By: Diane Benjamin
Ever feel like government is conspiring behind your back to force their agenda on you?
They are!
Julie Hile is a progressive. She knows how you should live your life, your opinions are immaterial. All progressives want to reshape daily life to whatever their vision is. Hile has a long history of pushing her world view on everybody else. Currently she is doing it from the Connect Transit Board, appointed by another progressive – Chris Koos. What happened to the consultant CT hired? Poof – disappeared.
Julie Hile is behind another initiative you know nothing about. This time she is using the McLean County Regional Planning Commission, another organization you know little about unless you’ve been a long time reader.
The MCRPC gets paid by Bloomington, Normal, and McLean County to create plans. Years ago they were a nice conservative operation. Today they want to force changes on you and of course make you pay for it. Think bike trails, bike lanes, and Smart Cities just to start..
What’s Hile up to this time?
At the February 5, 2020 meeting of the Regional Planning Commission her group gave a presentation on the Vision Zero Action Plan. PDF page 2: https://mcplan.org/upload/files/Document%20Center/Minutes/Commission/2020/Commission%20Meeting%20-%20February%205%202020.pdf
If you read the minutes of that meeting the plan is to address pedestrian deaths and cell phone usage while driving. They want to promote public education. Then you will see this:
… national program based on the ideas that zero traffic fatalities is an achievable goal, that crashes are largely preventable, and there are systemic and public education strategies to achieve this goal.
The first problem is “national”. We are not the same as Portland, Seattle, or Chicago – all cities signed up to implement the plan. See a map here – most are in California: https://visionzeronetwork.org/resources/vision-zero-cities/
Vision Zero website: https://visionzeronetwork.org/about/what-is-vision-zero/
What does it take to achieve ZERO traffic deaths and serious injuries?
The website is littered with words like: “fundamentally” and “equity”.
Of course a grant is involved with funding this Hile Group initiative. The minutes don’t say from where.
It should be a conflict of interest for the Hile Group to be involved in any transportation project since Julie Hile is on the Connect Transit Board. Think riding a bus won’t be part of the plan?
The minutes and website don’t have specifics of the plan. Those will be a surprise.
Eventually a public survey will appear that few will answer. Remember “Bring It On Bloomington”? Previously a bike survey was conducted but only Bike Blono knew about it. That plan of course got overwhelming support. This is how the “public ” is engaged.
By FOIA both Bloomington and Connect Transit claim they haven’t made any payments to Julie Hile or Hile Group in the last 3 years. Normal paid Hile Group:
I also FOIA’d McLean County and the McLean County Regional Planning Commission. Even though this bill is to the MCRPC, it was paid by McLean County. They are separate entities, the County needs to explain why they paid the bill:
The McLean County Regional Planning Commission has NOT answered my FOIA.
Hile is using a group called Firebrand to structure how to con you into believing “if it saves one life . . .”
See their website: https://firebrand.coop/
Julie Hile wants to fundamentally transform transportation. Of course that means you have to be talked into surrendering freedom and liberty. That is why “EQUITY” is mentioned. Hile plans to eliminate the risk of being alive.
Are You Ready to Submit?
If not, quit voting for anyone who uses the word “progress“. That means their agenda, not yours.
The MCRPC Board is appointed by various units of government – many are other progressives: https://mcplan.org/about-mcrpc/who-we-are/the-commission
From the minutes – people present at the February meeting:
Hile’s husband is on Normal’s planning board too. You would think there would be an ethical problem in Normal. However after watching the other corrupt dealings overseen by Reece and Koos I am not surprised. Hile was appointed to the Connect board by the very people who pay her company for transportation services.
Normal government becomes a bigger joke the deeper you look.
A bit off topic but shows lack of ethics. Pam’s husband is an owner of MUELLER, REECE & HINCH, LLC Law. This firm also does legal work for Normal. If nepotism is allowed at the top level why would ethics anywhere else be a concern?
Ethics and Normal together? Try speaking at a Council meeting.
The MCRPC stopped being a sensible entity when Joel Warner left.
Since then it has been an “agenda machine”..
Started by Normal’s new technology director with no background in technology
Haha! I remember when she was “leading” MCRPC. The local rag did a story about her vision and planning to prepare the community for a world with autonomous vehicles. I remember thinking, wow…they’re preparing for a world with autonomous vehicles yet have no solution (or acknowledgment) for the disruption of higher education or larger employers (ahem, Big Red) being disrupted and losing market share to innovative technology companies. This local economy has been running on borrowed time…and it has nothing to do with COVID-19. COVID-19 merely exposed it.
Vision zero talks about self driving cars too. If they need different infrastructure why do it and who is going to pay for it?
So it’s für Ihre Sicherheit (for your own good) then?
Yes, the Nazis used für Ihre Sicherheit a lot as they rounded up people for the extermination camps.
Sorry Julie Hile, but we will not submit and we will definitely not go quietly to wherever you and your ilk want us to go.
What is the suspicious sounding Hile group? Anything to do with Hitler?
Julie Hile is one of the biggest frauds there is. The company website has always been nothing but a bunch of BS laced with million dollar corporate lingo that doesn’t say a thing about anything. I like how it never mentions her qualifications or academic background to do any type of consulting work. All she basically does is steal items and ideas from other agencies and corporations and takes forever to put them in a useless report and charges the client top dollar for stuff she has taken from other websites or reports. She makes good money by basically stealing from taxpayers whether it is local or elsewhere. Probably pulled the same trick out east before people wised up to her. Another out-of-town carpetbagger in a long line of them. As an aside, Mercy Davison has been showing up for MCRPC meetings for years, although she is heavily involved in being Koos’ go-between for many of the Town’s green initiative projects.
Hile has a degree in English. Her experience in transportation is as an editor of a heavy rail operating manual. So now she presents herself as an expert and everyone believes her misrepresentation.
Looks like people don’t want public transportation anymore: https://www.autoweek.com/news/industry-news/a32463337/study-traffic-will-be-worse-after-coronavirus/?fbclid=IwAR08s9DY4qPZhkHDlJjW84QqczYcMZBWYWzmowkcqpNl4eI0-CS-M964hUI
https://www.linkedin.com/in/julie-hile-0a690236/
This zero fatality nonsense has been goin on for ten years. I argued against it from the beginning because it is an unreasonable goal and people ignore reasonable goals. All the touchy feely people loved it at the time though and today we still have it. In a way it’s a microcosm of the Covid-19 panic. People can’t look past the fact that while we might prefer nobody died from anything, we must look beyond that and be reasonable.
I’m sure we could bring about zero traffic fatalities through a shelter in place order in which JB locks us in our homes. Wake up people. There’s more to the shelter in place order than public health. Lots more.
Julie Vile is a Koos proxy. She’s an outside “expert” brought in to prepare written research/justification that supports the predetermined outcomes planned by Koos and Reece. Her answer to everything is bigger and more intrusive government, and government-determined economic outcomes. Just supply the question and that’s her answer. The name of this project seems appropriate for the leadership in Normal: “Vision Zero.” The actual project itself might be a backdoor to making Uptown pedestrian plazas only, while adding more bike lanes and large buses that no one uses.
We certainly have a lot of Zero Vision going on in the Koos Cabal and a lot of just silly wasteful focus (and spending) on making Democratic Socialist Elites’ day dreams come true.
It really at this point doesn’t matter what the Koos Clowns do. It is already too late for Normal. The die has been cast. The perfect storm has arrived. When they least expected and were totally unprepared for, the Chinese Communist Party virus shutdown happened.
Normal’s economy has been permanently damaged. Small businesses are dead or dying. ISU and HCC will never be the same. Their ace-in-the-hole, Rivian appears to be AWOL or just gone for good?
Who is going to invest in the declining economy of Normal after this?
Who would want to?