It’s time to cut Rich Daley some slack.
Not much, because he sits behind the mayor’s desk and that’s where the buck is supposed to stop.
But it’s time, after three weeks of constant bombardment by our city’s two daily newspapers, to observe a temporary cease-fire.
This is, after all, standard artillery procedure. Only when the smoke clears can one see which journalistic shots hit the mark, which fell wide, and importantly, whether there are any innocents caught in the field of fire.
The opening salvo, fired by the Chicago Sun-Times at the mayor’s City Council floor leader, Patrick Huels, was a direct hit. Turns out the alderman from Daley’s native 11th Ward is part-owner of a security firm favored by companies that get city development subsidies. And worse, that Huels’ firm had been bailed out by a million-dollar loan from another city contractor, cartage king Michael Tadin, for whom Huels helped secure a million-dollar city subsidy. Outrage mounted when the Tribune disclosed that Huels’ company hadn’t been paying the city’s payroll tax.
Little wonder Mayor Daley didn’t try to talk Huels out of resigning. Or that Daley’s reputation also got bloodied by the shrapnel. As well it should, for Tadin is a Daley pal and fellow Bridgeporter who got rich with the help of city trucking contracts and real estate deals.
My hunch, however, is that the mayor didn’t know about the smelly Tadin-to-Huels loan. I even suspect Daley feels mightily abused, maybe even double-crossed, by those who have been trading on his friendship.
Some of my newspaper colleagues think me naive in this belief. Daley was born and raised in the crony culture of City Hall, they say, and he has to know what irons his pals have in the fire.
But I doubt he’s aware of them all–at least not the deals with such huge potential for embarrassment. One lesson Daley ought to take away from this is that he needs to find out who’s getting what, and to tell those who’ve been freelancing to give it up or get out.
Other shots fired at the Daley regime are not as black-on-white as the headlines make them seem.
It was dead wrong for Huels to take that loan from Tadin, but I’m not at all convinced it was wrong for the city to subsidize the cartage firm’s relocation into a city industrial park. Was he supposed to take his company to the suburbs?
This gets to the tricky intermingling of money, political clout and urban redevelopment.
The Daley administration has a bad habit of dealing mainly with its friends on such projects. This isn’t illegal, but it raises the question of whether a better-qualified stranger could do a project better, or for a lesser public subsidy. That’s the key question, not whether urban renewal needs doing (it does) or whether it requires a public subsidy (almost always, yes).
So the public needs to ask: Could another development team besides Matt Walsh and Jack Higgins, old friends of the mayor, do a better job of redeveloping the derelict rail yards south of downtown along the Chicago River? And could that other developer do it without tax-increment financing, or TIF, the property tax mechanism the city will use to fund construction of streets and sewers where now there are only rotted ties and track ballast?
The first answer is “perhaps,” but the latter is almost assuredly “no.” The proof seems obvious–the land there has lain fallow for 40 years, ever since the last freight train chugged out. If Mayor Daley had realized his dream of legalizing and luring a gambling casino to those rail yards, no subsidy would have been necessary or warranted. But Walsh/Higgins, who already have control of some of the land, plan townhouses and mid-rise residences. Laying the public infrastructure for such a project is a worthy use of TIF funding, even if the two men are friends of the mayor. (They also run the largest construction firm in the Chicago area.)
Another knock against TIF financing is that it diverts taxes that would otherwise go to the public schools. But again, that presumes the development would be possible without TIF. By my lights, it is not.
Call me soft on cronyism if you will, but I think Daley’s plan to extend the old North Loop TIF zone southward through the seedier parts of the Loop, and down the riverbank all the way to 18th Street, is, well, a planning master stroke. There are no more federal subsidies to pay the public’s share of downtown redevelopment. So why not tap the rebounding North Loop for improvements further south, especially if TIF cash eliminates the need for a public works bond issue, with all the interest payments and issuance fees that would entail?
None of this means it doesn’t pay to be a friend of Rich Daley. If you’re a Loop property owner in need of TIF help, chances are you’ll find yourself at the door of the mayor’s former law firm (Daley & George) or another of his lawyer-friends, such as schools chairman Gery Chico.
That’s the problem. If Rich Daley truly aspires to be a great mayor of a great city, he needs to point the “city that works” in a new direction.
But don’t, Mr. Mayor, let this barrage of bad ink scare you away from TIFs, or from subsidized industrial parks, or any of the other legal devices Chicago desperately needs to compete with the Schaumburgs and the Napervilles.
City-building is God’s work. But for Pete’s sake, let a few strangers in on it.
