Peoria Sales Tax Down - Mayor Pleads For Spenders to Spend in Peoria

Sales tax collections are down in the City of Peoria and Peoria County. Surely this is explainable as even I explained why this would happen in several blogs over the the past few years. Our former County Administrator, now City Manager, should also well know the reasons why. East Peoria is where the business expansion is taking place, not Peoria. When the ill-fated museum was being touted by the elite and the dreamers; two Bradley economic professors predicted that the the museum alone would bring in $16,000,000.00 in new business every year and with the money, more taxes. The "knowing" ones realized that predictions from those who live in "ivory towers" seldom come true. (one of my favorite comment writers, Don Axt, recently satirized the "movers and shakers" dreams about how Peoria would one day host the World Series of baseball)pointing out that the elite and other dreamers were so wrong on so many tax-payer funded expenditures such as on the Peoria Riverfront Museum (PRM), on the RiverPlex that recently had to extend thier original 10 year loan to 16 years., how the privately owned ballpark had to have a City loan of $1,600,000.00 forgiven because of lack of attendance, how the African exhibit would have a new entryway off Prospect as illustrated in a 9/23/06 JS article written by John O'Connell and one article appearing on 9/07/07, plus in promotional advertising, when indeed the entryway looks exactly the same old way it looked 25 years ago and while attendance is touted to be, the mostly freebie school visits included while most of these kids look at these trips as way to avoid real learning experience, etc. My parents took us kids to the zoo, never the taxpayers. The more tax dollars spent on non-tax collecting entities, the less sales tax collected despite Peoria having one on the highest sales taxes in the nation. Look at all the abandoned businesses that no longer collect taxes and abandoned houses in Peoria. Look at our population, down about 5000 from 2004 when all these expenditures were susposed to build our population in Peoria. I'm stopping here because my lousy computer or software is threatening to shut me down again like it did last night losing 1/1/2 hours of my labor. My spell-check doesn't work and I'm sick of all the coddling being given to those who could work but can't because of their lousy upbring, a wimpy bunch of compasionate leaders, weak, unpaid weak school boards, all in an All-American City, a distinction earned largely by submitting the best bragging. Not bragging about ugly buildings with low attendance, the ugliest being the new museum, a leader in STD's and rough and pot-holed streets, mass gang fighting among the unemployed blacks who can't work but can steal, vandalize and impregnate. Good luck, Patrick and Jim. I'm buying where I can save the most money providing the service is the same. I pay the City and County and #150 enough in fees and taxes already.