madam Mayor collaboration it's really
going to take that it's going to take the help of everyone in this room and many other
rooms around the region to really make this go. I bench park off Rochester, Minnesota and
that community up there has it together in terms of how they welcome people and the strategy
they use for the community. We've got to get there because others around us are doing it
every day but we need everybody and it's all hands on deck for that so we really appreciate
the time here and the reception that we've received and we'll need you're all
help as well. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you very much.
We are going to ask for a
motion to receive in file but because it's rare that we get so many CEOs in our
council chambers for a meeting like this if if you have time I think our next
presentation is scheduled for 20 or 30 minutes. If you have time the next
This presentation is equally as important in terms of talking about racial justice and equity.
Our commission will make a presentation.
If you're able to stay, we invite you to stay and to hear part of that presentation.
Thank you.
Move to receiving file by Councilmember Rick Ruckrigle, seconded by Councilmember Jensen.
Did you have your hand up?
Councilmember Jensen.
Any discussion?
Please cast your balance.
It's
motion passes unanimously.
Our next presentation is a presentation of the racial justice and equity annual report.
It is presented by the co-chairs of that commission, Mr. Tim Birchie and Mrs. Mary Peterson.
This is a biggest commission that we've ever had.
And it's a joint commission with Peoria County that was established now about year a little
bit over a year, a little bit over a year ago, maybe a year and a half ago.
All yours.
Good evening.
Thank you.
And thank you.
It's well in what we're talking about here this evening and making Peoria and the county
of Peoria be the best place that we can be for all citizens, all residents.
my name is Mary Peterson I am the co-chair of the Joint Commission on Racial
Justice and Equity with me here Tim Berger who's the other co-chair and we thank
you for this opportunity this evening to speak with you about the Joint
Commission on Racial Justice and Equity in our report out of our findings. As Mayor
said about a year and a half ago, you, the city council, along with the county board came
together and approved this commission to look at the mission was to accelerate efforts
to institutionalize racial justice and equity within the county and the city government.
Equity, equity was defined as in the charter as fair and just opportunities and outcomes
for all people. We took that mission, it presented a challenge to us, question was whether
today's racial disparity and that it impacts the justice and equity in our community.
Does it impact our community? We began our work and we asked the question again, are the
material disparities between the races and our community.
If so, how large?
Can we find data that supports this?
And not just antidotes, but hard facts, data.
And we did.
And we will talk about that this evening.
What we found is also in the report
that you have that you should receive in your packet.
We're just going to highlight a few things this evening.
You have this.
And so we'll give you, after you highlight
we can give you an opportunity to.
We did find that there are many disparities in our community.
There is no exception in the various areas that we looked into that there is significance
disparities between white people and people of color. Every area that we examine shows that there is
large gap in terms of the races in our communities.
Differences are substantial and like cultural.
Tim, would you walk us through our next stages of our report?
Good evening.
So as we went about our work, that you assigned us
through the charter of the commission.
One of the first questions we addressed
was, how are we going to address all of the issues,
which you've challenged us with.
And we adopted a four-stage work plan,
and we're here tonight to talk to you about present to you
the results of the first stage of our work plan.
That four-stage work plan is essentially this,
and it's really for anyone who's in business,
it's a very common sense approach
that we all think in business.
Number one, to create a baseline of where we stand
as a community in respect to racial disparity.
Does it exist?
How does it exist?
and into what extent does it exist.
And in fact, some of you challenged us in a recent meeting to say,
is there really disparity in this community?
Tell us about that disparity, and this report addresses that.
Item two, phase two, is to develop strategic plans that address areas of
material disparity in races in our community.
The third phase is to create implementation plans around those strategic plans.
and then fourth of course is to implement those implementation plans and to
monitor their success and to refine them as might be necessary. So we haven't
set a time frame for each of these. The first phase took us about a year and a
half. Our goal is to address the strategic plans. We're here again tonight to talk
about this first phase, the creation of the baseline. Now it would be easy for us to
go out and take anecdotes from the community about this or that. And those anecdotes are
important because they reflect life experiences. But by the same token, we were told repeatedly
by some of the people in this room, by people nationally who have been involved in this process
in the past. And by those who are involved with grantmaking, should we go down that run,
data that data is essential, reliable trust-worthy data is essential to showing our case and improving
the situation that we're in and showing the progress in fact as being made.
And then one after, then one can after that's done, supplement that with the life experience
information.
And then add to that the experience of other communities, what are the best practices for
of those other communities that have adopted similar plans
to ours.
And there are many communities that have done that.
Perhaps most noteworthy is Seattle King County,
which I think is thought as the leader in developing
racial equity plans.
Now, Seattle's not the only community.
There are other large communities that do this.
Washington, DC, St. Louis, et cetera.
But there are communities as small as say
to Bugaiwa that do this as well.
So one of our goals in this second phase is to take the experience.
There is the best practices of other communities and meld them to the other information that we have. Now, back to phase one, which again is in our report tonight. The baseline is a compilation of data that we have obtained. One might say, well, is that data reliable and trustworthy? And here are the sources of our data. And they're all foot noted at the end of our report. The U.S. Census Bureau, the Illinois State Board of Education,
the USEPA, Puria City and County Police Records and the Puria County Health Department.
Those who are our primary data sources, the reliable sources that you can rely upon as
you read this report.
Now you'll see that in a number of cases, we do not have data for the Hispanic and Latin
X population of our community.
And if you don't see that, it's not because we didn't include that data.
Sadly, in many cases, data for this VANA community is simply not available, where it is available,
it is in the report.
In fact, I think we were quite surprised as we went through the available data that there
was a lack of information about some of our distinct populations in this community as one
of those issues I think that we'll need to deal with as we go forward.
Now our commission itself is divided into nine groups and each of those nine groups was responsible
For obtaining the data you're going to see this evening or that you've already read hopefully and the reports are provided to you.
Mary's going to talk about the steering committee and the eight subcommittees and begin to walk us through the data.
There are eight subcommittees in the steering committee.
Child and youth development, economic development and jobs, environment and climate, health and human services, housing, information and technology,
justice, transportation, and mobility, and a lot of this has already been talked about in the presentation earlier.
As the steering committee, our charge was to steer this commission to provide direction, to write processes, and to just to steer them.
As the steering committee, we looked at some indicators of disparity ourselves.
For example, the life expectancy of a black person compared to the life expectancy of a white person is a 15-year difference.
79 for a white person and 64 for a white person, I'm sorry, 79 for a white person and 64 for a black person.
The medium house value for a black owner is 59% less of that of a white owner.
Hispanic owner, the home medium value is 74% less of that of a white owner.
Elevated lead levels found in the black community and black children is 10.1%
compared to 6.3% for white children.
And yes, I am a product of Peoria Public Schools
and Peoria Public School is a great school system.
We do still have some challenges.
When we look at kindergarten readiness,
and kindergarten readiness, when we talk about kindergarten,
it's five year, the students, the children are five years of age.
There are a number of developmental domains
which determine when you say ready for kindergarten,
there's a number of domains that you look at
that contribute to a child's ability to adapt
to the classroom.
Some of those domains are physical, social,
emotional, language, math, and cognitive skills.
64.7% of our children are not ready,
are not kindergarten ready.
And if you're not kindergarten ready,
and you don't have some of those skills,
And if it's not then being enhanced, then when you start to look at third grade, and
you look at the English proficiency, the numbers decrease in terms of readiness.
Then you go to eighth grade, and you look at math, the numbers continue to decrease, and
some aspects increase in others.
When we think about math and English, we know that that is the cornerstone when you talk
about education and in terms of being successful.
High school terms, truancy, 24.3 for white students, 59.2 for black students, and 40.9
for Latino students.
Is that because they just don't want to go to school, or are they not feeling what
they belong, or they're welcome, or they're not getting what it is that they need?
Economic development and jobs.
When we talk about medium household income, when you start to look at wages and we just talked about the wages of women, when you look at wages, black men make 87 cents on the dollar compared to white men.
Latino men make 90 cents on the dollar compared to white men. White women make 82 cents on the dollar.
Black women make 63 cents on the dollar, and Latin X women make 58 cents on the dollar.
So when you start to talk about medium, household income, and you see the difference in the
three, the black community, the Hispanic community is less than the white community by large numbers.
Unemployment rate, and then families who live in power, those are all there.
economic
environment and climate, and you might say environment, what does that have?
When we talk about environment, we're talking about environmental justice index.
Environmental justice index are a national place-based tool designed to measure the cumulative
impact of the environment burdens through the lens of human health and human equity.
There are 12 environmental justice index and are zero zip codes, 6162, 0305.
They are 90% of the national percentile, 11 out of the 12.
Human services, health and human services,
3.25 black babies, more babies died than their
white counterparts. More black people die from cancer and heart disease. Is it for the
lack of medical facilities or medical treatment? Housing, and we just had, we talked about
housing here. It's fair housing in the month of April, fair housing, and affordable housing
in quality housing.
When you talk about the ownership rate, 76.7 whites on homes,
33.2 African-Americans, blacks on homes, and 64.9 on home ownership.
But we talked earlier about the value of those homes being less.
When we talk about rent, if you talk about budgeting,
Everything will tell you that 30% your home, what you pay for either rent or mortgage,
should only be 30% of your income.
What we have percentages that are higher, that are 50%, the whites that their income is 50,
their rental or their home ownership is 50% of their income is only 19.7.
for blacks is 28.1 and for Hispanics, Latinos, it is 32.3.
Tim's going to talk about the other four areas, the other four subcommittees.
So, the next area that we looked at was information and technology.
Now, some folks may say, well, you know, the real issues here are life expectancy,
issues of housing cost, housing value, etc.
And we're here to say that that's not totally the case.
In fact, information technology and existence in the digital world
is an essential today.
And if students and families aren't connected to the digital world,
it impacts in a very material way,
their jobs, their education.
And what we found was that in puria,
there is a strong correlation between
between digital inequity, between census tracks,
with higher populations of people in color of color.
So let me explain what we're saying here.
We don't have data, I don't think anybody has data anywhere,
which says, which looks at this from the standpoint
of people of color per se.
So what we did was to say, what proxy can we put in
to take a look at this and make an analysis of this?
So what we looked at was if code 20305,
which are areas primarily where people of color live, far away, people of color reside,
impaired white people, and those pop in those areas. And what we found was that in those areas,
a lack of digital technology or availability of technology or the cost, the expensive technology
was marked. And therefore students are suffering. And those with jobs are suffering as well. Imagine
for any of us trying to get through the pandemic and not having access to the digital world.
But that's the life of many of the folks living in that area. It's a critical issue.
And again, simply by looking at geography here, we know that there's inequities in that area.
Next is a topic area that is naturally of great interest to me as an attorney.
And that is justice. And the problem with looking at the justice system is it is such a huge area
that there are any number of statistics that we could look at in this particular arena.
We took a particular approach to this and that was to look at traffic stops and also to look at
juvenile detention. And figures really are shocking. Take a look at the first bullet point here.
The population of Puree County Juvenile Detention Center is 79 percent black, 16 percent white,
5 percent other.
What that means is that for every five people sent to the Juvenile Detention Center,
four of them are black.
Think what that means for their future and think what that means for our communities future.
80 percent are African-American.
And you look at the 3rd bullet point, in 2021 period police arrested 387 black juveniles
and 35 white juveniles, disparity in our community.
And then the middle point, black drivers comprise 61% of the traffic stops in the city of
puria, despite blacks being only 27% of the population.
Now you could say if that number was last comprised 58% of the population, well 61% it's pretty close or 63%.
No, it's 61% of the population, excuse me, 61% of the arrests and 27% of the population.
That is not a coincidence. That is an instance of disparity that is clear.
And as I said, we could go on in the justice system with a lot of other statistics.
Let's move to transportation and mobility.
Again, an issue that we might not think of at the top of our heads is an issue that is
important to the standpoint of disparity, but it clearly is.
I encourage you to look at the third bullet point first.
About 15% of pure households do not own an automobile.
The most prevalent areas of zero vehicle households are overwhelmingly in zip codes,
it's 020305.
Again, we don't have data that is black versus white here,
but we could look at it again using a geographical proxy
because we can tell who has automobiles
and what particular zip code.
So 020305, again, overwhelmingly non-white.
15% and 15% here, households don't know
the automobiles primarily located in that area.
looked then at the top of the 2021 Greater Peer and Mass Transit District.
Micro-transit study shows graphically that ZIP codes are 20305 are very underserved by
grocery storage, drug storage, and other retail outlets, and the next point
lacks more likely to depend upon public transportation than why it's both to get
to work in general commuting. What that says to us is that the black
population in Puria is underserved with owning an automobile and because of that
they can't get to grocery stores because they're not in their immediate area
drug stores because they're not in their immediate area retail outlets because
they're not in their exact area and they have troubles getting to work and have
to use public transportation. This is another issue of disparity and somebody might
say well again what's the connection here what you know what's significant but I
If you don't have transportation, you can't get to work.
If you can't get to work, you don't have an income.
If you don't have income, it's because you don't have
job or education.
And if you can't, if you don't have a car,
you can't get to the education, which is the basis of all this.
So there are connections throughout all of the factors
that we've talked about here today.
And, you know, again, it doesn't take me to tell all of you that I know, I know enough
of you have known you for a long time to know that you can, you can understand the connections
I'm talking about you.
There we plead.
Thank you.
Our report and frankly, as we've gotten into this, we've realized even more how interconnected all of these issues are and the holistic approach that we'll need to address these issues. So as we look forward to next year, Mary's going to talk a bit about our next steps for 2023.
We have created the baseline. We are showing the picture. There are many individuals here in Peoria, Peoria County and is browned in various areas.
places they ask the question, is there racial disparity? We have the data.
We're not the first,
this commission is not the first to look at racial issues in Peoria and Peoria County.
So we're going to, and we're in the process of trying to uncover all of those various reports,
other commissions, other tasks, other organizations who are tasked to look at that,
And we're going to compile all of that information and make sure that it's on our website so that people will know those who participated before.
Those who are participating now will know that they were heard and that that information is there.
And as I said earlier, we can't know how to move forward if we don't know where we're coming from.
We have to look back in order to move forward, that's Ann Kofa.
So that will be a part of our website that's under construction.
Looking again at the REIA which is the racial equity impact assessment tool that we are
looking at.
Peoria City and Peoria County to take a look at it's a tool that the city and the county
can use to be intentional when they are making changes, whether it's budgetary, policy changes,
to find out what is the impact on the entire Peoria and County.
What's the impact on all individuals and not just a few that we represent.
And then next we are going to Tim talked about and I've mentioned it.
We're going to go into the community and we're going to ask the community.
we have compiled data. This is what the data says. Now, from your lens, is this
factual? Is this true? And if not, then what is? And how do we go about solving
it? Because it's going to take all of us to solve.
Tim, let's go talk about the
next steps.
We have only allies in this community, no enemies. By that what I
mean is that it's important to us to reach out and hold hands with all the
other people in this community who are addressing these issues and there are
many. We recognize that we will only be successful by joining in alliances with
other people who are engaged in this process. We have no ego. We have no sense
that we need to be the leading organization working on this. We want to work
together with the community in accomplishing this and we've already begun to reach out to
other groups from the United Way, to Carver Center, to Friendship House, etc. And we will continue
to work with them to present a collaborative effort to the city and to you as one of our chartering
agencies.
I mentioned earlier that we're going to reach out to other communities to see what they've
done to address these issues. Again, that process has begun and looking at best practices. And from these
is in 2023, our goal will be then to develop high level
strategic plans.
And we hope that that will be accomplished by the end
of the year.
If you were to ask me today, what is that plan?
I would say that I don't know.
That is not my thing to say.
That is our community's thing to say.
That is our commissions thing to say.
And again, as I said, this is a collaborative effort
that we will bring to you so we can all work together
on what we're trying to accomplish.
In closing, I'd like to make just a couple comments or both Mary and myself.
We'd like to, first of all, thank our commission members, some of whom could be here tonight.
They're all listed at the back of our report.
Could you raise your hand if you're on our commission?
So first of all, thank you to them for their hard work during the last year and a half
and our expectations of them in the next couple of years.
Secondly, I'd like to thank the city and county staff for their strong support throughout
this process.
You know, to marshal information like this isn't easy, but we have found working with
Patrick and his staff and with Scott Surrell and his staff at the county that that road has
been made much easier.
Frankly, there to be singled out and given great thanks for the work that they've done.
Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Melody Green, your DEI officer, Andre over at
the county, and the work that you've provided to us too.
Today we met earlier with the county board executive committee, and I said something
then that I want to say to each of you as city council members, and it's simply this.
We want to thank you too.
You know, a report like this is not particularly flattering about our community.
When you see the statistics and have time to read through it, you'll see that it's not particularly flattering about our community.
And there are other communities who
would never embark upon the path that you took a year and a half ago.
And if they did, they would have hidden the information. They would have hushed the information up.
They would never have made it public.
and yet when we put together a draft report and shared it with the city and
county. Not one voice spoke up to say change this change that don't say this
don't say that.
As I said other communities would do this differently but we are
not other communities. All of you believe that to solve problems you have to
you accept that they're there, you have to study them, and you have to be transparent
about what those problems are so that you can resolve them.
And as I was sitting here tonight listening to Mr. Oberhelman and his group make their
presentation, I thought, oh gee, I've got to get up now and talk about bad things about
our community.
And I kind of smiled at Mary when we both were thinking the same thing.
But the more I thought about, the more this came to me.
They're addressing a problem too, and they've come up with solutions to deal with that
problem.
And frankly, the problem that they talk about is embarrassing your community too.
The loss of young people, or the refuse about the discouragement of people to come to
this community,
that's a problem.
They've come up with solutions.
We have problems too in the racial justice and equity area, ladies and gentlemen.
We all know it.
this report shows it. It's not unique to this community, but it is our problem. So what we're
saying is together let's join hands now and solve this problem. You took an amazing step as a
community to say let's put everything out there when you created this commission. We're here to say
tonight to you.
Thank you for your support and we appreciate
your ongoing support.
Tim, thank you for your leadership for the past year
and a half.
You've been volunteers, blood, sweat and tears.
You've given so much of your time in co-chairing this 100-plus
member committee, the steering, leading the steering committee,
leading the eight focus committees.
We thank the co-chairs of those focus committees.
We thank the steering committee.
You know, this really exceeded my expectations.
It's the hard truth, data driven, but it tells us where we are.
And we have to know where we are
before we can begin to get better.
And so I thank you for this.
It's very professionally done.
It's only going to help us to move forward.
So, I thank you on behalf of the Peoria City Council, and we look forward to joining hands with the entire community in making Peoria a better place for everybody.
Rowan?
Thank you Madam Mayor. I too would like to express my sincere gratitude to our co-chairs Miss Mary and Tim.
Also, appreciation to the 160 members that are part of this joint commission, given up their time, talent, and expertise to this important work.
The two reports that we received tonight are interconnected to the growth and success of our region.
When you talk about trying to attract and retain talent here in our region, we have to address inequities that exist.
As Mr. Oberhelm in referenced in his report, the 24-7 Wall Street isn't the billboard material that we want for our city.
But I think those who will consider coming to our city when they see that we have a joint commission on racial justice and equity to address the issue that we're owning our problems and realizing that we're going to put solutions in place in order to address them.
I think that's an exciting thing and maybe they will want to be a part of those solutions.
It's essential that we recognize that we have community members that don't have the same social
advantages and opportunities as others.
We've got to become comfortable having some uncomfortable conversations.
And this is some pretty heavy stuff.
It really is.
But as we continue to have the conversations, continue to collaborate, continue to work together
as synergy, we can really do some great things in this city.
in this county as well too so I applaud the efforts of you all I look forward to
being a continued resource and champion for this work I'm excited for again
both reports that we had today because it demonstrates that we are taking
control of our region we realize that we have work to do but we're not sitting on
the sidelines we check it in a game so thank you to everyone for being present
today and I look forward to a better tomorrow for our city and our county thank you
You council member Regan back. Thank you Madam Mayor and thank you to our chair of the committee and all the members of the subcommittees and
groups working groups that have made this report possible. Very sobering data, very sobering reading but as a guy who likes to see things in clear, understandable manner, you did a wonderful job
and presenting this and providing us with a baseline, as you mentioned, multiple times
through that, because as we work through this and look to the future for addressing these
issues, if we don't know where we're starting, it's going to be impossible to measure how far
we've come, so I really appreciate that and I think this
might be a little, I think this
This work needs to have that same outreach and regional appeal that our previous last
presentation had because this clearly isn't something just that's a puria issue or puria
accounting but this is something that affects the whole greater puria area and I would just
challenge my colleagues and the other communities to take a look at what's been done here and
I need to see how this can be replicated in their communities for the cause.
And regarding the racial equity impact assessment, I also think it's important that we include our not just the city and
county but look at our education partners in Peoria and recreation partners and that this is something that we embrace as a whole.
because just having one segment handle it isn't going to take care of the overarching problem.
So, again, thank you so much for the work and the dedication of all the folks who helped contribute to this.
Hopefully we can all take this and look at that data-driven information and see how we can work
to address those things head on. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Mayor.
Absolutely. Councilmember Kelly. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Thank you for all the work
you have done. I think you've established in most cases a very good baseline. Some
of those areas where you don't have data, I encourage you to try to get data.
But of course, we need to move forward, but what we see is a picture of what is.
We do not see a picture of why.
I think a good work for the commission is to examine the causes.
We can go out and try to solve something, but if we don't know the cause of the problem,
We're walking around in the dark.
You know, it's like somebody's got a high fever.
You can put them in a bathtub full of ice,
I guess, and bring the fever down.
But the reason for the fever is that infection,
which has nothing-
There's nothing to do with ICE, you know, doesn't really get you anywhere. So I would urge you to try to get in there and identify some. I don't know that we can know all of the causes. But to identify some of those causes, because that's the key to solving a lot of these really disturbing data points we have.
Thank you. Thank you Madam Mayor.
You're welcome.
Council member Graham.
I look at this a little bit differently.
I would like to see some concrete suggestions that this commission would make to our teachers
and principals who are working with our children every single day. Every single day.
And also some concrete suggestions to our police officers who are out there on the front
line working to protect all of us every single day.
Because as Paul Harvey said, we need to hear the rest of the story.
And believe me, you go out and you provide this data.
You'll get a reaction from the teachers.
You'll get a reaction from the police officers.
And it won't be ethereal anymore.
And then I think you're going to hear about four words spoken.
Where are the parents in this community?
I better lock off the in our community prepositional phrase.
Where are the parents?
Help us address that.
I remember when we had a police chief, his name was Arthur Kelly,
the third. And we were very alarmed during his tenure as police superintendent. It wasn't
a long tenure about the number of students who were truant out on the city streets when
they should be in the school learning.
And for a while, we were on kind of a kick to
make every police officer in the city a truant officer.
Well, that didn't go very far because
because even then we didn't have enough police to properly police our city.
So we talk about a number of black youths who are in our juvenile detention facility.
How did they end up there?
How did we end up with eight juvenile deaths in one year in this community?
Do we want to withdraw the police from those neighborhoods where this carnage is occurring?
See, the data gives us only part of the story.
Tim, I look forward to having coffee with you because we'll have an interesting exchange,
and I would also invite some of you to go out into the neighborhoods and present this to
the people and neighborhoods all over this city.
First district, second district, third district, fourth and fifth.
and you'll hear what I hear because they might have some ideas on how we can
better address these problems. We want to, we want to be cheerleaders for this
community but we need to be mindful cheerleaders and we need to have real
solutions to real problems. This data probably is not that much different than what
could have been cold together 15, 20 years ago.
So again, and this is one of the reasons
we have the PSAs on television. We're asking parents, it's 10 o'clock, do you know where
your child is? Now that may seem superficial. But trust me, if every parent knew where his
or her child was at 10 o'clock, we'd be a lot better off. And frankly, there are larger
issues that go beyond puria.
I see statistics that say 90% of Republicans and Democrats and parents think children should
not be having all these apps on their phones.
In such a proliferation of phones since 2017, I hear from the police department that children
are getting into tussles on Facebook and other social apps.
So this is being discussed in Washington too.
There are a lot of things we can do, but no, I also appreciate the work that you've done bringing this data together, but let's come up with an action plan.
Thank you.
Anyone else?
I have a motion to receive and file, moved by Councilmember Kelly, seconded by Councilmember Graebb, any other discussion?
Please cast your ballots.
Motion passes unanimous.
Thank you very much.
We
are at regular business, 23-099 is a communication from the City Manager and Director of Community Development with a request to approve the allocation of community development block grant funds for the rehabilitation of Logan Park and Morton Square Park in the combined amount of $875,000.
Mr. Manager.
Thank you, Madam Mayor. I'd like to turn it over to Community Development Director Joe Dolan to talk about this item, and I know that we also have with us, Emily K. Health, the executive director of the Peoria Park District.
Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Manager. Thank you, Council. The item in front of you tonight is a continuation in the partnership that we've developed with the Park District on some park upgrades in our community.
during the start of COVID I think one of the things that as we progress through
COVID we started to quickly realize is the importance and value of quality
green space in our neighborhoods and what we can do to get more people out
and about in our community. I think this item is very fitting for this evening with
the last two presentations that we received about quality of life and
investment or older neighborhoods. This item takes some of our CDBG funds that
the city receives through the HUD every year upgrading parks in neighborhoods in our
community as an eligible expense. We had a lot of success with the park district in
the upgrades to tree wind park that just wrapped up and will be able to be used this year.
So we approached them with some ideas of other park upgrades that were on their future list
that if they had some additional funding they could move up and we identified Logan Park
in Morton Square Park for some upgrades to the facilities,
pavilions, make it more accessible,
more playground equipment, and things like that.
If you have any specific questions,
or are my ask director, Kale,
come up and say a few words if that would be okay, Mayor.
Absolutely.
Hi, good evening.
I just want to say thank you on behalf of the park district.
This is, to me, I've had people ask me about this,
why is this happening?
And it is a wonderful collaboration as far as I'm concerned.
and we certainly appreciate the trust that you put in us
with the dollars that have been invested in tree wind park
we look forward to celebrating those together
with a ribbon cutting on April 10th.
I think it is an amazing thing that we have been able to do.
Certainly that sense of collaboration
and the impact that we can show our community
when we work together is embodied there
in that park and we look forward to meeting your expectations
in Logan and Morton Square Park as well.
We certainly appreciate those opportunities
Just like you, we have a capital improvement plan that is longer than the dollars are available to us
And so anytime we can work together to make improvements happen faster and with more impact
We are so excited to be able to do that and we appreciate your trust in us and your willingness to collaborate again to support our community
I do have the I brought the spreadsheets just in case you have questions about any specific items that are planned for either
Park is part of those improvement lists
and I would be happy to answer questions if you have them.
Thank you, Ms. Kayle.
Council Member Graham.
Do you have with our park district,
one of the finest park districts in the entire country,
in my opinion?
Thank you.
And not just me saying that because I'm a
pure city councilman, do you have activities for our youth?
Without a question, we certainly do.
We have lots of things available for our youth and our families.
And certainly, summertime is a time when we are able to
with the collaboration and support of the State of Illinois and Representative
Johan Gordon Booth. We are able actually to offer free access to many of our
facilities to include Peoria Zoo, Peoria Playhouse Children's Museum, the
Gwen Family Aquatic Center and our Golf Learning Center. Those are all available
for Peoria Public Schools families to participate in for free with the summer of
fun past that we're able to offer. That is just one example of the kinds of
access that we're able to offer to ongoing programming that is certainly very
positive and that engages lots of kids and families across our community.
Director Kay Hill, when the basketball hoops, I see on this site here, Perry Evans.
When the basketball hoops get bent, we just take him down and the kids can't play basketball.
That's what was happening a few years ago.
We have copious supply basketball hoops.
Actually, we took the hoops down during COVID in order to keep you from gathering and get
each other sick.
we have a supply of basketball hoops as well and we do replace them very regularly to make sure
that they are good quality. We certainly ask the community to let us know if there's a hoop
that is in disrepair but our maintenance and repair team is certainly on the call to make those
changes anytime a hoop needs to be replaced. We have some of the best basketball you can find in
the city and some of our locations especially at Gwynn Park certainly that's a place where if you
want a competitive game that's the place to go Logan also has a really great place to play basketball.
Constructive youth activities and do we have pools to serve the youth of this community it will be open this
Pools our pools will be open. I just was in a meeting earlier today with a tied-to-life-carb recruitment
Are we anticipate having when Family Aquatic Center and Proctor Recreation pool both open at the same levels that they were last year?
Again, that is when Family Aquatic Center is one of the locations that's available for free access for pure public schools families
So we certainly encourage people to be a part of that.
As you may have seen in the news recently, we did receive a grant from the state of Illinois
to bring a large-scale splash pad to Lakeview Park.
That is a replacement for Lakeview Family Aquatic Center.
Splashpad is a great alternative to a pool when we are able to do that because it doesn't
require lifeguards.
Maybe more importantly, it offers a longer season.
Swim season outdoors in Peoria, as you know, is no more than 10 weeks.
It's generally about eight weeks, and if you have a splash pad, you're able to extend that recreational experience to 12 to 15 weeks, so that's certainly direction that we are headed because it is something that is available to be open to families on a more regular basis than a pool is, but certainly we see the value especially living in a river city of offering those swim opportunities for our kids and families.
Do I call you director?
You can call me Emily if you want.
Thank you director Kiel.
And you know what council?
I'm going to be drawing our attention to some of these expenditures that we're going
to make going forward.
All the money that we're spending to help kids.
I'm going to remind you every single time we approve one of these.
Thank you.
Council Member Jensen?
Yes.
Thank you.
Madam Mayor.
I just I had a question because it wasn't clear or is the CDBG funding the the sole source of funding for the projects or would the park district be kicking and some money too?
For these particular upgrades, it's the CDBG covers the cost of all the upgrades.
Okay, I wasn't clear on that. Okay, thank you.
Council member make you feel better. I'll tell you that they are accompanied with for example, we are about to
Begin the process of a million dollar upgrade to our glant park playground to make that fully inclusive
So these are being matched throughout the city with a park district that has 54 different locations as far as parks or
Recreation centers. This is the best way to maximize our dollars and we certainly appreciate the opportunity to work together to reach more places
is more quickly than we could on our own.
Council member Al Regan-Batt.
Thank you, Madam Mayor.
I think we all remember hearing many times
how many levels of government Illinois has
and we have the largest number of
disparate government units and blah, blah, blah.
While I think this shows our constituents,
our taxpayers, how two distinct government entities
can work together for a common cause. We had quite a robust discussion in the fall about the
tree wind project and using some city funds to help the park district and I think again,
as Director Cahill pointed out how impactful that is for that neighborhood and I'm particularly thrilled
about the more than square improvements and having a chance for the neighborhood to weigh in on
exactly how this new shelter will look and not just a picnic shelter, but perhaps more
of a stage type presence.
But whatever it is, it's good to get our kids out in an active and constructive manner.
So I appreciate the spirit of cooperation that you're instilling up Director K. Hill,
Director Dullin.
Thank you so much for your work and the two of you.
We're finding ways to show the governments and Illinois can work together. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Absolutely. Councilmember Allen. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Councilman Grave, I will share your bias. This is one of the finest part districts in the country, and I am proud to say that, and I can't help but just the PORME. So I agree with you on that assessment. Tonight's theme has definitely been collaboration, and we saw that with our previous two presentations.
and now this, so I definitely appreciate you coming forth with this.
Just a clarification question, have the design been completed as far as what you plan on doing with these funds?
And if so, or if not, will there be opportunities for the communities that these parks are in to be able to provide some feedback or suggestions?
So, just as with the tree wind project, we define the scope for approval by the City Council
for allocation of those CDB, that's hard to say, CDBG dollars.
But what we intend to do then is to take those ideas, build out some opportunities for
public input.
So, as Councilman Rigenbach referenced, the picnic shelter at Morton Square Park, we have
that will allow them to do community gathering events,
whether that's a movie in the park or a concert
that can support the farmers market
and some of the other vibrant activities
that are happening there.
So we will be working with local residents
to make sure that the size and scale
and scope of that shelter meets their needs as well as ours.
Likewise, just as we do with most
of our other playground projects at this point,
we will get public input from residents
about what they want to see at Logan.
We are excited to be able to bring swings for most of you who grew up when I grew up swings were just like a thing
You took for granted that is not the case anymore because of the the fall radiuses and things that have to come with swings
They are not a part of our general new playground installation
So be able to be able to bring those to Logan is of special
Certainly it means a lot to us and for your support to be able to do that is significant and so we look forward to engaging the
the public in the specific design, but we certainly know the scope and we rely on the experts that we have working for the Peary Park District to help to make sure that what we offer them are safe, equitable, accessible opportunities and what they, you know, the colors that they are and the way that they're configured we look forward to engaging the public to help to select that.
Yeah, thank you for elaborating on that executive director Cahill.
I think it's very important that our community has feedback.
So that way they can have a true ownership of these projects.
So I'm very excited about that.
But they're their parts, just their York Parks.
They belong to our community and we look forward to representing their ones and
needs in those public spaces.
Well, thank you for all you do.
Thank you, Madame Mayor.
Thank you, welcome.
Councilmember Jackson.
Thank you, Madame Mayor.
Well, my comments are just, my comments are just in the way statements.
I have noticed since the tree went park renovations, and I don't have hard numbers, but I do know there's much more activity over there, and people are getting a lot of use much more out of the pavilion than they had in the past.
So, those dollars have gone to very good use, and I think it has resulted in increased traffic there.
I was there Sunday when the 309 market was there,
and I missed the crowd because the market starts at,
I wanna say about 11.30, but I could not find a park
around the parking spot, around the perimeter of the park.
It was just packed, including the parking lot.
So thank you, the park is getting lots more use,
and I do appreciate fact Logan is getting much needed attention.
I know I don't know how long they've been doing it,
But there have been soccer teams over there on Sunday, Hispanic, soccer teams.
And so they have been utilizing that park big time.
So I just appreciate the fact that we were able to tap into these dollars.
And I think this is money well spent.
And it will certainly be used and appreciated by the residents in those communities.
So thank you, Director Cahill.
Thank you.
So tonight is about public partnership, the two things that Councilwoman Jackson just referenced
and our public-private partnership that we're very proud of.
Being able to offer the tree-wind pavilion as the hub for
Peoria Grown and for their Market 309 efforts is something that we're very proud of
and something that has recently happened there.
But that is a permanent spot now for them to maintain their produce,
which allows them to buy more produce at a lower cost,
which means they can support and reach more people.
So that's a great opportunity and you reference the soccer league on Sundays.
That's absolutely one of our favorites.
We're host to about a 16 week league and on any given Sunday you can come down there and see between five and seven hundred people having the time of their life in that park and that's what our parks are for. So thanks for identifying those two partnerships that we're very proud of.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Remember Kelly.
Thank you, Madam Mayor.
I also am very, very proud of our park district and all the wonderful things that it does,
the extensive amounts of land we have, the things that we do with them.
But I would like to ask a question of our manager, was our donation to the true win rebuild
and renewal. Was that the first time we've ever, you know, a substantial piece of
money and delivered it over to the park district as far as you know.
It was the
first time that we use CDBG dollars directly and for the purpose of improving a
park. I'd have to go back and look at past actions that we may have taken in the
passed with the park district where we've shared cooperatively in different efforts.
But I think as we started to look at the use of the CDBG COVID dollars, we knew that
we needed to use those to get people outdoors.
And this was a good way to put those dollars to use.
And parks are an allowable expense under the community development grant program.
And this is a great way for us to move those dollars out into the community to get the community
active in around those. Thank you and Director Cahill are you aware of an answer
to that question of mine. I can tell you from my so I've been with the park
districts in 2011 the one project I can think about that is a similar size and
scope would be the MLK park playground renovation that was done that would have
been 2012, 2013, that's the one that looks like the fire, it's all fire themes, it matches
the fire department, firehouse there next door. But certainly I appreciate these opportunities,
especially given the presentations that I've heard tonight, as we think about our work to
to recruit and retain and get people to come to our community.
One of the talking points that we share in almost every public presentation that we give,
it's certainly nice for everyone to say, if you have a great park district,
the reality is that we have a park district unlike communities of our size anywhere in the country.
So when you look at the kinds of things that we're able to offer both from a land inventory and a programming perspective,
The kinds of things that we offer here in Imperialia are comparable to what Park Districts
or Park and Rec agencies in cities like Tampa, Florida, San Diego, California, Charleston,
South Carolina.
Those are comparables.
And so if you think about populations, those are not comparables.
So it is something that that shared investment in these public spaces to make them things
that support our residents and the people who visit here is absolutely essential to our
future, so we are so appreciative of the partnership opportunity and we look forward
to continuing to be good partners for the public benefit, because that's why we're all
here.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Councilman, I do want to follow up, you know, racking in my brain.
We do collect on new housing developments, particularly in Northwest Peoria.
we collect developer impact fees that were used for parks.
And so that was collected and as we built out that area
that was utilized for parks, predominantly
for the Peoria Park District.
In addition, as part of the LawCon process where the River
Plex was built, we acquired the Rocky Glen Park, which
which is in West Peoria as part of the LawCon program and then transfer that over to the park district.
So that was, again, dollars that the city utilized and that purchase that went to the park district but now they have an active park going as well.
Okay, thank you.
My point in asking is that we, we seem to be doing this a little bit more of the park district, I love the city.
We have two governments that generally don't have enough money to do all the things that we would like to do.
Our district does not have enough, we don't have enough.
I would like the council to consider having a policy session at some time just to see where we are on supporting other tax
tax generating entities within our city everyone loves I certainly love the
park district everyone I hope loves the city but there's a reason that they're
separate and we it hasn't become a rush yet but you know these are not
extraordinary expenditures. These are typical normal park district expenditures. I think that we
should be careful in that we can always use CDBG funds. We can always do more of what our
mission is, which might be more down payment assistance or rehab assistance, that sort
of thing. I just hate to be Debbie Downer here, but I, you know, I think we have to be careful
with the money that we that we are entrusted with. Thank you, Madam Mayor.
Council Member Regan-Butt.
Thank you again, Madam Mayor.
I just saw in the back of the room
our grants coordinator, Catherine Murphy.
And I think oftentimes,
Catherine and her team go underappreciated
for the work they do in
administrating these dollars that we get
whether it's CDBG or the ARPA programs
that we put into place.
So I'm just kudos to Catherine.
We appreciate what you're doing.
You why are you there?
Do you have a motion?
I will have a motion, but I just want to say one other thing that I personally don't think we need a policy session on on this topic
I think we need to look at this case by case and every every situation is different and I was very apprehensive to support the tree wind project
As many of you probably recall last fall during the budget cycle, but as I met with the park district representatives and as we discussed it amongst ourselves
I got that comfort level to do that, so I think we want to be careful about setting precedent, but we also want to be careful about cutting off potential cooperation, so with that, I would move for approval.
Seconded by Council Member Jackson. Any other discussion? Council Member Euler?
Thank you Madam Chairwoman. I would like to agree with Council Member Kelly. I do think we need to have a discussion on how we want to allocate dollars, especially when they're going to other government.
taxing bodies if that's some kind of you know an assessment or a checklist or
criteria something that says that this makes sense to me and I fully support
what we're doing here and have no issue with it but I do think that you know
it kind of crosses some boundaries if we're not talking about why we're doing it
and we're stepping in and giving money to do exactly what that taxing body's
role is. Thank you. You're welcome we can explore that. We have a motion and a
Second, any other discussion?
Please cash your ballots.
Motion passes unanimously.
Thank you, Ms. K.
Thank you.
23-100 is a communication from the City Manager and Director of Public Works
with a request to approve a professional services agreement with Cloud Point Geospatial Inc.
In the amount of $78,700 for 2023, $130,400 for 2024.
and $13,200 for 2025.
Mr. Manager.
Thank you Madam Mayor.
I'd like to turn the floor over to Public Works Director Powers to talk about this item.
Thank you Mr. Manager.
Thank you Mayor Counselors.
I hope, I know it's been along that already, but I kind of think this is,
and
this is that heavy lift that Councillor Rigidbach talked about.
I think he referred to it as a herculean effort that we wanted to undertake during the budget cycle.
I wish this was already in place having worth of $70 million being directed toward the CIP and our infrastructure.
This year, unfortunately, it's not.
Say that because if you look at the accounts communication as a pretty exhaustive list, you say infrastructure.
And then I'll go to an acronym that you know relatively well, PCI, which was a pavement
condition index which really reflects a piece of data
Because when you talk about infrastructure, you talk about roadways, pretty exhaustive list here, sidewalks, curves and gutters, storms, sewers, combined sewers, facilities, traffic signals, street lights, signs, roadway markings, urban forests and fleet, public works. You don't even think that when you think public works most of the time. PCI has to do with one piece of that infrastructure and only one rating relative to that piece, meaning a roadway. And we don't condition rate all roadways.
An asset management system or a holistic asset management system considers the effect
of each of these components of infrastructure upon the other, and as you're budgeting
how you expend those budget and how we project to you in a geospatial way, because we now
live in that environment, every time you get into your car you think GPS, one of the backgrounds
that the IS is running, meaning you're being triangulated on a map, it is just simply moving
you on a map. And we have gotten really good, especially in government, at putting pens
on maps, or putting data in a system that is geospatial related, that also has dollars
attached to it, that also has project related to it, that has any number of things related
to it. But the data is there and contained in a centralized location, but not being used
as a tool to make decisions. And I would say that in the department and before this council,
because I can assure you if I could show you data in a different way where it's
holistically presented, you would make different decisions because you would
see it geospatially, you see a picture, we're all good at looking at picture books and I
hate to boil it down to that but that is really what it comes down to. When you look
at a geospatial centric asset management system and I move dollars off of a
project, say from one project to another, just from sheer budget, say some of the
things we did creatively this year with Mellon overlays.
We moved money off of projects to another,
but I had to go to the finance director
to move those dollars into this day
would have to go back to say where are those dollars
or talk to our finance manager
to say where those dollars moved from
and follow a track if you are an audit trail
for those dollars, whereas if we had a holistic
asset management system, we would see those dollars
and that audit trail in a geospatial environment
that was attached on a dot or a point on a map and you could follow the money and the project.
You could follow the road conditions. You could follow what's buried under the road. You could
follow the map or the lighting and the lighting conditions, the sidewalk conditions, all of those
things which we're doing now and by the way I've already expended hundreds of thousands of dollars
on mapping again, mapping our storm sewer system and conditioning. Meeting even discovering where it
is to this day. We're still discovering where our storm sewers are and mapping it, but we're
putting data in. We're not making decisions with it. We're not bringing those things together and
concatenating them in a way. Did it tell us a story to us as a department? We are not the most robust
user in our own department, which is the first part of the proposal we'll bring into you, and I would
Proposes is sole source for a reason because we've had a parade of
Several vendors come through our office who have tried to sell us a solution and I have I have learned in government or
My many years in it that I do not see the force for the trees
meaning
As even as many times as I've gone through implementations with systems and so on
Have since someone being objective and not selling me a product use the example because they're the biggest asery and GIS
Yes, everyone is heard of, as we, but as we also will try to sell you a solution, so in order
to be unbiased and objective, we went out and sought the consultant that doesn't own
any of us.
But as the ability to assess all of them, some of them even work for us, frankly, locally,
that would pitch us a solution, but we don't know, frankly, I'll just say from a point of
public works to this minute which of our disparate systems we have a system
that we built a bunch of with every unit's a third-party system we have a system
that we use for paid conditioning that is used throughout the area we have you
think of front desk we have land-used information this geospatial leaf used
that we use and making decisions but we don't go to one place or as close to one
place we'll probably never get to one place but I want to get as close to one place
that I can and come here during the budget preparation season and tell a story
about infrastructure that includes that list all of it and one of its impact on
the other and show it to you in a picture and show you again red is bad green is
good and you just kind of look at it and see what the impact of stormwater is upon
paper or see what lighting costs are relative to pavement cost and project cost and you see it
and of
me trying to throw data at you and again I'm not trying to discount the value of PCI
because again we just had an item earlier we deferred it is valuable information we do use it to make
decision but that is one point of data that's one point of data it does not consider politics it doesn't
consider the amount of money we have. It doesn't consider the effect of one winter or even one storm
that could have on what we've rated. In other words, I could give you a condition rating on
pavement and have a week of sub-zero weather and have a road that wasn't even rated as bad below
up and it comes to the top of the list. So again, you have these anomalies that take place that even
can be in this instance plotted in this way in an asset management system, or a holistic
asset management system that will tell us that story and can help us make that decision
because we'll see it, because we'll enter the data, and then the data will enter it to
an algorithm that brings it to the top for us, and we can show it to you.
So that said, I will say Jonathan Houdell and Aaron Strickler are here from Cloud Point,
geospatial and again the reason we are putting them forward is the sole source vendor is because they
do not have a product to sell us. They have the expertise and just plug a few of the cities are
working with Bloomington, Peakin, and this is for Councillor Ruckery and I, Jasper, Indiana,
along with Western Springs. So they are working with communities around us. They have a great
deal of experience and again they are here and I just wanted to make sure that I
introduce them even if you don't ask some questions but believe it or not this
is one that I've done in a lot of places that I've worked so I doubt that you'll
ask me a question I can't answer even maybe for them. This is the beginning I
think of something really really great for Peory and we our plan is to train
throughout this year to determine what we need to know about geosubacial
environments, and then to have them take on the role of writing the requirements document.
In other words, coming and asking all of us interdepartmentally, asking finance, asking
IS, asking economic development, asking the manager, asking us, asking the mayor, asking
you objectively what would you like to see to make a decision that involves infrastructure
and your expertise.
Anything to do with public work.
But we can show you a geospatial image or a desktop or an executive dashboard
that comes to fruition throughout next year, which is where we will use them
to actually write the RFP, score the RFP, and actually acquire the software and do the implementation.
So we are looking as I say often, concept to concrete.
We want them on board with us and helping us get through each of those processes
Because, again, I'm just going to say it, we aren't the best at this.
We generally, we get linear.
We get in our lanes and we make decisions sometimes to forget to ask the right questions, the right people.
And I think this is the right room.
So I'll leave it there and see if there are any questions.
Director, thank you for bringing this forward.
I'm always interested in technology.
They can make us more efficient, potentially save costs,
and certainly make us a smarter city.
And I would like to ask the representative
from Cloud Point to come forward.
Jordan, they're both here, actually would do that.
To, okay.
It is Jonathan, Hodell, and Aaron Strickler.
Hey, introduce yourselves.
Good evening, Madam Mayor, councilmembers.
Thank you for this opportunity to be here this evening.
I'm John Holt, principal of Cloud Point Geospatial.
I'm joined by our director of services, Aaron Strickler.
We are both licensed professional engineers, but we are a GIS consultant focused in the area of public work specifically.
We also work with transportation utilities, but that's really our area of focus.
We are headquartered here in central Illinois in Roanoke of 30 minutes from here.
As we heard the discussions earlier of the attracting top talent that is also a situation where we battle that on a regular basis.
is always looking for top talent to attract the area.
But we're glad to be here tonight
and would be happy to address any questions
with this particular project.
Thank you.
Director Powers mentioned some local areas,
Bloomington,
Peakin, Illinois.
What are some other perhaps larger cities
in the United States that use this technology?
Sure, so the technology, as Director Powers mentioned,
is Ezri, the software is called ArcGIS, which you have some of that software already,
and that is what the majority of your cities and counties are using in their GIS.
Specifically, some of the other, as you mentioned, some of the cities we're working with,
we are primary focus, we do work throughout the Midwest, we've done projects across the
country, but our primary focus is in Illinois and the surrounding states, again in that
public works environment. Now this technology can be used by other departments and it certainly
would be in this situation with the city and you are using it in other departments. However,
we find that typically the greatest, really the driving force is the public works need because it's
so infrastructure asset heavy. And how much training, how many training hours does it take before
or an employee could start using the technology.
That really depends on what the application would be.
There's a desktop software component to it.
There's also a web component.
So what we see more and more as the technology increases its
capabilities is we see more people taking advantage of the web.
What that allows us to do is roll out GIS applications for
more of an everyday user, not having to be a GIS professional sitting behind a real
powerful GIS software if it makes sense.
So how much training might it take on average?
Is there a range depending on the user?
It's going to vary.
It's going to depend on, first of all, what the department would be, what their needs are
going to be oftentimes the training two would depend on what the final deliverable they're
looking for. For example, if they're just looking for printed maps, say PDFs that they
want to print out, that training may be less the number of hours to train somebody up
to speed on that. As opposed to if they're trying to develop more of the web GIS maps and
applications over the web, of course, that would be, you know, more involved with that training.
Oftentimes, depending on the department, they may have more what we call data layers,
GIS layers, depending on their needs in that department. And typically, you would see, like in the case
of public works, they would have more layers of infrastructure assets as someone mentioned earlier,
maybe than some of the other departments. But other common use cases, you know, the police department
with crime analysis and, you know, I'm sure you probably are familiar with some of those use cases for this department as well.
So I can't give you an exact number of hours for specific training.
It really is going to depend, but that's part of our contract would be to assist the public works department with improving training and have knowledge transfer as a part of that.
Thank you Madam Mayor, I think not necessarily a question I guess just a couple of thoughts and some comments and a nice shout out to Jasper and Deanna by the way, that happens to be my hometown, so you're doing some work down there as well I think that they are doing their town square and doing some complete streets through your service and I've got to think about
And this is way long before Director Powers was here,
before a city manager was here,
before any of us around the council were.
And when I moved into my neighborhood,
one of the first things we took when I went on the board
was to be able to upgrade the lighting,
because the lighting had not been upgraded the bulbs
within the street lights.
And as we got into that project,
and we're able to do that along in the neighborhood,
one of the things that was quickly pointed out to us
was the number of proliferation of signs that had taken over every single poll.
Many of them actually sang opposite of what the one above or below them did
because everybody knew how to put a sign up.
Nobody knew how to take a sign down, and that wasn't somehow just,
and it wasn't through anybody's necklaces, it just didn't have it.
And I think that that's a perfect example of when systems don't talk.
And technology is not one of those things. It makes the front page paper.
And everybody goes, yeah, wow, what a great thing. But it's one of the necessary things. It's why we're so excited about launching an app for Peoria Cares to be able to have that communication piece. I see a lot of utility in this, you know, I remember in a couple, I think it was not in the two distant past when council member Graham was talking about when we do a street, why we aren't looking at all the infrastructure underneath there, while we have it open to be able to save future
And that's exactly what this can really help because when we're doing one project, we can actually look forward to figure out if we can actually save some extra dollars.
Nice work on bringing this forward to us. I'm excited to see this and while this may not be the thing that makes the front page of the newspaper or makes the headline of the news story at 10 o'clock, I think this is important as we invest all of those dollars that we have
that are going to go into making our city a much better place to live.
Thank you.
Thank you, Councillor.
And I think it will tell a story because again, we can make this public face it.
So citizens will be able to see the conditions of the same infrastructure if we choose to.
Councillor Member Vellpula.
Thank you, Madam Mayor.
Just have a clarification question.
It says that this is a two-year contract with an option to extend for a one-year.
And I see there is a bell curve with the amount of dollars that are allocated.
We have a 78,000 and 130,000, then 13,000.
Could you explain me?
Sure. The differences in the first year will be primarily training centric
and then developing the requirements document.
Next year, we'll be going into the acquisition
of the actual asset management.
Right, the requirements document are, excuse me,
will execute the RFP, make an acquisition
of an asset management system.
Then in the third year, we'll drop back into more
of a general geospatial GIS management level.
So the dollar amount drops back down,
where we would exercise the option
to determine if we could take it,
or we still need your service.
So, what exactly would be the value of the software?
Correct.
What exactly would be the cost of the software for us to acquire that?
Now, creating the requirements document and putting together an RFP
and then we'll get bids that will basically then
I made earlier accounts.
We've been pitched many solutions, but we don't know what the solution is.
we need
astronomically high or we can buy something vanilla in a box that you go to a store and buy.
We know we don't need either. What we hope the RFP process does and guiding us takes us to that
point that we come to you during a budget build and we say we need this amount of money to acquire
the software. How much will it cost for us to lease it? How much will it cost for us to lease it
have been by that we don't know that again and I don't know that there's a
solution you can lease you could there are solutions you can pay licensing fees
for any but anything that you had had that you would say holistically that is
asset management asset management judge it not just GIS because we have GIS and we
can continue to plot information asset management systems overlay particular data
that is decision driven and then you put it out to users so they can make decisions.
That's what there are a lot of vendors out there right now looking at.
It's kind of a new frontier to a degree still.
It's been around for a while, but there are a lot of people that have a lot of ideas
that think they know what we need to include us.
We don't.
That's what they are going to tell us. That's why through their interviews,
the requirements document is key.
I learned a long time ago from the worry wise individual that if we know our requirements we know what to build
We know what we need to buy but absent that document even the RFP
So a lot of their time in that second year
In until the end of this year we have three quarters left is to develop what we need a statement the states
This is the city of Piorius
need which will translate it into the RFP, which will translate to me coming to you with
a budget I ask you for what it's going to cost the rest to buy based on the responses
to the RFP.
Thank you for the clarification.
Thank you Madam Mayor.
Welcome.
Any additional questions?
Council Member Reganbot?
Thank you Madam Mayor.
I'm Director Poes.
Thank you for bringing this forward.
I know this is something you've talked about off and on for a number of years and as we
We talk about the value we've seen in PCI, I think this will just take that to the next
level, including sidewalks, curbs, gutters, storms, the whole shabang, as they say.
So I'm looking forward to seeing where we go from here and how we can explain to our constituents
in that different level.
The reason this works being done is because of the condition of X, Y, Z, and reason this
is put off until next year is because of that.
So I think there's a lot of value in this for us to prioritize things and for you as the professionals to to give us that guidance. So thank you, thank you.
Welcome.
Can I get a motion to approve?
Moved by Councilmember Sears.
Seconded by Councilmember Kelly.
Any other discussion? Please catch your ballots.
That's
motion passes unanimously.
Thank you very much.
Madam Clerk.
23-101 is a communication from the City Manager and Corporation Council with request to adopt an ordinance to make temporary amendments to Chapter 18 licenses reducing fees, allowing additional locations in article 17 mobile food vehicles and reducing fees in article 12.
Street and sidewalk vendors of the Code of the City of Peoria.
Mr. Manager.
Thank you Madam Mayor.
This item really is coming to us from a request from the Arts and
Law in Education celebration at the Peoria County Courthouse.
They currently park all of their buses along Hamilton Street.
And if they're ever to get any food vendors, they would really need the stretch of Adam Street to be able to have any food vendors that would operate.
Right, there are no food carts that have applied, so what we wanted to bring forward was what we did last year, which is to basically allow the food carts or allow food trucks, excuse me, to operate along both the courthouse square block of Hamilton and on Adams during 2023, and then also wave the fees to try and encourage the food trucks to operate at those locations.
the only other location that they would be able to operate in downtown is right out here on Jefferson by the Civic Center where there's the bus pulloff section of that. So those would be the three locations in downtown that the food carts would operate.
What would the time period be?
The time period is for this full calendar year. So it would be through the rest of 2023 that we would do that.
But we did get a letter today that I'll be happy to share with Council from the county administrator that said at a minimum, I think they'd like to see April and May having that ability during the arts and education celebration discussion questions for the manager councilmember Jensen.
Thank you, Madam Mayor. Just wanted to thank you for bringing this forward.
This is something I would think Councilman Riggum back and I both had brought up before
during discussions on the Council floor to get more people downtown and get more businesses
downtown. So this is great and with that I move to approve.
Is there a second? Seconded by Council Member Valpula.
Council Member Euler.
Thank you Madam Chairwoman. Consistent with my opinion last year when this came up in my
no vote. I'll be opposing this again. I think it sends the wrong message to our restaurants
in downtown and it basically last year the only thing we accomplished was saying that we don't care
about you. We did not have one single license apply to put a food cart downtown but we told the
businesses who stuck it out through COVID that you need to pay your full property tax and stormwater
fee bill and parcel pension fee bill. I enjoy going to the food carts and the food trucks and I think
any of the owners that are here locally know that I frequent them but the
location that these go and saying that you don't have to pay but you have to
pay property taxes and stormwater fees is completely unfair and sends a bad
message when they are hanging on waiting for civic center events and the days
that OSF and caterpillar actually have employees in the office to survive. I go
in them every day downtown I have these discussions with all of the owners and
And they are very concerned about this.
I've had some of them even say that once there's enough people down here back to work and events going on, then you're welcome to plug the food truck into my front door if we've got enough business to go around.
But I assure you if you spend time down there, you will know there's not enough business going on, so I will be opposing it.
Thank you.
You're welcome and
there's no more discussion. We have a motion to approve and a second. Please catch your ballots.
Motion passes with three nays. Sear. Oiler. Recreate.
Madam clerk.
We are at unfinished business. We do not have any items under unfinished.
Okay, so then we are at new business. Is there any new business
councilmember Reganbach?
Madam Mayor, I just wanted to give special recognition to longtime East Bluff resident Ed McGraw for his induction in the greater purious sports hall of fame on Saturday night.
Ed McGraw was a civic teacher at Central Junior High when I was in eighth grade and he's the one that actually I guess he could say is responsible for me being here today in this and around this forest.
He made civics and and public service really come alive, so I'm sure some of you probably think less of him because of that of my being here, but he was a great teacher then and a great community leader and it's one of the founders of the steamboat classic, which will be celebrating its 50th anniversary this June, so just congratulations to Mr. McGraw.
Thank you.
Thank you Madam Mayor, well just kind of following up a little bit on what Director Kay
will talk about.
There will be a ribbon cutting hosted by the city at Treewind Park on Monday, April 10th.
At 1030, it's part of the national community development week and it's a partnership between
the park district and the city of Peoria.
Again, using those CDBG, CV funds, to fund park improvements at this, what's become
a vital park in our community.
The improvements are a new ADA accessible playground equipment, a new pavilion, new walking
pants, and a new basketball court to allow for outdoor activity.
So just to shout out to everybody who made this project possible and we hope to see a lot of people as well as my colleagues here joining me on April 10th for their ribbon cutting at Tree-Win Park.
Thank you Madam Mayor.
You're very welcome. Councilmember Jensen.
Thank you Madam Mayor.
I have a request to see if staff would bring forward either maybe a resolution regarding the proposed carbon dioxide pipeline that's going to go through 616-605, you know, the Sierra Club was here about a month ago, a meeting or two ago talking about it.
I think we've all been received emails about it.
I've read a lot about it, and I am concerned about it.
And I'd like to see that this council take some action,
at least take or make an adaptive resolution
stating that we're against having that expand here
or concerned and perhaps endure some moratorium
until we have more information about it.
Okay, thank you.
Council
Member Graham.
Thank you.
Director Powers and Manager Yuri, do we have a strategy to get that lane that's blocked
on Northbound Knoxville, just south in Nebraska back open.
It's been closed for a long time.
It's a hazard, it's potential accident causing hazard.
What's the plan?
Council Member, my understanding is it's a it's a water company issue, but we'll certainly
talk with them and see what we can do to get a status and an update on what's
going on with that and respond back.
Did you want to respond director powers?
Okay. I
think you're referring to the sinkhole. As we are working with I dot right
now in regard to what exactly the responsibilities are there with the issue. We
know the issue is a separation of some type possible separation of storm.
We're
for a surface.
For roads, manholes and structures, they're in lies the point. The agreement we have says we basically would take care of the manhole, the surface and a riser, whatever coming to that point. I doubt as of the belief that we would also maintain the sewer structure underneath. We do not believe that to be the case and they're in lies the point. We're trying to resolve that with them now. We need to get a result because our constituents are not being well served.
it's an accident creator and it's not that it's been a few days you know we've
had these discussions as relates to how we interact with the water company
and other entities i. Mr. Riggenbach, Councilman Riggenbach we we have to work
with other government entities and when we get to an impasse we need to have a
meeting. Otherwise, we see this stuff on next door with our constituents very frustrated
and they're sending emails out. Here's the thing. We're the elected officials here.
We expect our employees not only in the city of purity because they have full confidence
in you, but to get this resolved with who needs to be spoken to, I guess it's I dot.
that is correct and we are meeting with them and we do have the agreement and we're looking for the older agreement now to
determine if it's a matter if we determine it's us we'd already be there we just don't believe it is us
thank you director thank you councilmember sear thank you madam mayor next Tuesday we have an
election and I'd like to be the first one to number one say a big thank you to a couple of my
my colleagues, Councilwoman Beth Janssen and Councilman Sid Rockrigo for years of service
around the horseshoe.
Thank you very much for all you've done, it was a pleasure to serve with you guys and
I'd like to wish good luck to Dr. Valpula and my Councilman fellow here Mr. Kelly and also
Mr. Orler will be running again, wish you guys good luck and very soon we'll have a new
horseshoe.
So I wanted to encourage all our constituent to vote next Tuesday, so thank you very much
for both of you and good luck to everybody else, and we'll be back soon.
Welcome.
They've still got some more meetings to go, so go away.
Councilmember Jackson.
Thank you, Madam Mayor.
Just to follow up, thank you, Councilwoman Jensen, for the request for a resolution on the
carbon dioxide, proposed carbon dioxide pipeline.
I guess I'll go ahead and put it out there.
I've been kind of doing a little bit of research
and fact-finding and meeting with individuals about this.
And I too am opposed to this project for a variety of reasons,
some of which I'm still researching.
But I would like to, for those of you who are interested,
I'm going to have a news conference this coming
Thursday, day after tomorrow at 10.30 at Lincoln Branch Library, along with the Sierra Club.
And I would just like to invite as many people as possible to come out because I have some
great concerns.
It's not just the south side, but this project like this with the potential for any type
of problems could affect not only the south side, but we've got East Peoria.
Yeah, we've got we've got downtown Peory just a principle on the weather and things of that nature
So I have reached out to some of the companies and I'm still waiting to hear back
But I will continue to do my due diligence and gathering information, but for the record
I would like to see a moratorium of some sort until we're able to get a meeting and more information
from the parties involved. So again
And for those of you who are interested, I'm going to have a news conference on Thursday
at Lincoln Branch Light, Breary, to just talk a little bit more about it and to raise awareness.
Because there are many people who don't know about this.
And as the first district representative, it's my job to do my homework to raise awareness
and to inform, not only the residents, but the businesses, the schools, the churches,
and all of the non-profits and agencies that exist in and around that area of
town. So thank you. I hope that we'll get an opportunity to get more
information. And as I do hopefully I'll be able to bring that to the Council
and share that with you all as we look forward to maybe getting a resolution
and a moratorium of some sort until we're able to get more information about this.
Thank you,
councilmember Graham. Yes piggybacking off that one of the things
that is somewhat concerning to me is that we
don't have a city position or
recommendation on something that we are getting tutorials on from entities like
the Sierra Club and other environmental groups we know this is coming and
manager does our administration have a position on this no the administration
quite frankly hasn't taken a position yet on it because we don't have that much
and we've we've only got a little bit of information that's been presented by
the companies themselves to us so we don't have a lot of information yet to
make an informed decision, but we'll be happy to put some information together for council.
And that informed decision is important because some of these things could, if they could
be potential health problems, you know what, toxic fumes, whatever discharge of gas does
not respect district boundary lines.
So you know, it's all of us here and so thank you councilor Jackson for bringing this up
because I love our Sierra Club
and I love the people who represent various other groups
in this community who are concerned about our environment.
But you're saying we basically just don't have enough information.
So Councilor Jackson, I'll see if I can join you as well
because we need to start developing a body of information.
We just recently have seen what can happen down
with the bioerge of mess and the potential problem is there.
and I think this has to be front and center and I think I think that I want to
learn more about it. But thank you for telling us that we're on it, but we just
don't have sufficient amount of information to bring to the council yet. Thank
you. You're welcome. Madam Clerk.
We are at Citizens
It's an opportunity to address the City Council, we have not received any cards, so then we're on to executive session.
And I would like to, okay,
come on, you can come on, you can come up,
it's five minutes.
Okay, my name is Eric Smith.
I live at 511 west tea time with my wife Sherry on the corner of Mont-Holly.
We've been there since July 2020, and since being there, we've noticed that there's
general fast-driving on Mont-Holly.
It's especially bad at night and during the morning commute.
The speed limit is 35, but I have routinely followed cars going 50 and due to the width
of that road, it is quite easy to go 40 and not even feel like you are speeding.
Now, Mont-Holly is a feeder for all of, and this, quite frankly, might play in a little
bit too.
Your ability to work with, excuse me, the Joint Commission on Racial Justice and Equality,
and evening out your speeding ticket admissions.
This road feeds, Holly Hills.
It feeds Edge Wilde.
It feeds Fox Point.
and it gets a fair amount of traffic and I would presume that most of the traffic
comes from those neighborhoods where homes can cost in two commas millions of
dollars and I propose that we generally slow that traffic on the road now the
first iteration I think Beth you wrote to me today perhaps that we can get a
trailer monitor trailer mounted speed monitor there I do not know if those keep
data, if they just simply point a speed at anybody, but I would be interested if there were more metrics than mine.
The second iteration may be to have permanent mounted speed limit monitoring signs.
If you can put those up, I know there's one on Northgate Road, which is on Holly Hills, but Mont-Holly needs one in both directions.
I would defer to the city engineers or whomever I can work with to best place them.
And the third iteration of this could be as when road resurfacing is needed,
that we install some type of speed, calming, device, traffic, or whatever.
There have been emails going around the city council.
I talked to, I've emailed all the, excuse me, Mr. Sear and all of our city-wide representatives.
And there's talk about perhaps that there are speed monitoring cameras, legislation that could be put past.
I know they have that in Iowa because I got a ticket for Iowa while I was at the hardware store.
but the speed's on Mont-Holly, so what I did is I measured between two telephone poles
on Mont-Holly across from my house. They are 170 something feet. I measured the amount
to 180 feet and using the basic high school math of a public education system of puria.
I came up with a factor of 122.7 if you divide 122.7 divided by the number of seconds it takes
for a car to pass that distance. You will come up with 50, 37, 34, 34, 43, 48, 37,
40, 35, 41, 47, 33, 36, 48, 38, 46, and that is an average of 40 on my first five minute
break. That is an average of five minutes speeding. The next car that came by came by at 58
miles an hour still accelerating, 33, 50, 43, 46, 50, 38, 49, 57 miles an hour, 44 miles an
now are 42 miles, now are 58 miles an hour.
43 miles an hour, 46 miles an hour, 46, 41, 39, 41, 47, 39, 52 miles an hour, 45,
45, 45, 64 miles an hour.
44 miles an hour, 48, 45, 44, 38, 38, 50 miles an hour, 38, 43, 33, 47, 44, 38.
This is a residential street if you would like me to run 64 miles an hour down your
Street I'll go look you up and we'll do it. Now that's my time and I have seen
positive traction the last couple days with the council members so I appreciate
that but I know there was a there was hopefully a city police presence there
and you know but we'd like to see this move done traffic is moving much too
fast there and like I said if you want racial injustice and equality I think we
We can pretty safely say that it's not Black people's meeting down that road.
Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Smith.
And I would like to invite a motion to adjourn and to convene in closed session immediately
following adjournment of the City Council meeting pursuant to the Open Meeting Zach 5-I-L-C-S-120-4-2-2-C-1
to discuss the performance of a specific employee
pursuant to the Open Meetings Act,
and pursuant to the Open Meetings Act 5-ILS-120-4-2-C-21-4-approval
by the body of closed session minutes.
Move by Councilman Kelly,
seconded by Councilman Velpula.
Please cast your ballots.
Councilman Velpula.
Can you councilman Valpula? Can you vote?
Motion passes unanimous. Thank you for your service.