While you were distracted by all the NATO nonsense that’s been consuming our city for the last few weeks, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has been on the move as usual.
Let’s start with the corporate handouts. Emanuel turned over $29.5 million in desperately needed property tax dollars to a consortium of wealthy investors who clearly don’t need the money. In the mayor’s defense, it wasn’t his idea. He was dusting off a bad one left over from his Mayor Richard Daley.
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In exchange for that $29.5, the public’s getting a 1.5-acre park. Not the kind of park where you throw Frisbees or play soccer or run around a track—more like a river walk with trees and grass.
There’s so much wrong with this deal, it’s hard to know where to begin. Let’s start with the fact that TIFs are supposed to be reserved for the poorest of poor communities, and the West Loop definitely isn’t one of them. Then there’s the involvement of Ivanhoe, which, as one of the world’s largest real estate firms, should be able to finance its own deals.
It’s not as though there’s a dying need for office space in the Loop. The developers point out they’re still trying to bring in tenants. As Ryan Ori writes for Crain’s Chicago Business, it’s what’s called a “spec building,” in which there aren’t any preconstruction leases.
Don’t forget—there’s no credible evidence that charters do any better at educating students than public schools. Often, they do worse. So the practical effect of replacing public schools with charters is not to benefit large numbers of students, but to create a workforce of teachers that’s paid less. And that leaves more public money for . . . you guessed it—the charter school operators.
Last week brought the revelation by our own Mick Dumke that Mayor Emanuel’s been systematically pruning the city workforce. Well, not the whole workforce. In his office, Emanuel employs 86, up from the 81 Mayor Daley had on the payroll. Emanuel’s also paying his mayoral office employees more than Daley did—an average of $88,000, up from $85,000.
