Peoria Station

PEORIA – The City of Peoria is planning to re-zone Growth Cell Two from “Light Industrial” to something else. You’ll recall that trail proponents for several years dangled rail-spurred industrial development  there like a carrot to the Peoria City Council to entice their support in converting the city-owned Kellar Branch into a recreational trail. Let’s Review:

Peoria Journal Star in May 27, 2000 -

City officials met with Union Pacific Railroad officials in Omaha recently, [then-Peoria City Public Works Director] Steve Van Winkle said. The Union Pacific “will help market” Growth Cell 2, he said. “It was a very positive meeting.”

Peoria Journal Star Editorial June 4, 2000 - 

[Peoria Railroad Commission] opposition would be understandable if Peoria, Peoria Heights and the Peoria Park District were talking about ending the rail service the commission is supposed to protect. They are not. They are in fact talking about a new line that would provide service to the three small businesses in Pioneer Park that presently pay for it, with the added benefit of reaching the industrial growth cell. No less a figure than [former Peoria mayor Richard] Carver, who wants to ensure continued rail service to the lumber company his employees are buying from him, is working to make that happen.

Peoria Journal Star August 16, 2000 -

Van Winkle and city officials recently have tried to highlight the plan’s potential to help develop Peoria’s Growth Cell Two, 700 acres earmarked for industry.

Peoria Journal Star Editorial August 17, 2000 -

Most of the talk Tuesday focused not on the trail’s potential to make Peoria a better place to live and visit, but on the new rail line’s potential to make the city money. State Rep. David Leitch, who secured $875,000 from the state to pay for the spur, said there is no area in downstate Illinois with as much development potential as this part of Peoria. Economic Development Director David Dobson went a step further and suggested it might be the biggest such parcel in the nation.

Fast forward to Wednesday’s Peoria Journal Star and we learn that this grand idea has been abandoned:

Within Growth Cell 2, encompassing Wal-Mart Supercenter and Menards on Allen Road, the city wants to focus on attracting technology companies and organizations specializing in sustainable “green” development.

Planning & Growth Management Director Pat Landes said her department will devise a new zoning classification for the area that is bounded by Illinois Route 6 to the north and west and Allen Road to the east.

Landes said the appeal of attracting new technology and sustainable development to that area is the cell’s proximity to Route 6 and because of a “large mass of ground” that hasn’t been developed.

“It’s not like anything else in the city,” she said.

So what happened? It’s simple: such perfuming of Growth Cell Two was a ruse to get funding for an ill-advised 1,800-ft connection between an existing 1.9-mile industrial spur from Union Pacific’s mainline west of town and Kellar Branch trackage at Pioneer Industrial Park, theoretically allowing for the abandonment of most of the Kellar Branch, and thus freeing up the right-of-way for extension of the Rock Island Trail to downtown Peoria. As soon as the tracks could be pulled up and hikers and bikers could begin using the asphalt path, Growth Cell Two could be filled with houses, as far as the City was concerned.

The titles alone of three Journal Star editorials pretty much revealed trail proponents’ true agenda. These were: “New rail spur helps make case for bike trail” (August 17, 2000), “Paying for rail spur small investment to secure trail” (September 26, 2004) and “Put city money into building rail spur for bike trail” (October 5, 2004). In other words, “building a rail spur is just a way to get what we really want – a trail.”

The irony in all of this is that city officials should have listened to their own propaganda because had they taken rail-spurred industrial development of Growth Cell Two seriously and installed the necessary infrastructure to make it “shovel ready,” north side residents might  have been able to ride their bicycles to downtown Peoria on a dedicated trail well before 2009. New rail-served industry in that area would have provided sufficient volume to ensure economies of scale and thus lower per car rates charged by Union Pacific, even the short distance between East Peoria and Pioneer Jct. Thus, the Surface Transportation Board would have had no reason to reopen the Cities’ Adverse Abandonment Petition as they did in January 2007, nor would Carver Lumber been harmed by exhorbitant rail freight rates, and slower service. And it isn’t as if someone didn’t tell them this. Former Peoria mayor Richard Carver was probably the only one serious when in February 2000 he told city officials that:

In my opinion, there’s got to be a world-class attention to new industrial development.

He hadn’t changed his position when he told the council in October 2002:

You have one of the largest sites in the Midwest that is rail and interstate-level highway served…this is a great opportunity.

But city officials saw a dedicated trail network as far more rewarding than attracting good-paying jobs, and against better advice, spent more than $2 million constructing just 1,800 feet of new track to pretend that rail service  to Pioneer Industrial Park wasn’t being ended, and an estimated tens of thousands in legal fees to replace Pioneer Industrial Railway as operator. Today, Pioneer Industrial Railway and the City’s replacement carrier, Central Illinois Railroad, both hold operating authority. Promised attraction of new business along the Kellar Branch was conditioned on City cooperation, which has been nonexistent.

It isn’t like Peoria couldn’t have attracted industrial development during the past decade. Journal Star Business Writer Paul Gordon mentioned in a November 21, 2000 column that a manufacturing firm had taken interest in Growth Cell Two and needed rail service. Perhaps serious efforts to promote Growth Cell Two would have enticed Amerhart  Ltd. to relocate to a new facility in Peoria rather than move to Pekin, which it did in 2006.

Peoria officials have shifted their industrial development focus to the southside, and now expect purely non-industrial commercial, residential and retail-type development on the northwest side. But it is obvious that city officials used an industrialized Growth Cell Two as an enticement to win an expanded recreational trail network. When that didn’t work, they abandoned the idea. If they were serious when they began building support for it more than a decade ago, it would have come to fruition with or without a Rock Island Trail extension.

- David P. Jordan