It Takes Courage
Our hometown of Peoria, Illinois has a different sort of mayoral candidate this year. Her name is Chama St. Louis. She’s a long-time community organizer and activist; she’s young (34), she’s black, and she grew up on the South Side. If you’re from Peoria, you understand how significant her candidacy is.
Ms. St. Louis has an informative website (chamastlouis.com), and we’re going to use that to look at some of what she’s proposing for Peoria should she be elected Mayor.
Her platform has four planks:
Plank One: Re-invest in our Communities
- Remove barriers for working families, low-income families and elderly residents to access resources
- Increased funding for home repairs
- Create more public spaces and gathering opportunities to build community among residents
- Make neighborhoods walkable with all the essential goods and services in the neighborhood
- Improve infrastructure like water, electricity, the internet, etc.
- Increase internet & smartphone access for all residents
- Additional funding for community-based programs that target equipping youth with trade and life skills.
- Raise incomes of working families
We’re going to discuss what each point might/could entail – obviously, we can’t address each one in detail, but we’ll highlight a few from each of her four planks.
“Remove barriers,” etc. This suggests resources need to be close to residents (most of her points refer at least implicitly to the historically-black parts of the inner city, i.e. Districts 1, 2 and 3), and she’s correct (she’s correct about everything she proposes, really, but the question is how to achieve her goals). There should be a satellite office for all public services down in the city – Social Security, the VA, the DMV, to name just a few.
Because: here’s where the local SS office is now; here’s where the main office of the VA is now; here’s where the State of Illinois’ DMV is now; here’s where the Peoria Election Commission is right now – we note that there is a Medicaid office and a HUD office near the South side, which is good but alas, also indicative.
Of course St. Louis is also referring to other types of resources – we’ll look at those in what follows, since there’s some overlap in her list of plank points.
“Make neighborhoods walkable,” etc. Many people living on the South Side don’t have cars, so access to core consumer items – food, for example – should be within walking distance. The South Side is a classic food desert. [It’s good to see there’s a Farmers’ Market each week on the Riverfront, but it is affordable for residents to shop there?]And healthcare providers should be there too – including dentists and pediatricians and internists (general medicine). [Note: We saw today that the Southside Market will open tomorrow – it’s accessible to some residents by foot, and will be accepting LINK cards – a very positive development.]
“Increase internet and smartphone access,” etc. The City of Peoria needs to step up here, pronto – even before the November elections. There should be wifi hotspots every couple of blocks on the South Side – yes, blocks – during the pandemic. The best solution would be city-wide wifi, not hotspots scattered throughout the city, but this is the best interim solution.
Plank Two: Re-imagine our Criminal Justice System
- Increase access to trauma services
- Provide nonviolent conflict resolution training to residents & police
- Show young people we care for them through mentoring
- For those at-risk and those who have already got in some trouble
- One-stop-shop for those reentering society that connects them community-based organizations and government agencies
- Police reform
All are standard proposals for the re-envisioning the criminal justice system; we’d like to see each one fleshed out somewhat – perhaps St. Louis could do a series of Facebook addresses, one on each of her four planks, that would give her the time to elaborate.
For example, mentoring: should the program be city-sponsored (something like “Peoria Cares,” or privately-sponsored? Should there be a single umbrella program, or should there be programs associated with schools, or with church groups or with non-profits? Peoria has private mentoring programs already, perhaps these could be expanded to include every child who could benefit … that’s a big ask from private service providers, though. Generally speaking, we’d prefer a city-wide program with volunteer services provided through schools, churches, and other civic-minded organizations, but centrally-run and administered – the Carver Center could, for example, provide administrative expertise and serve as the city’s official non-profit partner.
“One-stop shop,” etc. Absolutely, and there should be a fairly large physical location for people reentering society to go for this support (and the City should lease/rent it – it’s not like Peoria is experiencing a real estate crunch right now). Job searches (with a list of employers who hire those reentering society), housing services (ditto), enrollment for Medicaid on Day 1, food support, a clothing bank, counseling services – all should be available in a single location large enough to house meeting rooms, offices, and a congregation space for groups to meet – and for folks to hang out. Remember: reentry often means “resocialization.” This is a whole initiative of its own.
“Police reform.” St. Louis has separately posted (on her Facebook page) what she means by this, and it’s all in line with national progressive thinking and proposals. One concept which struck us particularly: “Emphasizing the core job description of police officers as ‘Guardians’” as it recalled us of something we recently read by Simon Balto, who’s recently published a history of Chicago policing, Occupied Territory. The author has described the situation endured by Chicago’s South and West Side residents in encapsulated form thus: “overpoliced and underprotected.” The same holds true for Peoria’s South Side and (southern) East Bluff residents. What they deserve is to be overprotected so that underpolicing will be possible, as it is north of War Memorial Drive in the middle-class neighborhoods built in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s … But this is a hard ask, as we’re seeing in Chicago (and Peoria, in early June – it made the front page of the New York Times as a representative of a mid-sized, Midwestern city of looters). We’d like to hear much more from St. Louis about how she’d approach the topic of police reform specifically in Peoria.[Note: She has several posts on her FB page dealing with this topic, so more detail may be included in these.]
Do we have too many police, or too few? Should we partly defund the police and hire trauma interventionists and crisis mediators? Should we return to the concept of the “beat cop” who knew everybody in their neighborhood, and whom people (largely) trusted to keep their secrets and look out for their little ones on the way home from school? Should police live in the districts they patrol, or at least within the City of Peoria limits? [Note: For that matter, should City Council members live throughout the city? Or only in select neighborhoods?]
Plank Three: Rebuild the Table
· All are directly involved in all important decisions
· Residents help shape the budget by giving input on priorities and values
· Proponent and opponent witness slips
· Making data more available and useful
· Interactive public meetings and town halls that allow community members to provide input as decisions are made
These are excellent – of course, the first is really St. Louis’ guiding point, her lodestar for the remaining ones, and it’s a critical aspect of what could be characterized as “representative democracy.” If you start from “Peoria can/could be a true representative democracy” (note: its population is nearly identical to Athens’ in the mid-5th c. B.C.), the others all follow effortlessly.
There should be public budgetary discussions, with a spearhead address by the Mayor as the yearly process gets underway, and then a series of public (say, in the libraries, or other sizable public venues, or churches) meetings by each City Council member in their own District, accompanied by the City Manager or someone from the City’s Finance Department who can answer specific questions. And there should be ground-level preparation for these meetings, too – neighborhoods, district members can hold informational sessions in advance of meetings with their City Council member to get a better feel for how the process works, and what changes might be feasible in future.
We’re not forgetting the five at-large City Council members – they should also make themselves available for direct questioning at public forums throughout the process – preferably in a district they don’t live in. [More on the current City Council below.]
[Note: Peoria has a budget page which currently anticipates a $2 million dollar shortfall currently in 2020 – goodness only knows what 2021 will be like – and is seeking input from residents about what to cut. And by the way, nearly 50% of its budget is slated for “Public Safety” – policing. That’s in comparison to Chicago’s 38%. Yikes.]
Plank four: Rejuvenate the Economy
- Community Wealth Fund Dividend (Direct Cash Payments to Residents)
- Investing in small businesses
- Investing in businesses that bring wealth to Peoria not extract it
- Invest in education & training
- Access to free training and education for entrepreneurs
- City Business Incubator Program (removing barriers to access to funding)
- Provide infrastructure for small businesses
These are all standard, and all good; we especially appreciate the idea of investing in small businesses (remember: the looting of Walmart and Dollar Store – which succeeded in destroying both black- and white-owned small businesses in Peoria over the past several decades – are different than the looting of locally-owned / operated businesses) –Peoria could tap into funds being made available by the State of Illinois for this purpose. It’s been demonstrated again and again that locally-sourced and locally-produced goods keep a lot more money in the community than outsourcing. See, for example, Albuquerque, NM on this phenomenon and how the city has an explicit policy of developing small businesses with local labor, for local consumption..
The Community Wealth Fund Dividend is a new concept for us; here’s an introduction. Basically, such a fund recycles publicly- (or communally-) owned assets / sources of profit back into the ownership community, and one way of doing this is through direct cash payments – a sort of minimum Universal Income (UI), if you will. But what will the sources of income for that fund be, we wonder? We can think of several possibilities – e.g. a series of collectively-owned grocery stores, or community-owned gardens (Detroit’s been successful in starting these) – possibly the two could be combined into a fairly robust enterprise. What about a solar farm, community owned, down on abandoned property near the riverfront which would both power the South Side and return a dividend in the form of reduced power bills for residents? What about some light-industrial co-ops, say for the production of key medical supplies? What about a small factory for production of school and office supplies? Or one for children’s educational toys? Or bicycles? (There’s a massive shortage of U.S.-made bicycles these days.] What about an artists’ co-op devoted to public art creation? Peoria has a high unemployment rate, plenty of transportation, and plenty of local demand for front-line medical supplies in particular – why not do a study of local bodies’ (city/county government, health care providers, schools, institutions) procurement records and see what they buy, and then match their needs to start-up production facilities?
Note: We also think the South Side / (southern) East Bluff should have its own, community-owned credit union, but that’s perhaps a separate, larger topic – someone might do well to do a deep dive into the largest local lenders’ practices the past 5-10 years to see how robust their lending has been to potential home buyers and small businesses in Districts 1, 2 and 3, though. It would lend support to the idea of a locally-owned and run credit union – of the residents, by the residents and above all, for the residents of these districts.
Further thoughts:
We listened to part of St. Louis’ response to a number of comments on an interview she’d done via Neiman Marcus (?) on August 13 with Marc Supreme of the Peoria Journal Star. (Here’s the link to the interview, and here’s the one to her response). She comes across as sincere and well-informed, but she’s even more charismatic when she delivers prepared remarks. More of these, please.
Peoria is the 7th-worst city in the U.S. right now for blacks (according to ratings provided each year by 24/7 Wall Street) and believe it or not, this is the best ranking it’s had in years. It’s also home to the second-poorest zip code in the State of Illinois (61605) (which should sound off an alarm bell not only for local but for state intervention as well), and it has the most segregated school system in the United States today. And did we mention that it’s overall the sixth most segregated city (of any size) in the country?
As former educators, schooling is an area we’re particularly interested in – and concerned about, when it comes to our hometown. When you look at schooling, you look at K-12, and frankly, Peoria should be under a federal consent decree.
Failing that (it’s an embarrassment, but at some point something will have to be done about the city’s extreme level of segregated schooling), School District 150’s catchment areas need to be redrawn, again. This isn’t something that a Mayoral candidate – let alone a young, untried, new-style progressive candidate – can put in their campaign platform. But, along with economic development heavily weighted towards Districts 1, 2 and 3, it’s a short-term fix for integrating the schools and, to some extent, the city itself.
Because the City runs N-S, with the poorest neighborhoods, oldest housing stock, and lowest-ranked schools on the South Side, those who re-draw 150’s school boundaries need to draw boundaries running N-S, so that each primary, middle, and high school includes a representative number of students from every income group and race. The goal should be an entire system with fully mixed income and integrated student bodies – one which reflects the City’s overall demographics.
We’ll continue to follow St. Louis as her campaign progresses. What she’s up against is enormous, and the very fact that she’s running a serious campaign is an example of considerable political courage.
One final note: St. Louis’ campaign slogan is “A New Normal” (for Peoria, that is). Given all the pandemic-connected employment of the phrase, we’re not sure that the slogan per se is as uplifting as her explanation of what she means suggests (several posts explain in greater detail what she means by the phrase – the problem is with its current connotations during the pandemic, unfortunately).
Maybe “When each Peorian prospers, every Peorian prospers” or “When We Do Well for Each of Us, We Do Well for All of Us” (too long, yeah) – when she was asked what Peoria’s #1 problem was, she responded “Poverty.” And she’s right – if zip codes 61603, 61604 and 61605 had a median family income of $65,000 (median for Illinois as a whole) instead of $20,000, their problems – and Peoria’s – wouldn’t be at all the same as they are now. The thing is, we’re all in this together – more investment, economic development, and services for Peoria’s poorest ultimately will mean a much better – and more sustainable – future for all but its wealthiest citizens (most of whom live in Dunlap now anyway).
The challenge for St. Louis is how to persuade Peoria’s middle-class white voters – some of whose votes she will need to win the election – that helping the city’s poorest residents will lift up the entire city – economically, demographically, educationally and spiritually. This will be the true test of whether community organizer Chama St. Louis can advance from ruffling feathers in the community to ruffling feathers in board rooms and country clubs and banks, not to mention City Hall.