In 2024, Eric Hutchison, a retired Caterpillar engineer, began to notice something troubling along Peoria’s riverfront.
He had been a frequent visitor to the Rock Island Greenway Trail that runs along the riverfront, particularly in the Detweiller Marina area behind the headquarters of O’Brien Steel, during warmer months of the year. Hutchison took note of the condition of the marina property, with trees and foliage beginning to become overgrown and garbage piling up across the area.
“I eventually decided I would try to do something about it, see what one person could do,” Hutchison said. “I had some pretty good experiences with the Peoria Park District and the city of Peoria relative to their PeoriaCares system.”
Unfortunately, the Park District wasn’t responsible for the upkeep of the property – just the trail – which became the first in a long series of frustrations which continued with the frequent communications with the Detweiller Playground Trust, which owns the now-closed marina. Despite numerous conversations with the trust’s director, Andrew Schneider, Hutchison didn’t see much in the way of improvements over a long period of time.
“I found it really frustrating that they wouldn’t,” Hutchison said. “They were quite good about responding to emails and getting back to me; I didn’t typically have to wait a long time for that and they would promise to do it, and then it wouldn’t happen. So, it’s like, ‘What do I do next?'”
Attempts to use code enforcement and enlist volunteers to try and clean up the area fell through, adding Hutchison’s plight to those who are dealing with the Detweiller trust as it moves to sell a portion of the property to O’Brien Steel for business expansion.
J.P. O’Brien, O’Brien Steel’s president, told the Journal Star earlier this year that the company plans to use a 10-acre site for storage of products such as steel beams on the marina’s parking lot and a portion of the playground. Half of the land would remain with the Detweiller trust to maintain as parkland.
Advocates for the trail and the playground have accused Detweiller of neglecting its duties to maintain the playground in order to facilitate the sale, which had been agreed to last year and approved by a Peoria County judge last November. However, the advocates have asked that the sale process be reopened and have leaned on groups like the Peoria Park District, even if it may be beyond its scope.
The condition of the park is one of many issues the advocates have with Detweiller’s treatment of the park under its current leadership, one that has led them to explore how they could transfer management of the property over to the park district.
Schneider turned down a Journal Star phone request for comment for this story.
Drawn to the land in Peoria
Advocates who are frequent visitors to the park have spoken about seeing this patch of land for the first time and being drawn to it immediately. Jo Lakota, a former schoolteacher who moved to the Peoria area when she was 5 years old, said she was always attracted to the Detweiller land when she would ride her bike along the Piney Creek Trail many years ago.
“That was always my stop because it was the prettiest beach,” Lakota said. “Even as I got older, that’s where I would go to walk or go down to the beach because it was beautiful. You would walk through wildflowers and there was a large, sandy beach. You could sit on the tree roots of the big old cottonwoods there and you could see herons and eagles and of course, Canadian geese and ducks, lots of water birds there.”
She noted that cities in Peoria County situated along the river have many places to go and experience the river, but Peoria itself has steadily lost those places in recent years, with the exception of the playground area. She feels that the trust has destroyed a lot of what attracted her there without taking the time to keep it in good working order.
“I think they should be investigated since there’s going to be a lot of destruction and no maintenance,” Lakota said.
Schneider, the president of the Detweiller trust, told the Journal Star earlier this year that one of the key reasons why they would pursue a sale of the property is because the area itself is no longer profitable. He estimated that the trust last made money from the marina back in 2010. In 2018, the trust lost over $86,000 on the marina.
Schneider said that after 2018, the trust couldn’t afford to continue to make payments to the Peoria Park District to maintain the marina, forcing it to make two attempts to find a new operator. None of them worked out.
Hutchison said the riverfront is the showpiece of the community, somewhere visitors make their snap judgments on whether Peoria is a great place to be or not. He said that the park district does a pretty good job in terms of maintaining it, but sees that the Detweiller property has not been well kept.
“You get to this one certain area of the marina, it’s like a different planet,” Hutchison said. “This just reflects badly on the city, it reflects badly on the part because they’re going through there, they don’t know anything about the trust. They assume this is the city’s problem or the park district’s problem or whatever, but it’s just not a good image for the city of Peoria and it’s just a special place.”
Problems with the trust
Julie Dodge, another advocate who has been present at park district meetings trying to cajole someone into challenging the court’s decision on the sale, noted that there were areas of the marina and playground that are simply unusable, due to poor maintenance.
She accuses the trust of trying to block views of the river by piling up construction debris and industrial waste across the playground, particularly in the parking lot near the playground.
“Where dirt once was with birds walking around looking for insects, where ducks and geese walked on the beach and hung out near the beach waiting for the residents to return in the evening with food so they could be entertained by the wildlife and filled with joy, is now all gone,” Dodge said. “What was once a park is now an industrial wasteland.”
Hutchison’s issues with the trust began due what he says was their slow-playing of the cleaning of the property. He says Schneider made promises to clean up the property but never fully followed through with it. He wondered what he could do in terms of trying to push Detweiller toward cleaning up the property.
His first step was to go through the city’s PeoriaCares program and see if they could exercise code enforcement on the property. Some success was had with this; parts of the playground and trail area were mowed, but some parts remained overgrown. As it turned out, code enforcement through the city can only do so much in that area, particularly when it comes to maintaining the trail area.
“What I learned through that process is that they can’t force the trust to trim the outer portion of the trail,” Hutchison said. “That’s just the way the city code is written. The outer portion of the trail doesn’t have a significant amount of grass. If it did, the city could force them to cut that. Nor does it have a significant amount of invasive or noxious weeds. If it had that, they could force them to cut that. It has neither of those.”
Because nothing was being done through PeoriaCares, he decided to lean on friends of his who volunteered frequently to clean up parks like Detweiller. Last fall, he began contacting people to organize a clean-up effort, but he knew that in order to make it all work, he needed permission from the trust. So, he went back to Schneider, hoping for the go-ahead.
“At first, they were quite resistant,” Hutchison said. “They did not want to allow us to to that. They were stalling and it didn’t go well at first.”
Frustrated, he ended up compiling a long list of complaints he had with how the property was being handled and sent them to city officials, including Mayor Rita Ali and City Councilman Tim Riggenbach, who represents the area of the city where the Detweiller property is located. None of them got back to him, he said, but within a day, he got permission from the trust to clean up the property with his team.
Unfortunately, it was getting to be later in the year by this time, and despite getting the go-ahead from the trust, Hutchison decided to wait until the spring. Such a cleanup has not happened, however, in large part due to the pending sale between Detweiller and O’Brien.
Hutchison says that he was disappointed in the closed-door nature of the negotiations between Detweiller and O’Brien.
“Pie in the sky, if the park district could get this land and the marina in perpetuity, that would be the best solution, but I don’t know that we will get there,” Hutchison said.
Letting it deteriorate
The lack of maintenance has frustrated people like Lakota, who are finding it difficult to go out to the marina. She says those at the marina have accused her and others of trespassing on the land.
“Most of the people making these decisions don’t even know what’s there,” Lakota said. “I said, ‘Well, you took off the native plants and for a while you were storing all of this scrap construction material there.’ It was horrible, then the parking lot deteriorated. Then, they let people camp along the beach.
“That piled up and accumulated and if you go down there now, if you can get through all of the invasive species that have taken over, then the garbage, old tents and clothes, you can’t even walk to the water through the garbage. It’s like an extended garbage dump out there.”
Hutchison said that if Detweiller doesn’t want to maintain the property, regardless of what is left after O’Brien assumes control of the property, someone else, like the park district, should assume control.
“Let’s pretend that this didn’t go through a court and get a judge to sign it,” Hutchison said. “In my opinion, if the Detweiller Playground Trust does not want to do the job that Thomas Detweiller intended, or they feel that they can’t do the job because they don’t have enough money, then let’s find another way to do it.”
This article originally appeared on Journal Star: Garbage and neglect: Advocates decry condition of Detweiller grounds in Peoria
Reporting by Zach Roth, Peoria Journal Star / Journal Star
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By Zach Roth, Peoria Journal Star | USA TODAY Network
