Candidates are critical of big money spending in local politics.
Sid Ruckriegel was the biggest spender but didn t advance to the general election.
Experience. A track record. Building a diverse coalition. Even learning from a loss.
Those are among the factors that the two finalists in Peoria s mayoral race believe helped them to advance to the April 6 general election.
Both Rita Ali, who finished at the top with 39% of the vote, and Jim Montelongo, who finished second with 24%, said they thought voters rewarded their experience in public life.
Ali has served on the council for two years, but she said her experience runs deeper than that.
For days, Peoria awaited a winter wallop.
When it hit, the storm pounded the town with a remarkable blinding of whirling snow and swirling winds, accented by the eerily odd crackle of lightning. The storm of the first two days of February 2011 a monstrous marvel infamously dubbed Snowmageddon ‘11 left central Illinois overwhelmed in white and exhausted from shoveling.
Indeed, in the blasting blizzard s wake, a screaming Journal Star headline succinctly summed up the snowy, blowy impact: TIME TO DIG DEEP.
Snowy afternoon
Tuesday, Feb. 1, 2011, arrived with Peoria bracing for a blizzard marching across the Midwest, though no one here knew exactly what to expect. Forecast estimates varied widely in central Illinois, calling for a two-day accumulation of anywhere between 12 and 24 inches in spots.
Tim Shelley / Peoria Public Radio
Former Hotel Pere Marquette developers Gary Matthews and Monte Brannan were indicted Tuesday on 21 federal felony counts of money laundering, consipracy to commit money laundering, mail fraud, and concealment of bankruptcy assets.
In a 26-page indictment, Assistant U.S. Attorney Darilyn Knauss said the two men defrauded their investors, the city of Peoria, lenders, and others by illegally diverting money earmarked for the hotel s renovation and revenue from the hotel project for their personal and business use.
Peoria taxpayers had significant skin in the game on the Pere Marquette deal. In 2012, the city loaned Matthews $7 million and doled out $29 million in grants to invigorate the redevelopment effort. The city subsequently had to eat those costs in 2018 when a bankruptcy court awarded ownership of the hotel to its largest investor, INDURE Build-to-Core, an union-owned real estate investment fund.
PEORIA The former owners of the Hotel Pere Marquette were indicted this week on charges of money laundering and mail fraud.
A 26-page indictment, returned late Tuesday, accuses Gary Matthews and Monte Brannan of diverting $750,000 of hotel funds to themselves after the hotel went into foreclosure. They are accused of taking approximately $1.6 million away from the hotel s bank accounts and putting it into their own.
The charges allege the two men caused $13.8 million to be moved from a hotel management account into an account they controlled.
The project has become an albatross around City Hall s neck after the project was foreclosed upon, leaving taxpayers on the hook for between $7 to $8 million.