Tram City USA? Mayor D'Arcy Wins Electric Tram For Downtown Joliet

JOLIET —Even though at least 325 readers of the Joliet Patch offered negative Facebook comments — including many blistering remarks about spending $95,000 to build an electric tram to use around downtown Joliet, Mayor Terry D'Arcy and his City Council majority voted 7 to 2, in favor of the controversial plan anyway.

When it came time for Tuesday night's vote, here's the way your city of Joliet elected leaders voted:

• Councilman Larry Hug: "No."
• Councilwoman Suzanna Ibarra: "Aye."
• Councilman Pat Mudron: "Aye."
• Councilwoman Jan Quillman: "Only if I can drive it. Aye."
• Councilwoman Sherri Reardon: "Aye."
• Councilman Cesar Cardenas: "Aye."
• Councilman Joe Clement: "No."
• Councilman Cesar Guerrero: "Aye."
• Mayor Terry D'Arcy: "Aye."

Minutes before the controversial vote, D'Arcy displayed last week's Joliet Patch article that broke the news regarding City Manager Beth Beatty's idea of buying an electric tram for downtown Joliet.

"I want to make a couple comments on this," D'Arcy began his remarks. "First of all, there was some misinformation that was put out by one of our papers. It was completely half the story. There is a grant involved in this that's going to pay for it.

"This paper had a tram from Barcelona, Spain in the picture," D'Arcy told everyone. "I'd like to get our story straight when we put stories out, please."

The Joliet City Council information packets made available last Thursday, in preparation for Tuesday's meeting, contained no photos of what the tram would look like.

Joliet Patch did report that "a zero-emissions vehicle was selected so that a federal grant opportunity could be utilized as the funding source."

At Tuesday's Council meeting, D'Arcy shared the following photo, suggesting that is what downtown Joliet's future electric tram will look like.

However, Joliet's electric tram will still need to be built in Florida before it arrives in Joliet, and bringing it to Joliet will also cost the city extra money.

It was also explained at Tuesday's meeting that Joliet's tram can only transport 15 people.

Before the vote, Councilman Hug criticized the project, thinking the tram would only be able to transport 50 people. Councilwoman Quillman then corrected Hug, and advised him that the capacity of passengers will be 15, not 50.

"This is not the first time the city has had a shuttle," D'Arcy continued in his remarks before Tuesday night's vote. "In fact, in 2008, a 20-passenger shuttle was purchased unanimously by this City Council for $51,000. And that was replacing a trolley that was 20 years old. So when the city staff has been meeting with some of the downtown businesses, and asked what they needed, they said help navigating residents and visitors through the construction zone, which this will help. And we've been working hard, trying to do anything we can, to help businesses during this construction time.

"This is a solution in the form of a federal grant through the U.S. Department of Energy. We applied for the grant and were awarded $187,350 with the grant receiving a 15-passenger shuttle in the amount of $95,000."

Next, D'Arcy asked city staff to again display the photo of the electric tram for everyone watching and attending Tuesday night's Council meeting.

The mayor pointed out that additional grant funds will acquire an electric street sweeper that will clean downtown Joliet's sidewalks and the city owned parking deck.

"The shuttle will be used for visitors during construction, other special events, not necessarily 3,000 people, and I don't know if you noticed, but for about a month, there's a dozen boats parked along the wall, in fact, on my way in tonight, I just saw a family getting out of their boat, walking downtown to get some dinner. These are things that we can use this for.

"And as the mayor, I walk around the town during the day at times, and I introduce myself to people. That's what we do. I've met people from Italy, Switzerland, from Germany, from Poland, and it's kind of fun because they want to get a picture with the mayor," D'Arcy said of himself.

"So, sometimes there's six or seven or eight people. They ... hit the historical museum, they want to see the courthouse, this is a way for us to bring families around our town and this is particularly going to be strong once we get the downtown back in shape by the 2026 time frame," D'Arcy explained. "So it wouldn't make sense to me that we would not want to take this grant and utilize this as best we can. The fuel costs is next to nothing. It's a plug-in electric vehicle. I've got 20,000 on mine, and I'm saving the planet for all of you. All we do is rotate tires, so they're not really that expensive to use."

Once D'Arcy finished his remarks, urging the Council to pass the electric tram purchase, Councilman Joe Clement spoke up.

"I've supported the Rialto, the businesses downtown, this project, the greenscape project that we have going on, and I just don't know. It's going to be a couple years before that's done. I just don't know, why is now the time to get this," Clement remarked. "We're probably going to have overages for this greenscape project. I mean, more than likely, it will happen. And I'm in agreement with you. The downtown's not real big.

"I just don't know that we have the need for it now. Maybe we can do it a year or two from now. I'm not being critical with anybody, I just wish that like when these things come up, we can be notified about, hey, this is what we're trying to do ... we were given this information here 33 minutes ago and I was really hoping we would table this thing, to get a little more info, but I just don't think now is the time for that, and I don't know how big of an impact it's going to be."