Caterpillar Inc. is fixing up its parking deck. Good for them. For them. It’s their deck, they are responsible for it. In a totally pure free-market, free-enterprise system they ought to be responsible for those costs. One of those costs, one assumes, would be to find a place for its workers to park.
After all, there [...]

I’m sitting here in the late evening without access to the data to look this up. But it sounds to me like Randy Oliver told the fine folks in Durham, N.C. that the City of Peoria owns (or could one day own) a bunch of Caterpillar stock. The post is from a Durham blogger who [...]

From the Journal Star:
Against a backdrop of unrest in Tibet and protests accompanying the worldwide tour of the Beijing Olympic torch - two issues that have placed China in an unflattering global spotlight this week - the Chinese Ambassador to the United States, Zhou Wenzhong, is visiting Peoria Friday.
But unless you are an employee of [...]

For those who were wondering, I’ve moved this week’s PeoriaPunditRadio show to this Tuesday. The scheduled topic is the situation in Tibet, plus local news and information, plus two “Fibber McGee and Molly” episodes.
The show can be heard here. Callers are welcome at (347) 326-9459.
As a matter of fact, it looks like I’ll be working [...]

From the Journal Star:
A plan to set aside $12 million in state funding for the proposed Peoria Riverfront Museum took another step forward Thursday, when the House of Representatives approved it.
The vote was 80-23.
Suddenly, that deliberately deceptive poll conducted by the county makes sense. You know the one that claimed a majority of respondents favored [...]

C.J. Summers took a look at the figures, and it turns out that the pro-museum push poll conducted by the County of Peoria actually found that at no time, under no circumstance mentioned, do voters support any kind of tax increase to pay for the regional museum that Caterpillar and other movers and shakers want [...]

Apparently, we are supposed to read this article and come away with the conclusion that earmarks — which is the government and media’s new work for “pork barrel spending” — are good. Without earmarks, we might now have wonderful things that the uber-museum in downtown Peoria
The reality, however, is that anyone who’s been paying attention [...]

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 [...]

Yeah, those Caterpillar workers sure do have it made, don’t they?
My best wishes to the the injured, their family and their friends.

The downtown museum backers asked the Peoria County Board to give them $24 million. That’s $24 million in taxpayer dollars. They can’t talk ordinary donors to cough it up voluntarily, so they want every single taxpayer in the county to pay up involuntarily. Seriously.
If the board says “no,” that might very well mean the end [...]

Here’s some post Blogger Bash news, via the Journal Star. The snarky commentary is my own:

The council decided to NOT shoot its entire wad of available cash on the South Side and will instead look at the policies they use to determine who gets sidewalk funding. The gist of it, from what I gather from [...]

At the request of intrepid newsie/journalism teacher Jonathan Ahl, I pretended to hold a press conference for his weekly news writing class. Some thoughts and comments for the students:

I enjoyed my brief visit. The format didn’t allow for much discussion before or after, but I enjoyed the class nevertheless. It took me back to the [...]

Today’s Peoria Journal Star article on the death of efforts to attach a hotel to the Peoria Civic Center saved the best, most telling paragraph for last.
Civic Center Authority Chairwoman Rebekah Bourland was discussing the lack of support for a proposed Hilton Garden Inn at Monroe Avenue and Kumpf Boulevard, the latest scheme in a [...]

The Peoria County Board voted yesterday to secure half of the $6 million loan Firefly Energy (co-owned by Caterpillar) needs to expand. The City of Peoria secured the other half (and since the city comprised half the county population) city residents are essentially funding three quarters of the project). The bank giving them the [...]

In today’s Journal Star, reporters Jennifer Davis and Teri Bibo tried to pin down rumors that the “Amazasploraportaseum on the Square” will have to be downsized because nobody in their right mind wants to donate money to this colossal boondoggle.
What the reporters got was an endless parade of denial and double talk, all of which [...]