I’m starting to feel sort of sorry for the Ricketts family, owners of the Cubs, who’ve been roundly pounded by politicians and pundits for proposing to spend at least $200 million in public money on Wrigley Field renovations (which, as it happens, is the subject of this issue’s cover story).
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Tom Ricketts, who led his family’s effort to take over the Cubs from Tribune Company a year ago, mishandled the current plan by bypassing Governor Pat Quinn before going public with it. “Apparently, they don’t think I’m as important as others,” Quinn told reporters. “I am important in this matter because I’m goalie for the people of Illinois to make sure they get their top priorities addressed.”
If only the taxpayers of Chicago had a goalie to protect them from deals like the mayor’s CME proposal, which is to pay the Chicago Mercantile Exchange out of the mayor’s favorite little honeypot—the tax increment financing program.
Effectively, Mayor Daley was volunteering to pony up public property-tax dollars to give one billion-dollar corporation a leg up on another billion-dollar corporation in a bidding war to buy out a third billion-dollar corporation. And you still thought Chicago was the home of free-market economics.
Nonetheless, the city, when asked, contends to this day that if ICE had won the bidding war it would have moved jobs to Atlanta. “The Intercontinental Exchange emerged as a competing bidder for the CBOT,” reads a 2009 staff report on the project from the Department of Community Development. “In order to complete the transaction, CME wanted to raise its proposed price and requested the city’s assistance in helping to cover redevelopment costs for the consolidation. ICE is headquartered in Atlanta and if ICE were the successful bidder, it is likely they would have moved the headquarters and many CBOT jobs to Atlanta. The city’s offer of assistance helped to incent CME to raise its price by an amount that allowed them to outbid ICE.”
That seems unlikely: In 2007 CME sold two floors it owns in the skyscraper at 20 S. Wacker for about $17 million. In 2008 it found $8.3 billion to buy out the New York Mercantile Exchange. So far this year the exchange has made some $750 million in profits on revenues of more than $2.2 billion, according to the Sun-Times.
Care to comment? Find this story at chicagoreader.com/politics. Ben Joravsky discusses his reporting weekly with journalist Dave Glowacz at mrradio.org/theworks.
