As a railfan, it’s exciting to see trains running on tracks that get used on a less-than-daily basis. When I worked at Caterpillar’s Morton facility, I would frequently see a Toledo, Peoria & Western Railway train come into town to service customers. Since I moved to a new position at Peoria in September 2005, I hadn’t seen […]

Eyebrows McGree has had a case or two of private garbage dumping. She seems slightly annoyed.
I’ve been meaning to write about this for quite some time. My thrice-weekly sojourns to Pekin, my daily trip into Peoria, and my weekly jaunt to Bloomington take me through plenty of rural territory. There is a lot of garbage […]

I ate lunch with Peoria attorney and would-be Peoria County State’s Attorney Darin LaHood the other day. We met for lunch at Kelleher’s. He had the turkey club, I had the corned beef sandwich. I guess I’m more in touch with my Irish side than he is, especially since he’s of Lebanese ancestry.
(FULL DISCLOSURE: Lunch […]

The Subway Conductor took his kids to the children’s museum in Bloomington/Normal and came away convinced Peoria needs a children’s museum:
Put it downtown. Get some old warehouse, gut the place and make it all gritty on the outside and really swank and cool on the inside. Divvy it up so there are areas for all […]

I am frightened.
I’ve been reading today’s editorial on TIFs and enterprise zones, and I can’t find anything to really snicker at, especially since they came clean on having benefited from one, thus giving critics one less thing to sneer at.
Oh, I would have said ‘no’ to the $6 million Firefly Energy loan guarantee simply on […]

I was going to say pretty much what Scott O’Brien says about local media’s excessive coverage of the looming smoking ban:
Give us a break. Instead of continuing to over-cover this story, why don’t these media outlets instead focus on more important local stories.
I mean, let’s take a look at the current city government issues. Apparently […]

Kinight in Dragonland has been a bit lazy of late and not living up to his rep as the unofficial “Pekin Pundit.” He broke out of his funk with a good post giving hell to a certain member of the District 108 School Board. No, not Jim Mangan (who actually served on a different school […]

I don’t always agree with Peggy Noonan, but I found her opinions about the upcoming Iowa caucus pretty dead-on with mine (except she was a little nicer to Hillary than I would have been).

I found this pretty funny:

A Requiem
Rest in Peace

So, I started posting stuff on Bill’s blog a year ago. It was in direct response to the posts of someone else who was posting…well, we know and I don’t want to rehash that. I eventually was “fired” by Bill for “quitting” his blog for reasons I think we (almost) all remember. Shortly thereafter, those […]

WCBU reported today that Peoria City Manager Randy Oliver was a finalist for the city manager’s job in McKinney, TX. As Jonathan Ahl reported on his blog, this was first reported in a Texas newspaper. The Oliver family denies he’s looking, and Ahl reports that Oliver future in Peoria is not certain, as his annual […]

Links via the Journal Star:

Phil Luciano rightfully criticizes East Peoria Fire Chief Mike Vaughn for abdicating responsibility for keeping the public informed about the fire at Caterpillar’s KK building that send three people to the hospital. My two cents: It is absolutely untrue that the public officials have chips implanted in their brains that require […]

Sometime overnight, the Blog Peoria Project exceeded bandwidth, and all member sites were inaccessible. It seems the warnings from my hosting company were being blocked by Yahoo’s spam filter. An email solved the problem and the sites are back up.
My apologies for the inconvenience.