I hope everyone enjoyed the Peoria City Council meeting today. It was both short, AND boring.  Here are the bullet items:

The council punted on what was to be the big story, a new attempt to pass an ordinance mirroring the state law banning smoking inside commercial establishments. The goal is supposedly to “capture” 100 percent [...]

Here are links to whet your appetite for tomorrow’s Journal Star:

But there’s not going to be any cameras: No doubt Aaron Schock is frustrated that he won’t be able to attend Wednesday’s 18th District candidate debate on foreign policy issues. Instead, he’ll be in Springfield, pretending that he has the slightest role to play in [...]

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 [...]

One topic discussed at the blogger bash was the proposed city business license. For a couple of reasons I am opposed.
First, this solution is based on the problem that a single scofflaw taxpayer, the former Wendy’s franchisee, went belly up without paying their taxes to the city for many many months. Unfortunately, this [...]

Today’s Word on the Street column is really fun, as it leads with Peoria School District 150 officials whining and carping that the City of Peoria isn’t playing nice with them over the proposed Warehouse District tax increment financing district. As someone who fought like Hell to get the school disterict to work and play [...]

Could the headline above the Journal Star’s brief and mostly one-sided article on the effort to get the Peoria Civic Center added to the Warehouse District TIF possibly sound any more enthusiastic about the idea? The headline: “Hotel hopes remain alive.”
Geeze. It sounds like some kid has fallen down a well and everyone’s praying for [...]

I don’t have a lot of time to post today, I here are some bullet points from last night’s Peoria City Council meeting:
1. The East Bluff must feel like a red-headed step child. One week, they are told that their neighborhood will be the first to be installed with the city’s spiffy new wireless “mess” [...]

Here’s three more very relevant paragraphs from the Reason magazine article about the futility of tax increment financing districts:
Local officials usually do not consider how much growth might occur without a TIF. In 2002 the Neighborhood Capital Budget Group (NCBG), a coalition of 200 Chicago organizations that studies local public investment, looked at 36 of [...]

It would seem that all the questions have been answered. Methodist Medical Center wants to build a facility similar to the one a Pensylvania group wants to build on a long-vacant four-acre lot in the Southtown TIF district. It’s not likely the state is going to approve two such facilities in the same city.
If Methodist [...]

The president will take a break from his vacation and visit Aurora, where he will sign the federal transportation bill. He’ll sign the thing at a Caterpillar factory. The company thinks it’s going to make a bundle from all the equipment contractors are going to buy.
Most of the big Illinois projects seem worthy. Although it [...]