The $1.3 billion push to double the size of McCormick Place and build a domed stadium for the Chicago Bears rubs salt in two of the oldest wounds in local politics: Chicago versus the rest of the state and downtown versus the neighborhoods.
Not since Chicago tried, and ultimately failed, to mount a 1992 World`s Fair have the lines been drawn so clearly.
Suburban and rural lawmakers, mostly Republicans, see themselves being asked once again to help pay for a mega-project that holds few benefits for their constituents.
Within Chicago, many neighborhood and human-services advocates view the so-called ”McDome” project as an example of ”trickle-down” economics run amok.
As often happens when veteran combatants take to the rhetorical trenches, ungilded truth has been an early casualty.
McDome advocates are likely overestimating the project`s benefits while minimizing its cost. Opponents, meanwhile, are posing apples-or-oranges choices between spending tax dollars on football games or on health care, education and other social needs.
This is, moreover, an election year-a season in which political posturing becomes as mannered as ballet.
Gov. James Thompson and Mayor Richard Daley support the project.
But with Thompson retiring after 14 years as governor, neither Democratic nor Republican legislators want to do anything-such as enacting new taxes-that would jeopardize their party`s chances of grabbing the governor`s mansion in November. And Daley, whose support for the project has tapered off to faint praise, wants to do nothing that would provoke neighborhood opposition-opposition that could coalesce around the McDome spending issue.
This is the thicket into which McDome organizers will wade this week as they travel to Springfield with their list of new taxes that will be required to build the project.
Little wonder that many political hands, including the governor and House Minority Leader Lee Daniels (R-Elmhurst), are predicting the whole matter will be deferred until the autumn session.
But whether the crunch comes then or now, arguments for and against McDome are filling the political sky.
Project organizers got off the first barrage in late January.
The Metropolitan Pier & Exposition Authority, the city-state agency in charge of McCormick Place, trotted out a book-length, $320,000 consultant`s report that concluded Chicago will lose its position as America`s foremost convention town unless it doubles the size of its lakefront convention center. The report also found a need for a huge assembly hall that, conveniently, could double as the domed home for the Chicago Bears.
Reams of market forecast data-all of it based on an assumption that demand for convention space will grow by 6 percent a year indefinitely-show how the expansion would shower the Illinois economy with 14,300 new jobs, $477 million in new spending, and $101 million in new state and local taxes.
There appeared simultaneously an Illinois Leadership Coalition composed of top business, labor, and civic executives, including several veterans of the effort to stage a 1992 fair. Like the fair boosters, the coalition has hired a team of professional publicists and lobbyists.
Five years ago the legislature scrapped the 1992 fair after studies showed it would not ”pay for itself” when direct revenues were applied to direct expenses.
Indeed, there is no promise, even by McDome`s loudest advocates, that hall rentals-including the $8 million a year agreed to last week by the Bears- will repay construction costs. No U.S. convention center does, and McCormick Place barely covers operating expenses.
So the first challenge facing John Schmidt and James Reilly, respectively the chairman and chief operating officer of the pier and exposition authority, is to convince legislators-especially non-Chicago legislators-that their districts will get a sufficient return for their tax dollars.
To that end, Schmidt reasons that the largest beneficiary of McDome-generated taxes will be the state treasury and that most state spending occurs outside city limits.
Schmidt and Reilly are also aiming the tax bite at the convention and tourism trade, not at the general public. They reportedly will ask for a statewide tax on rent-a-cars, a step-zoned tax on Chicago-area hotel rooms, and a tax on restaurant meals served within a downtown district.
So far their tax plan has been greeted like an unwanted in-law.
”I couldn`t support that,” was the first reaction of state Sen. Forrest Etheredge (R-Aurora) when asked about higher taxes on suburban hotels such as those popping up in his district along the U.S. Interstate 88 high-tech corridor.
Even Chicago lawmakers are finding things not to like.
”The theory is to tax conventioneers, not someone buying a sandwich on their lunch break,” said state Rep. John Cullerton (D-Chicago) on hearing that an early version of the ”downtown” restaurant zone stretched all the way to Belmont Avenue, well into his North Side district.
The other timeless dispute reawakened by McDome is not so much geographic as socio-economic.
”We`ve been continually told there`s no money in the state budget for a welfare increase,” said Douglas Dobmeyer, executive director of the Public Welfare Coalition of Illinois. ”Now we`re told there might be money for a playground for the Bears.”
Dobmeyer said Illinois welfare recipients this year got their first raise in 5 years: a 7.5 percent bump to $367 a month for a family of three, well short of the 20 percent cost-of-living increase during the period.
His organization is now pushing for an annual winter clothing allowance of $25 a welfare child, though Dobmeyer said he is being told the requisite $25 million may not be available in next year`s state budget.
Asked whether the jobs and economic activity spawned by McDome wouldn`t ultimately benefit the poor, Dobmeyer shot back: ”Trickle-down doesn`t work. Not when people are cut off from the downtown economy. Not when people don`t have the education and training they need to get into that stream.”
”Where are the priorities?” echoed Edna Pardo, president of the League of Women Voters of Chicago. She argued that the $75 million a year in tax funds required to fund the new hall and dome could be used to cut class sizes in overcrowded public schools, to set up a badly needed ambulatory health clinic, or to rebuild crumbling streets, sewers and viaducts in failing neighborhoods.
The pier and exposition authority`s Schmidt countered by arguing that lawmakers would hardly tax the convention and tourism industry to raise funds for social services. But they might raise taxes on the industry to enlarge the industry, thereby enlarging the state`s tax and employment base, thereby helping the poor.
