I used to work at the Canton Daily Ledger. It’s owned by GateHouse Media now, but then it was owned by Conrad Black’s American Publishing Company. It’s hard to believe, but those people were even scummier than GateHouse. Black is now serving time for all sorts of financial crime related to his ownership of the Chicago SunTimes. One of my beats in Canton was the Illinois River Correctional Center. It wasn’t much for generating copy. Prison being what it is, the dirt was pretty well hidden. And American Publishing being what it was, no one there really gave a rat’s ass about uncovering  dirt anyway. Photos of mushroom hunters? THAT we gave a damn about.

Most the prison coverage focused on how much the business community just LOVED the money the joint dumped into the local economy, or at least into the economy of the movers-and-shakers. In this sense, Canton is a lot like Peoria.

We did stories about how the prison’s culinary education program catered local events. We did stories about how the prison was a nice, safe place. But every time I looked at one of these guys, I got the impression he’d like to gut me with a butter knife and escape in my car.

I got to tour the the facility where prisoners were taking inbound customer support calls. Seriously. People were calling to report that their consumer products were not up to snuff and convicts were collecting their personal information.

I met my first AIDS patient, an inmate who went by the nickname “Full Blown.” I also read all the mail from inmates, most of which were claims that they had been falsely convicted. No doubt some of them were, but I didn’t have the time to write stories about their claims. I mean, who would write about the Santa Jo’s Workshop if I was out gallivanting around trying to find out why the cops were conspiring against a three-time loser.

My point is this: There are stories to write about prisons. But they don’t put prisons in places that are served by newspapers that have a lot of resources to cover them. And honestly, I doubt there would there be lot of inclination to do so if there were.

It’s hard work, especially in an environment in which the media is just handed a lot of its news by the government agencies it covers.

Reporters from Peoria-area media can go down to the police station and look through reports about everything from dog barking reports to murders. I’m not aware of any reporter who goes out to the Canton prison on a daily basis to see which inmate got busted and tossed into solitary.

When guards at the prison hold press conferences and say things like they said at last week’s protest, it prompted Dick Heitz, a lieutenant and president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3585 to make states. He said that guards in a tower, for the first time, fired a shot to break up a fight, and that ammunition was missing and that inmates were passing notes threatening to kill guards.

Pardon me, but I think shots fired at the prison is news. I think live ammunition in the hands of prisoners just MIGHT be news. But I didn’t see this news in the Journal Star or the Canton Daily Ledger until this story.

Were Heitz not president of his union and speaking out about an issue of concern to his members, we might never have known these things. That’s not a healthy situation, folks. More transparency is called for.

So if there are any insider blogs out there dealing with the Illinois River Correctional Center, let me know. If there is anyone who wants to START one, let me know.

PJS editorial board still a source of unintentional humor

The award-winning (snicker) editorial board of the Peoria Journal Star included this paragraph in its recent editorial about the City of Peoria’s budget problems:

“As a result, a fair number of locals are venting, understandably, though some of them paint either-or scenarios that do not exist. Indeed, the choice is not a recreational trail vs. police officers, or a museum vs. firefighters. The vast majority of the funding for those quality-of-life projects comes out of dedicated revenue streams controlled by other local governments – the park district and county, respectively, with the help of grants. Those dollars couldn’t be used to put more badges on the streets even if the council wanted to. Like them or hate them, those projects — one of them initiated by a successful citizen referendum — are not what created this operating deficit.”

First, I’m not aware of anyone — not me, not fellow Peoria blogger C.J. Summers — who is arguing that the money being collected to pay for the museum or the trail can be diverted to police of firefighters. Give us some credit.

No, what we are arguing is that we are living in an economy in which the city is reducing the number of firefighters and police officers, and in which sidewalks and streets go un-repaired, and in which some neighborhoods do not have sidewalks and are flooded into un-usability in any heavy rain.

Considering this, it is the height of stupidity to increase the tax burden on citizens for these items deemed “quality of life issues” for people fortunate enough to not live in high crime areas, and whose homes are not at the highest risk or arson or electrical fire because they are built with modern materials and to meet modern fire codes.

People who live in older parts of town often must walk more than a mile to a decent grocery store if they don’t have a car. Tell THESE people that a recreational trail waaaaay out in North Peoria is going to increase the quality of their lives.

Seriously. Stop one of these people you see shuffling along carrying grocery bags on a cold windy day and ask them how glad they are they will have a place to go for a walk.

I guess these people don’t matter. You don’t see many of these people attending cocktail parties at the Lariat Club whispering into the ears of city council members.

Second, doesn’t the total tax burden placed on residents play a role in the economy, regardless of what revenue stream the collected tax revenue is placed? When residents feel they are overtaxed, the less support they have for more taxes. You would think with so many nominally anti-tax Republicans on the council, the concept of low taxes stimulating the economy should be somewhat familiar to them.

If we weren’t paying extra sales taxes to support that money pit of a civic center (which is one of the dedicated revenue streams the PJS mentioned) and if we weren’t paying additional sales taxes for the museum (yet ANOTHER precious dedicated revenue stream), the working class people who spend most of their paychecks on food, rent and utilities might be able to spend more on themselves, generating some sales taxes that MIGHT go toward essential services.

Or maybe, just maybe, if we weren’t diverting potential tax revenue AWAY from essential city services and into these dedicated revenue streams, we might not have such an operating deficit.

Second, we have Peoria’s one and only newspaper sputtering indignantly about how taxes spent on museums and recreational trails and hotels and museums has NOTHING to do with a lack of revenue for essential services. The writer of this editorial is either being stupid, or deliberately disingenuous in an attempt to mislead readers into not opposing projects the editorial board (and their bosses) support.

This really isn’t an editorial about the city budget. The newspaper is just pimping for the museum and the trail again.

Will someone buy a map for the editors of the “Peoria” Journal Star?

Long-time residents of Peoria residents will spot the big blunder in this rather routine crime story.

“A 19-year-old man told police he was walking home after being dropped off by a bus at the intersection of Sheridan Road and Frye Avenue about 8:30 p.m. when he noticed a man and woman walking up quickly behind him in the 600 block of Frye Avenue.”

OK, everybody all at once now: THERE IS NO INTERSECTION OF SHERIDAN ROAD AND FRYE AVENUE. Nada. Doesn’t exist. The article might as well have said he was dropped off at the intersection of Never-Never-Land Road and Fantasy Island Parkway. It would have been just as inaccurate, but it at least would have had a certain element of whimsy.

East Frye Avenue starts at the top of Abington Street Hill where it becomes Frye Avenue (right before it hits Prospect Road) and then runs all the way to North Maryland Avenue, where the new Glen Oak School replacement is under construction. It starts up again at North Wisconsin Avenue and runs to North Knoxville where it ends.

There is NO Frye Avenue west of North Knoxville. In fact, if there was, it would be called WEST Frye Avenue.

Had the reporter bothered to find out if it was East Frye or West Frye, they might have figured it out.That’s provided there’s anyone left at the paper who was born here or has lived here long enough to know that street names of east/west streets that are west of North Knoxville include the directional designation of west, while east is used for those that are — wait for it — east of North Knoxville.

I’m guessing that the person who wrote this flawed story doesn’t live in Peoria and just regurgitated information from a police report, probably written by someone who doesn’t live in Peoria either.

Regardless, it’s the reporter’s fault. And the fault of the editor who was supposed to fact-check it. When you write up a crime story based on police incident reports, you have GOT to be suspicious of the information they write down.

Peoria is the biggest and most important community it covers. The people who report in Peoria have got to have a better working knowledge of neighbors in Peoria than this story demonstrates.

Observation: I was watching something on the History Channel with my mother and it says a “parkway” is any long road that travels through a park. I’m trying to recall even a sliver of a park that’s adjacent to Pioneer Parkway.

Bill Dennis is the creator of Peoria Pundit and The Blog Peoria Project, and is co-owner of Tell Peoria Online Media. Contact him at peoriapundit@gmail.com