Quad City Images Blog

St. Patrick's Day Parade Images

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 18:51:00 GMT

Here are a few shots from today's parade. The weather was better than some years, worse than others. Overcast, misty, almost Irish weather...

Third Street, before the parade.

You never know what you're going to see in a QC St. Patrick's Day Parade. Irish Santa, and the weinermobile made appearances today.

And the parade joins into the 3rd Street bar area festivities. This block, at this exact hour of the year, has got to be one of the liveliest places in the QC.

Menards Update

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:40:00 GMT

It turns out that the QCTimes articles about the Menards dark store agreement were a bit inaccurate. This article said, "Worried that the 53rd Street store would sit empty and be an eyesore for months or years, Davenport aldermen demanded the company have a buyer or renter for its existing store before starting construction on the $15 million project." When I read that, I thought that it wasn't how I remembered it. There are indeed requirements, but none of them explicitly disallow Menards from building their new store before finding a new use for the old one.

Here's a PDF that you can download of the actual agreement from both 2005 and 2007. The first one was regarding Menards potentially moving to Elmore, and the second one has to do with the site on North Brady.

Download the actual pdf here:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/ioytzmigjyr/Menard's DarkStore Agreement.pdf

Menards and Museums

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 13:47:00 GMT

Davenport may kill Menards 'dark store' deal to spark construction -QCTimes

As someone mentioned in the comments earlier, the council is considering changing their mind. Shawn "Property Rights, sometimes" Hamerlinck helped pass a set of requirements having to do with the current Menards in order to rezone their future site near the intersection of Brady and 65th. At the time, there were a number of potential businesses going in out in that area, and the economy was humming right along. Now, a couple years later, things are a bit different. It appears that much of the council is willing to have an empty Menards on 53rd in exchange for a larger Menards spurring development in a new corridor and providing construction jobs. I don't know that they're wrong, but I do worry about the old Menards sitting empty for a long, long time. I can think of one possible use, but I'll do a post on that later.

Deal with city, schools creates a short-term boost for Putnam -QCTimes

This one gets pretty complicated, but the end result is the Parks and Rec department moving out of the old Davenport Museum of Art building, the Putnam giving up their claim to the building, and the Davenport Community School District preschool program moving into it from the former Eagles near the Fairgrounds. Having a school as part of the "museum campus" makes perfect sense, and in an ideal world the Putnam board can bring in some new tenants to their buildings downtown before using up the 3 year influx of money. We'll see. My main concern is with the Putnam in the future. If they do manage to turn things around and somehow have plenty of money again, where are they ever able to expand to in the future? They had always hoped to be able to expand into the former DMA building, but never had the cash. With this deal, that option goes away. I always hate to see the QC sell the future short during present difficulties. It does explain the sudden interest in the Parks department moving into the River's Edge (QCSC) building on the riverfront though. I wonder where the Community Services Division will go?

Blogging will resume shortly

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:26:00 GMT

I have fallen into my usual late winter slump. If I were Wundram, I would have flown off to somewhere interesting. I didn't. I should get back to normal QC-related stuff soon. First though, something completely different.

In the spirit of the just-finished Canadian Olympics, here's a video of a lady that has to be one of the neatest mayors in North America. She's 89 years old, and has been the mayor of Mississauga, Ontario for the last 31 years. I'd vote for her.

I know these widescreen YouTube videos kind of break the blog formatting, so I'll turn it into a link later today.

Dispatch Tax Stuff

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 21:36:00 GMT

Some people in the comments on the previous post are starting a discussion on the city's decision not to lower taxes to make up for the county's new emergency dispatch center tax. I certainly haven't denied that the county taking over taxing for dispatch services and the city not lowering their taxes is a tax increase. Its just that we've known about it for years, despite what some people are claiming.

Here's a QCTimes article from 2007 talking about how they plan to use money saved by the (2009, ha!) opening of the consolidated dispatching center to hire front desk clerks for the police station. So you can see that at least 2 and a half years ago the city knew that they were going to be keeping at least some of the tax money currently spent on dispatching.

Sometimes unpopular things are the right thing to do. The article in today's Times about the AA bond rating is really a final verdict on the unpopular stormwater fee. If the council hadn't passed that "budget-fixing fee" a few years ago, the city budget would be in far worse shape. Instead, we've gone a number of years without the threat of police layoffs that used to be an annual event. So yes, taxes and fees in Davenport have been slowly rising over the last decade, but so has the quality of life. If we can keep making Davenport a better place to live, we should start gaining enough residents to spread the future costs out over more people, and keep taxes and fees steady.

Refresh the Hilltop and more riverfront meetings

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 13:31:00 GMT

A couple things about the Hilltop Campus Village.

In the paper today, the Aldi and former Walgreens on Brady will be demolished, and replaced with a larger, nicer Aldi. The one out at 53rd and Elmore certainly has a different feeling than most Aldis or Save-A-Lots that I've been in. I'm sure city staff are trying valiently to convince them to build a non-suburban style store. It didn't work with Walgreens, so we'll see if it does with Aldi.

In the "thinking outside the box" category, the Hilltop district is competing in the Pepsi Refresh Project. This project consists of a Pepsi promotion to give away millions of dollars to good causes, based on people voting for their favorites. Hilltop is asking for $25,000 to buy metal trash bins to put around the neighborhood with the Hilltop logo on them. The top 10 projects seeking $25k get the money, and right now we're 96th. You can vote each day, and the contest ends at the end of the month. Vote for Hilltop here! I've probably spent that on Pepsi over my lifetime anyway...

And the other thing is an upcoming meeting. Here's what the city has to say about it:

The Levee Improvement Commission, Davenport Parks and Recreation and the Design Center want to know your ideas for developing the East Industrial Area (along the Mississippi River just up river from the Government Bridge).
Join us on Monday, February 8th from 5 - 7 PM in the Film Room at the Main Street Library in downtown Davenport for an Open House as we kick-off the planning process.
Be a part of history!

I kind of liked the suggestion that a casino take over the Clayton House/Clarion/HoJo/eyesore property and be connected via pedestrian bridge across River Drive to a restaurant and plaza along the river. There would still be a lot of room upstream for more uses if that happened, which seems about 1% likely anyway. I plan to go to the meeting and see what's happening. These are where these things are decided, after all, not the smoky back rooms that the negative folks picture.

Anti-Bettendorf Rant

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:06:00 GMT

The thing that got me thinking about this again was this QCTimes editorial about the QC Sports Center, believe it or not. What really got my goat was this 15+ year old quote:

“Where do we draw the line?” former Bettendorf alderman Joe Douglas said in a 1994 council meeting. “I’m not sure we should be bankrolling the facility. There are many types of projects that benefit the Quad-Cities as a whole. Each city funds these projects on their own without funding from other cities.”

Yes... each city provides things that benefit the QC as a whole. Or at least, that's how it should work. In reality, what does Bettendorf bring to the table? I count a total of one QC-wide amenity, which is the Family Museum. I'm not talking things like libraries and parks, which all of the QCs provide, but metro-wide amenities like the Figge, Botanical Center, or iWireless Center.

Bettendorf is around 1/3rd the size of Davenport, and 3/4 the size of each of the cities of Rock Island and Moline. Does anyone believe that Bettendorf provides 1/3rd as many QC amenities as Davenport, or 3/4 as many of the amenities as Rock Island or Moline provide? This doesn't stop them from using all of the culture and amenities that the QC has to offer to market to and attract residents to Bettendorf, of course.

Then there's the additional factor of Bettendorf having a meager fire department and relying on Davenport's help for anything larger than a dumpster fire. I'd imagine it would also cost Bettendorf quite a bit to build their own Sewer Treatment Plant rather than using Davenport's. So they take advantage of these things provided to them by their larger neighbor, which allows them to keep their taxes low, which they then use as a selling point when luring away Davenport's residents.

I suppose the main thing that bothers me is that Bettendorf is essentially leeching off of Davenport. Their "Premiere" city could not keep its taxes low and provide the quality of life that many of its citizens want without Davenport. Yet on the other side of the coin, Davenport would actually be in much better shape without Bettendorf siphoning off Davenport's wealthier citizens and potential residents.

Bettendorf wouldn't be as good without Davenport.
Davenport would be better without Bettendorf.
Maybe they should change the name of their tiny riverfront recreation area to Leech Park.