By: Diane Benjamin
Government wastes your money! Proof: An unused fire station and unused water tower. $$$$ – MILLIONS – $$$$ poof, up in smoke and nobody in jail.
Those are just huge examples of utter incompetence. Many many more exist on a small scale. Just this week Council and staff time were needed for a special meeting because the agenda wasn’t properly prepared for the Monday night meeting. How many instances of waste, fraud, and abuse exist that we never know about? How many city employees are miserable because they are trapped in the job and unable to stand up for taxpayers?
Today Steve Vogel wasted ink in the paper criticizing the Bloomington City Council for dumping the Sales Tax sharing plan with Normal. Stevie, Bloomington has enough reckless spending they can’t afford, why give up money to Normal to subsidize their reckless spending? I wonder if Vogel’s daughter is going to be Renner’s campaign manager for the 3rd time? Forget to disclose that Stevie?
Here’s an easy solution that won’t take hiring more Administration people to oversee sharing: Sign an agreement. Neither Bloomington or Normal gives any business a dime in tax rebates, incentives, free land, etc etc to move from one city to the other. Case closed! I’m sure attorneys can turn that into a 20 page document, otherwise the cost is minimal.
But WAIT! Your local leftists want to social engineer your streets. Monday the Council will hear about “Complete Streets”. Bike Blono (a tiny minority of citizens) is behind it: http://bikeblono.org/2016/06/why-a-complete-streets-policy-is-a-win-win-win-for-bloomington-normal/
Note: “fundamental shift”. Is that like “fundamental transformation”?
Scott Black is quoted in the bird-cage liner saying this policy will increase safety and decrease costs. He wants you out of your car because he doen’t want to pay to fix the roads. He (and Bike Blono) claim they can’t afford to, but that’s because roads aren’t glamorous. Black and others on the Council wants to be memorable – like Markowitz and the Coliseum. He probably wants the roof-top restaurant at the new taxpayer-funded downtown hotel named after him. After the City commits $$$-Millions-$$$, not much is left for the roads.
People who believe having bikes on major roads next to cars is safe are probably the same people who think taxpayer subsidies of $700,000 a MONTH for buses is good policy!
Citizens are constantly being forced to pay for government lunacy. Renner can read tea leaves or tarot cards because he knows the future. It multi-modal. Your future streets will allow for buses, bikers, walkers, and a few cars. The Feds have so declared and they hand out your money to make it happen.
We’ve seen this play out over and over. Gas prices intentionally skyrocketed as companies were not allowed to drill on federal land anymore. Remember when gas got close to $5 a gallon? A leftist wet dream! Then fracking on private land brought the price down. Our current leaders don’t want you free to drive, so they tried by making driving expensive. Now they will try abolishing roads.
Re-read the second Bike Blono paragraph. They want only two lanes packed full of cars, probably at 20 miles per hour. Last paragraph – safety over speed.
The only fix for stopping your government from telling you how to live is: Elect different people! Government has no authority to bankrupt citizens with higher taxes so they can control you.
Change the City Code. List what local government can spend money on. If it’s not on the list it isn’t even discussed, let alone funded. If government isn’t put in a sealed box, it’s free to pursue ideology at your expense.
If the guys below cared, maybe people would subscribe again. I wonder why this abandoned vehicle hasn’t been ticketed. The white duct tape is classy! More friends of government get a pass not available to you?
Most of Bike Blono are little less than organized thugs.
They are Renner’s thugs though.
Renner and Schmidt were on the steering committee for the Bike Master Plan.
Odd that they would add a motor fuel tax and then spend money to encourage/facilitate people to ride a bike, walk or take the bus. They had plans for that fuel tax money, that future revenue is spoken for. I wonder how they will react to the streets plan if we all start biking and walking with a result that half as much fuel tax is collected? They WILL react perhaps a bicycle license? A pedestrian tax?
These conflicting plans just don’t make sense. This is sheer incompetence. What business could be survive that sold you a product but then did everything it could to encourage you not to buy it?
🙂 🙂 🙂
“Governments the world over require that people pass tests before allowing them to drive cars because driving a car is an inherently dangerous activity to those around you. Every time anyone gets behind the wheel, we ask that they remember this fact and treat driving with the vigilance and attentiveness that it deserves.” –Michael Gorman, Bike BloNo
http://bikeblono.org/2016/06/bike-blono-asks-for-retrial/
Would be nice of cyclists were required to take the Bicycle Rules of the Road test and be licensed before they are allowed to ride on the street. Cyclists also need to be attentive to others on the road and the fact they are difficult to see. A photo accompanying the article in the Pantagraph had Mr. Gorman riding with a friend, two abreast, on Front Street–a violation of the Illinois Bicycle Rules of the Road. An accident waiting to happen. He should know better.
Now, you tell me how a two lane street in Bloomington will accommodate pedestrians, cars, buses and bikes without causing serious safety issues. What about all the money being spent on Constitution Trail? Will the East side residents bike to downtown? Where are the bus routes to the East side developments?
Streets are made for motorized vehicles, plain and simple. End of story. Period. Done.
Maybe our role models in city council should ride their bikes to work, or shopping! Except I’d have to vomit if I saw Scott or Tari in those disgusting biker shorts! Yuck!
BTW… yesterday I saw a new commercial van with City of BLM logo on it. Wonder how much of our tax $ was wasted on those?
WOW! And I always thought a Big ole John Deere was the most EXPENSIVE vehicle on the road. Lets ALL get one and share the streets with cars, bikes and pedestrians, since the Blono people ride north out of town all the time and run the stop signs on the way to Lake Bloomington, MAYBE they can LEARN to share the road with the tractors that RAISE their Corn Flakes! Fair enough! I don’t see WHY bicycle riders need lanes in town, other then to be pains in the pygidium about it! I would MUCH RATHER ride in the country (on smooth roads) then on city streets-wouldn’t YOU???
Going to be hard to stop the Complete Street Policy train. AARP, insurance companies, medical professionals are behind the national initiative. I don’t support converting the current streets to move to this policy since roads are already in bad shape as it is, I don’t think city would improve on its ability to have well-maintained streets. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some sections over the years that will be converted.
One thing I have noticed is there has not been a lot of mention of problems with complete steet policy. I searched in Google and Yahoo and found nothing. There are cities that have granted exceptions for areas of heavy commercial shipping and transportation.
Mr X
I did some of the same. Most mention on the internet is on .gov or .org websites that are pro complete streets or have an interest in their success.
I did find the following article that discusses the results of a 6 month trial done to study the effects of a complete streets program. The results were unremarkable (traffic was no worse or better, no real safety issues) It is flawed as it only involves one street that had been reduced to one lane in each direction and does not appear to take into account the voluntary rerouting of motorists wishing to avoid delays. It only mentioned that traffic volume was down 14%.
http://www.morganhilltimes.com/news/report-complete-streets-trial-shows-mixed-results-at-halfway-point/article_3d5de522-fdbf-11e4-af99-0bb0f0ca1204.html?mode=jqm
The intention of this initiative to to make your experience in an automobile more frustrating so that people abandon their autos. Think the City of NY, Chicago, etc., it’s just not worth it when traffic is continuously congested and space as well becomes too expensive or impossible to find a space to park your car. Although it’ll be a long time before that is the case in B-N, this is just a part of the begining.
The first big change (as the city has suggested in the past) will be Main/Center Street reduced from 4 or 3 lanes to 3 or 2 lanes. Smooth flowing traffic for 1000’s of automobiles will be sacrificed for 1 or 2 selfish bicylists. In addition on the rainy days, snow, ice, windy as heck, very hot, very cold days when bicyclists are nowhere to be found, automobile traffic will still be slowed down due to the newly striped lines for selfish bicyclists that refuse to share the roads as they’ve always been able to do.
As above Troy noted that even in a flawed study traffic count was down 14% which (was noted as unremarkable) in reality IS SIGNIFICANT for all business owners on any street that would experience this.
If you want to know more about what bad ideas are in store for your future see the United Nations Agenda 21. Coraling and controling you, is their utopia.
Mudd, Surveys of local businesses and citizens were done at the beginning and midpoint of this study (It runs until July 2018). The citizens approval dropped from 50% to 39% (which if history holds true wouldn’t matter to our council’s decision making processs) but local business approval went up from 50% to 56%. No analysis was given for these changes. It also did not specify if those businesses were along the route just that they were downtown. Perhaps the 14% decline in traffic rerouted past the 6% increase in business approval.
Interesting to me here is the level of citizen and business involvement and the lengthy study being undertaken. I doubt our city council will ask anyone but the local bike clubs and proceed without further study of their own. Though a Springfield or Chicago consulting firm will undoubtably be hired to confirm the social and economic benefits of complete streets for “our” community.
NOTE- the study also indicated a 116% increase in bicycle traffic from 43 riders to 93 riders per day. An entire lane of traffic for 93 individuals to use over a 24 hour period. If that rate of increase were to remain steady increasing 116% every six months the economics might work out. I believe the studies length is to help determine if that pans out.
Bicyclists – I’m sick and tired of these selfish Blo-No people that want, want, want. They don’t pay any road taxes, they don’t follow the rules of the road, they constantly run stop signs everywhere, they don’t carry insurance for being on the road, they don’t have license numbers so we can report them for their disrespect of the law. Many of the Blo-No riders have attitudes as though the road belongs to (only) them. They are a minuscule user of the road but want everyone else in cars to suffer because of their selfish spoiled brat indifference.
Tell the people who rely on technicians to fix your appliances, your plumbing and your electricity that they need to stop using vehicles ! I live in Heyworth. Do you seriously think I’m going to ride a bike to Blono to get my groceries?
The more bike paths they build the more companies leave Bloomington-Normal. They promised the exact opposite.
Just listened to an interview on WGLT by a representative of that bike organization (I refuse to call them by their name, anything with Blono in it just sounds ridiculous!), those people are nuts…
and so are the people who believe them!
@ Troy – I skimmed the link you posted and I can attest that it is very similar to many such studies that resort to vague analogies of which is part of the plan to deceitfully avoid the reality of anything negative. Due to some experiences in such matters, I seriously question where you get the “Interesting to me here is the level of citizen and business involvement and the lengthy study being undertaken.” as there was little info noting any definition of that claim. Usually these studies favor the so called stakeholders (interested parties) on board rather than the majority business owners affected. Again I would suggest the study of Agenda 21 to see what the contollers from the United Nations have in store for freedom loving citizens of the worlds sovereign countries.
I’m wondering why a minute of no cars is bad, but most of the day with no bikes in the bike lane is good!
In my opinion, Agenda 21 is a dog whistle. It’s a benign document with no legal binding whatsoever. We have no obligation to follow it. Yet somehow people are convinced it is a grand conspiracy to enslave the human race. It’s OK to not like something, but leveling conspiracy theories is nothing more than artistic license and interrupts the ability to govern. Humans are predisposed to fear. It’s what helps us to stay atop of the food chain. But if you continually believe that a Saber-Toothed Tiger will eat you if you venture outside your cave despite evidence to the contrary, you won’t be able to eat or dispose of rubbish. Plus you may miss out on the creation of fire.
Look at uptown and the student housing along Main Street. It’s right out of agenda 21.
You are correct it is non binding. However, it was and is being carried out through executive orders which ARE LEGALLY binding. If it is actually happening it is not a conspiracy. Agenda 21 is the bible of sustainable development and is the foundation for every United Nations climate conference since 1992 and sustainability in the United States. At this point I think it is important to know the historical significance of Agenda 21 and its relationship to what is happening now. However, I do agree many people take it too far with other conspiracy theories they attach to it. But It is a historical fact Agenda 21 was signed by President Bush in person at Rio in 1992 and its principles directed into all agencies of the federal government by President Clinton one year later through executive order on the one year anniversary of President Bush signing the UN document. That is fact, not conspiracy. The conspiracy would be to deny these facts and pretend it never happened.