You Made A Wrong Turn Awhile Back!
Bloomington insider Don Donath was selected by Bloomington City Manager Tim Gleason to be the city’s top cop. No word yet on questionnaire provided by local activist group Black Lives Matter BloNo, which both candidates promised to provide.
For background on this story: (see more)
Peoria City Councilman Zach Oyler and his alleged survivor were no-shows in Order of Protection (OP) court Monday, August 19th. According to court records, the OP was dropped and replaced by a mutual no-contact agreement between the two parties to be further litigated in divorce court. Councilman Oyler was granted temporary permission to return to his domicile.
Currently, there are no pending charges against Oyler for the alleged assault of his wife. This is likely the case because his survivor declined to press charges further. However, this does not mean that Oyler’s survivor has recanted the allegations made against the Councilman; and, even though there are no pending charges against Oyler, this does not mean the incident of abuse was false
Oyler was absent from the last Peoria City Council meeting on August 13, 2019. He has made no public statement on whether he plans to resign from his elected position, despite multiple inquests. Oyler may take the dropping of charges as an opportunity to remain on City Council until at least the next election (which would be 2023). This will largely depend on whether constituents maintain public pressure against him or not. I’ve already detailed that the Councilman has a duty to his constituents to state publicly whether he intends to remain on City Council or not (and furthermore, why I think he should resign).
Councilman Oyler was arrested at his home on July 31st on charges of aggravated domestic battery, interfering with a report of domestic violence and unlawful restraint. He was later released from jail on a $100 bond. For a full description of allegations against Councilman Oyler, see my piece here.
UPDATE: On October 16th, 2020, Councilmember Zach Oyler took an Alford plea to disorderly conduct as part of an agreement to have other charges stemming from a July 2019 domestic incident dropped. Oyler & his wife have reconciled. (SEE FULL DETAILS)
The article isn’t about completely delegitimizing due process. Due process is a worthy thing to fight for, especially as our rights are increasingly infringed upon by an increasingly large state apparatus. But R. Kelly’s history of abusive behavior towards young black girls shouldn’t be ignored just because his previous court case found him not guilty. Despite its ability to create truths, a court room is far from perfect and far from the final say on what is true or false. Any argument placing his accuser’s facts in a state of epistemological limbo until they’ve been tested in court fails to recognize the obvious limitations of the judicial system. (view more)
Allegations of Abuse, Sexual Assault, Prostitution and Philandering swarm City Council member Zach Oyler
Despite getting reelected Peoria City Councilman Zachary Oyler has likely obliterated any political capital he had. On Tuesday, July 30th, 2019, Oyler was arrested at his home on charges of aggravated domestic battery, interfering with a report of domestic violence and unlawful restraint. He was later released from jail on a $100 bond. 1
The following day an Order of Protection (OP) from his wife was filed in Court. The allegations in it paint a disturbing picture of the Councilman. The OP reads:
Zachary [Respondent] was out at the bar drinking and when he returned home he fell asleep but before he went to sleep he was shouting at me. I [Petitioner] left to go pick up dinner and Respondent called me wanted to know if Petitioner was leaving and not coming back. Petitioner got home and he was in the yard, Respondent walked in behind me and said “is this how its going to be?” Respondent was yelling at Petitioner for majority of the night, Petitioner tried to leave and Respondent trapped Petitioner in the house. The Petitioner called her therapist and was told to tell Respondent she was leaving for a couple of hours to go work and make sure Petitioner takes her purse with her. Petitioner attempted to leave and respondent took her phone and threw Petitioner to the ground and put his arm around her neck. Respondent was trying to get Petitioner’s stuff from her. But Petitioner was able to get away from him due to Respondent was drunk. Petitioner got into the bedroom and Petitioner convinced Respondent to go out to the garage. Respondent came back in [to the house] and told Petitioner to leave her keys. When Respondent was outside, Petitioner realized she needed to call 911 because she wasn’t sure how bad it was going to get. Petitioner heard Respondent come back in and Petitioner was going to hang up but dispatch said to keep the line open, Petitioner put her phone in her purse and they heard the incident. Respondent ended up going back outside and the police arrived.
Also there has been numerous sexual assault with the last one being Friday 7-26-19.
On Thursday, Oyler’s alleged survivor filed for divorce citing irreconcilable differences.
Further details from police incident reports and the 911 call the survivor made sheds greater light on the July 30th incident and Oyler’s past.2 She reported to the police Oyler had come home after a long day drinking (Oyler admitted to police he had been drinking and officers noticed an alcoholic stench emanating from him). Oyler was asked by his wife if he wanted dinner, but Oyler said he wasn’t hungry with the survivor stating he also said his lack of hunger meant she did not need to eat either. However, when Oyler took a nap, she left the home to get dinner. The councilman arose from his slumber and phoned his wife questioning whether she was leaving him for good and allegedly yelled at her upon her return to the house. Eventually, the survivor called her therapist who advised the survivor to leave the home and take her phone with her. She attempted to leave telling Oyler she wanted to go to work for a few hours. However, Oyler allegedly took his wife’s phone from her and threw her to the ground and keeping her down with his arm. The councilman admitted to police he and his wife had been arguing, and at one point, he did take the survivor’s phone from her (which means he admitted to interfering with a report of domestic violence); but, Oyler denied the dispute getting physical. Several police recorded red bruising on the survivor’s neck and a small scratch on her chest. Because Oyler was heavily intoxicated, the survivor was able to escape and retrieve her phone. She escaped his clutches to the bedroom and was able to convince Oyler to go out to the garage, though Oyler told her to give her keys to him preventing her escape. The survivor quickly dialed 911 fearing for her safety. She can be heard on the 911 audio crying and expressing extreme fear of Oyler. After the police arrived, they determined a domestic incident had occurred and arrested Oyler for the above stated crimes.
When Oyler ran for election it was as a conservative and he is a part of the Weaver faction of the Peoria Republican Party. He has also admitted he is very religious. Yet, according to his survivor’s interview with police the following morning, Oyler has a history of paying for sexual encounters and philandering going back a decade. She states even before they were married, there were trust concerns. The survivor alleges that one instance in 2009 occurred when they were both at Big Al’s strip club and Oyler paid a woman $800 to give him oral sex, an incident the survivor states she walked in on. The survivor further alleges a long-term relationship between Oyler and a County Board member3 as well as incidents of cheating when Oyler was staying at a nursing home briefly.
Oyler is currently out on bail. He is prohibited from being within 300 feet of his survivor or of having any contact with her. Furthermore, he is prohibited from accessing his house or vehicle without police presence. A plenary court date is scheduled for August 19th where a judge will decide whether to uphold the order of protection, and, if so, for how long and what stipulations he must abide by.
Oyler has not released any public statement so far regarding the allegations or whether he will resign from city council. He retained Rob Hanauer to handle his various legal affairs. “We look forward to our day in court and people should not be so quick to rush to judgment,” Hanauer said but declined to comment further. Should Oyler be convicted of a felony, he will no longer be eligible to serve on city council. However, there is not currently a way for the public to recall Councilman Oyler or for the other members of City Council to remove him by office. He could chose to weather the incident and allegations and remain on City Council, though this would be hard to believe. Unless the accusations against him are complete fabrications it’s hard to envision how Oyler could survive this and still be politically viable.
If convicted, it will be his first conviction. He was arrested in 2001 in Decatur for an incident involving arson, but the charges were dropped and all reports were sealed because Oyler was a juvenile.
Zachary Oyler is innocent until proven guilty before the law.
UPDATE: On October 16th, 2020, Councilmember Zach Oyler took an Alford plea to disorderly conduct as part of an agreement to have other charges stemming from a July 2019 domestic incident dropped. Oyler & his wife have reconciled. (SEE FULL DETAILS)
There is a deep poverty in Peoria. Not just materially or socially, but ideologically. Peoria’s ideas are themselves impoverished: all Peoria seems to get is private-public partnerships, job training, and tax abatement. This is a poverty in thought which leads Peoria inexorably further into decline.
A look at City Council reveals the poverty of thought which re-presents Peoria. There are: 3 bankers (John “Growth™” Kelly, Tim Riggenbach, and Denise Moore) 2 real estate agents (Zach Oyler, Chuck Grayeb), 3 business owners (Sid Ruckreigel, Jim Montelongo, Denis Cyr), a corporate executive (Mayor Jim Ardis), a lawyer (Beth Jensen), and a local college administrator (Dr. Rita Ali). It has been like this for decades: bankers, business owners, and real estate agents as far as a horse’s eyes could see. I call this a poverty because where is the rest of life on this council? Where are the garbage workers, service workers, nurses, teachers, scientists, librarians, etc?
. . .
I’m talking about the City’s ideas; ideas that have lived in Peoria for a very long time in correlation with a period of intense decline–decline which is not unique to Peoria, but is a reverberation of a global phenomenon. This lack of uniqueness, a general universality, is embodied in Peoria’s slogan: “If It Plays in Peoria, it must play in the rest of America.” This slogan4 (with its roots in early 20th century vaudeville) says Peoria is the simulacrum of average America, of the dominant ideas of the U.S., and currently, that is neo-liberalism. It is an ideology: a matrix of ideas with a factical history investing itself in a socius.
Neo-liberal ideology: Capitalism has always repeated the function of maximizing the extraction of surplus-value from resources, equipment and labor. Throughout the history of capitalism, it has been necessary for government to assist in this goal whether through infrastructure, population analyses (e.g., the census), educating workers, communication, etc. These things were all to aid the free market even if they themselves were not market driven in their own function. But what is new in neo-liberalism is the belief, if you run traditional government or non-private institutions like a business, with the aim of maximizing profit–through the metastasized spread of the competition function–you will have a better product.
This belief correlates with a lack of faith, not just in government, but in its ability to effectively manage populations in a non-competition manner. This lack of faith manifests itself as austerity. Brutal austerity! We have a “servant-leader” who swears local government is really only for public safety and infrastructure. We have a rather Growthy™ appendage that said, “To the extent cities don’t work, there’s something nonmarket screwing it up.” We have a bunch of people in city government that don’t believe city government can do anything to help the average person, only the average business person. And, that’s a poverty of thought. This City is limited in its ability to see what potentialities exist that would actually benefit Peoria as a whole.
I’ve already talked about the importance of making Peoria a Welcoming City.
The City could pass ordinances limiting the ability of non-bank financial institutions like payday lenders and car title loans from engaging in predatory practices. There are over 30 of these stores throughout the Peoria area. They offer fast cash at extraordinarily high interest rates (some as high as 400% APR) and target largely poor and minority communities.
Peoria could buy the water company or encourage vertical farming.
The City could increase the minimum wage, reduce the legal loopholes in the state minimum wage law (e.g., exceptions on paying the full wage to minors, tipped workers, etc.), and teach classes on financial literacy.
But, apparently Peoria isn’t good enough for these things. We get more private-public partnerships, job training, and tax abatement. It’s as if we’re still in the 1980s, snorting cocaine while Reaganomics trickles down on us and Caterpillar destroys Peoria’s working class. It’s as if all the City Council seats are occupied empty, occupied by the ghosts of neo-liberal past.
For many liberals, progressives, & leftists in Peoria, April 2nd was a somewhat disappointing night. Yes, we replaced a conservative black man with a centrist black woman; and, the reign of Beth Akeson was finally brought low (she only received a pitiful 4.87% of the vote). At the same time, now we have John “Growth™” Kelly on city council, a man with a fetish for both gentrification & the “free market”. Perhaps no one was more disappointed than the Peoria Journal Star. After the February primary, Chris Kaergard wrote “Big city primary winners are progressives, ‘change’…” and, “Vote totals show … a surge of strength for progressive-leaning candidates or those who’d likely shift the balance of the current council majority” from the “more traditionalist or status-quo” candidates. The candidates chosen as “progressive” or “change” candidates: Dr. Ali, Beth Jensen, Peter Kobak, Andre W. Allen, and Aaron Chess Jr. Kaergard didn’t provide any examples of his methodology for their selection or evidence to support this label for these individuals, but it seemed rather superficial at best.
For starters, as far as I can tell, only one of these five candidates on this list ever mentioned the word progressive throughout the campaign (Peter Kobak). Furthermore, every candidate always says they represent change (John “Growth™” Kelly’s campaign motto was “A Whole New Approach”). So, we have to look specifically at policy as opposed to the rhetoric of candidates. More perplexing is the equivocation of a range of different policies not only as progressive but as a change for Peoria. Let’s briefly run down these five candidates on their platforms5:
As I’ve said in earlier critiques, the question isn’t about label or ideological purity. The question is whether these candidates’ policies are actually different from the so-called “traditionalist” candidates6, or more importantly, are these policies any different from the last several decades of neo-liberalism in Peoria? There has been this similar refrain within Peoria politics of “private-public partnerships” for social concerns, “job training” to increase employment and seduce businesses, “tax abatement” to attract new investments, etc. Local politicians have been doing this for decades to what results? Yet, every two years it’s “private-public partnerships”, “job training”, more “tax abatement”, and we hear that same melody from many of these so-called change candidates. The only candidates with truly new policies were Peter Kobak (Welcoming City Ordinance), and Andre Allen’s #RebootPeoria plan to address vacant properties. And, by new, I mean they don’t continue the same power structures of neo-liberalism, e.g., privatization of government functions, tax giveaways to the wealthy. Dr. Ali rallied for bringing Amtrak to Peoria, a good idea, though not a new one, and she offered no plan on how to accomplish this.7
Something often missed when analyzing neo-liberalism is the ramping up of police forces (probably because of an austerity attitude towards most other government functions). Peoria Police Department (PPD) has seen a similar growth in militarization alongside other police forces in the U.S. and Europe. In the U.S., this is largely thanks to post-9/11 grants provided by the Federal government. But even before, back in the 80s & 90s, we heard the clarion decree from the City’s (white & black) capitalist leadership that the Southside of Peoria was infested with superpredators and urban terrorists. It framed the Southside as a warzone and called for a military-style strategy of increased surveillance by the police, and draconian punishments for often minor infractions.
One the one hand, the status-quo has typically deferred to PPD on policing decisions and outcomes. Any form of critical analysis by council members is quickly quashed by the police union. On the other hand, the recommendations and political investments from politicians have been toward the ideology of “tough on crime”. In the late-90s, despite overcrowding at the Peoria County Jail, politicians & bureaucrats lamented on not being able to arrest and imprison more people.8
In just the past two years, Peoria has seen two minorities killed by police under suspicious circumstances9, and there is a long history of unfair treatment towards minorities by PPD10. Of the supposed “change” candidates, three were endorsed by the police union and a fourth insisted “Cops aren’t the bad guys.” Dr. Ali, a long-time member of Peoria’s Police Advisory Committee11–who had some of the best answers regarding increasing equity in the community–was very supportive of increasing the surveillance power of PPD. She advocated public funding of surveillance technology be given to private individuals & businesses who would then connect the visual feed directly to PPD headquarters. Where is the concern among progressives for this proposal (my god, where is the analysis!)? Mr. Allen boldly stated he would never support cuts to police (though he acknowledged not every solution to crime could be answered with more police). But, only Peter Kobak was directly calling for more oversight and control over the police, including giving the Police Advisory Committee more power to punish police officers.
We also heard praise for the resident officer program that currently exists and increasing diversity among the police force from Dr. Ali, Jensen, and several others. Once again, these are not new ideas, and there seems to be little analysis or critique of the efficacy of these programs. While most of us agree the police should have to live in the city they serve, has the current resident officer programs made the areas they live in safer? And of course our government departments should be diverse, does increasing diversity among the police increase the trust between police & community? We’ve heard these ideas going back to the 1970s, but are they providing the answer to systemic inequality caused by racist police practices?
Ultimately, some of these candidates ideas don’t seem that progressive or ‘change’ at all. Does Chris Kaergard think every minority, millenial, or female (whose last name is not Akeson) is a “change” candidate, or is the status-quo skewed so far right that anyone who isn’t a Lahood or Weaver clone looks like a leftist? Does change play in Peoria? The bigger question is perhaps what policies would be a change for Peoria? The ideas that would represent a change for Peoria–like a Welcoming Ordinance, public control of water company, greater scrutiny of PPD and their role in mass incarceration, regulations against the title-loan cash schemes, the #RebootPeoria plan for vacant properties–seem to get little traction beyond the progressive circles, and an analysis is sorely needed as to why this is.
At-Large seats privilege the majority.
–Brennan Center for Justice
Since local elections only generate 12% turnout, slightly more than the population of Peoria’s ruling class, At-Large elections reinforce the status-quo of a city reflexively. In Peoria, that would make it extremely difficult for anyone but the good ole’ boys from the Lahood and Weaver conservatives to get elected.
However, cumulative voting is a particularly, peculiar answer on how to improve minority representation. Peoria At-Large races are the only electoral races in the state which relies on cumulative voting, one of only around 100 in the entire U.S. Now, if a candidate wants to win, it is hard for them to do anything else but pool votes for just themselves. “Put 5 on it,” becomes every candidate’s motto.
Why does Peoria have this voting method? It seems almost obvious a district system would provide the preferred results of increased equity in elected representation.12 After decades upon decades of racial discrimination in housing, education, and employment, lead plaintiff Joyce Banks brought a lawsuit against the Peoria School Board, Park District, and City Council in 1987 over lack of representation among the minority community. All three political bodies relied on At-Large seats. Plaintiffs wanted to move toward an all district system for all three. This was eventually agreed upon for the Peoria Park District and the Peoria School Board; but, when it came to City Council, the League of Women Voters intervened. A “compromise” was reached whereby City Council would increase its allotment of At-Large seats from three to five but elect them through cumulative voting.
Thirty years later, and what are the results? Black Peorians make up nearly 30% of the population. Only three black people have been elected to At-Large seats and no more than one at a time. This position was held for over 20 years by conservative Eric Turner, and now is being passed to Dr. Ali, a centrist. It’s as if the establishment is saying “we’ll let minorities have a seat… but only one or two.” Add in a black politician from District 113 and BAM! equality achieved, or so the establishment claims. “The Voting Rights suit was filed to ensure African Americans would have a seat at the table. Mission accomplished.” writes lead plaintiff of the 1987 case Joyce Banks.14 And, under the framework of neo-liberalism, equality has been achieved. Is it any wonder the League of Women Voters (a group of largely middle-to-upper class, center-right, white women) insisted on this compromise? While a rarity in government, cumulative voting “is a practice well known in corporate elections. Many American corporations use this mechanism to ensure a voice for minority shareholders.” Such a neo-liberal15 solution fits with the times of the late-80s (back when the concept equity barely had it’s first outlines). Instead of the obvious solution of having ten districts, Peoria City Council chose to look to the free market for its answer to a lack of diversity. Considering how far the Park Board of Trustees and Peoria School Board have come in electing people of color it is clear neither cumulative voting or At-Large seats are benefiting communities of color.
