Did Park District officials tell alderman Vi Daley about their plans to build a soccer field in her ward? It’s not a trivial question: the board has agreed to allow a private school exclusive access to public land.
Well, was the alderman notified or not?
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For her part, Daley’s sticking to her story: she says she didn’t know the Park District was installing the soccer field until this spring when Crain’s Chicago Business columnist Greg Hinz called her for comment. “We had a meeting on this–oh God, I don’t know how many years ago,” Daley says. “But that was a different plan. That was a running track. We had a lot of meetings back then and there was a lot of community opposition. As far as I knew it was a dead issue.”
In exchange for building the field the school will have exclusive use of it during much of the spring and fall soccer seasons. It gets to use the field from 3 to 7 PM every weekday in April, May, September, and October. It also gets the field from 8 to 5 on weekdays in August, to gear up for the fall.
Back in September or October, when there could have been a public hearing on the soccer field, Alderman Daley was entering a tough reelection battle and it might have been difficult for her to endorse it. “I would have been raising tough questions,” says Michele Smith, who wound up losing to Daley in April’s runoff.
So what’s the point of the dog-and-pony show? “The Park District wants people to be able to see the proposal,” says Daley. “So they’re going to show them.”
By law, TIFs are supposed to create jobs by subsidizing development in blighted communities. I still don’t understand how the booming Loop even qualifies as a potential site for one, much less how the city can justify rewarding a company that’s firing more than 400 employees. Essentially, the city’s paying CME more than $100,000 for every job it eliminates.
