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Look for Emanuel to give on school closings — a little

Fri, 17 May 2013 13:00:00 EST

As Mayor Rahm Emanuel continues to get clobbered in the media over his school closure plan, I'd look for his Board of Education to pull at least a few of the 54 schools now targeted for closure off the table when the board meets on May 22.

But if I read the tea leaves right, Team Emanuel will not be making any big capitulation — merely an adjustment to indicate that it's listening and that all of the public hearings and review by outside examiners wasn't a big waste of time.

The latest shot at the mayor came from Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, who told the Sun-Times the board ought to back off from shutting the 13 schools that hearing examiners urged be kept open, at least for now.

Ms. Preckwinkle, a former teacher who on occasion still acts the role, actually went considerably further, dinging the mayor for “the way in which the teachers were demonized” before last fall's strike. But though the paper didn't play it up, even Ms. Preckwinkle conceded that some schools will have to be closed in African-American neighborhoods that have lost much population.

As I've previously reported, Ms. Preckwinkle and Mr. Emanuel have different styles and, should he step down from the office, she's at the top of my list as a potential replacement.

That having been said, I wouldn't look for a large number of concessions next week by Mr. Emanuel's schools chief, Barbara Byrd-Bennett. For two reasons:

One, Mr. Emanuel has invested major, major political capital in this fight. He knew exactly what he was getting into and, should all or the majority of the proposed closings be reversed, any political weakness will be seized upon by every interest group as a sign that the mayor can be rolled — particularly when CTU opposes even one closure.

Second, the main foe of the closures, the Chicago Teachers Union, doesn't have the same leverage that it enjoyed during the strike.

The strike came in the stretch run of the presidential race. Mr. Emanuel was raising money for his ex-boss, President Barack Obama, and wasn't about to do anything to hurt him. CTU knew just that, and there was reason to believe that it had persuaded other labor leaders to make a national issue of the matter in the closing days of the presidential race. That helped the union win some decent concessions in its next contract here.

That was then, though. As for now, I'd look for Mr. Emanuel to give a little on the closings. But not too much.

IRS power may need permanent trim, Roskam says

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:00:00 EST

The Internal Revenue Service may need to have its power permanently trimmed in view of the scandal over its targeting of conservative political groups, according to the senior Republican in the Chicago area's congressional delegation.

Speaking as the House begins what is likely to be a lengthy series of hearings on the IRS flap, U.S. Rep. Peter Roskam of Wheaton, the chief deputy Republican whip, says his goal is "to try to lay a foundation as to what happened."

Members of Congress had asked the IRS before about reports that conservative groups were being put through special scrutiny to be granted nonprofit tax status, and "were assured that wasn't happening," Mr. Roskam said. But by all accounts, it did, and Congress needs to determine "what happened? Who did it? What assurance do we have that it won't happen again?"

When the inquiry is completed, though, "maybe the (tax) code needs to be revisited," Mr. Roskam said. Asked how, he referred only to "the enormous amount of discretion" the IRS has in granting or not granting tax-free status.

Mr. Roskam says he's not buying arguments that the apparent missteps came when the IRS was flooded with requests by new political groups following the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which loosened rules for spending on political campaigns by "independent" groups.

"I have not heard that they had designs on anyone else," said Mr. Roskam, referring to groups on the political left. "It would appear there was a political agenda for this to happen. . . .If it was a response to Citizens United, (the IRS actions) would have happened across the political agenda."

In response to another question, though, Mr. Roskam said he's seen "no evidence" that President Barack Obama or senior officials in his administration orchestrated such conduct.

Mr. Obama has said he's "angry" about the revelations and didn't know about them until a report was issued by the IRS inspector general, which led to the resignation of the acting IRS commissioner. Reports so far have suggested that the misconduct occurred during the tenure of another commissioner appointed by President George W. Bush.

Update, 12:30 p.m. — Meanwhile, though it looks like Mr. Roskam is on the right track, the House GOP's political arm just can't help itself.

In statements today, the National Republican Campaign Committee slaps two area Democratic congressmen, Brad Schneider of Deerfield and Bill Foster of Naperville, for accepting "tainted campaign cash." That would be the union that represents some IRS workers, the National Treasury Employees Union.

With IRS "ravaged by scandal," NRCC says, it's "hypocritical" for the Dems to take a penny.

Of course, the NRCC in its own statement, fingers "ineffective (IRS) management" for the scandal. Last time I looked, management wasn't in the union. And the Treasury Department covers lots and lots of ground that isn't IRS territory.

If the union was involved in the targeting of conservative groups, NRCC would have a point. If a considerable portion of the union's membership was involved, it would have a point. But demanding that the money be returned is like demanding that all employees of JPMorgan stop donating because company boss Jamie Dimon has stumbled and some folks want to strip him of his dual post as chairman. Silly.

Amtrak chief rallies rail faithful in Chicago

Thu, 16 May 2013 14:00:00 EST

The head of Amtrak came to Chicago today to rally the rail faithful, and his message was a simple one: Keep the faith, despite a ride that often remains very bumpy.

In a luncheon speech to the Midwest High Speed Rail Association, Amtrak chief Joseph Boardman says he and the agency certainly have enjoyed having a president in Barack Obama who is “really interested” in passenger rail.

His reference was to the fact that rebuilding passenger rail has been a focus of the administration since its earliest days, with Mr. Obama including $8 billion for high-speed rail in his first-year stimulus program.

But many others in Washington remain much more skeptical, Mr. Boardman said, even though the National Railroad Passenger Corp., as it's formally known, now pays 88 percent of its operating costs without federal subsidy.

Navigating that reality is "a balance constantly,” said Mr. Boardman, with the agency constantly under pressure from one direction to save money by cutting things like food service on long-haul trains and pulled from another direction to expedite development of true high-speed service of 220 mph or more.

"Keep your vision," Mr. Boardman told his audience, noting that California is proceeding with federal help on a starter 220-mph system. "We may not get to 220 quickly. We may not get there at all very fast. But maybe we'll get to 160."

I didn't get a chance to talk with Mr. Boardman, the former New York state transportation commissioner. But, based on his remarks, he seemed most concerned that the agency will be forced by Congress to end transcontinental and other long routes.

Doing so would hurt "national unity," he said, with many rural areas still counting on trains to get to big cities. "The federal government spent billions of dollars developing this network."

In some ways, Amtrak has growing pains, with ridership up about half since 2000, Mr. Boardman said. Particularly on the East Coast, "we can't keep up," and improvements there and elsewhere require money. Yet the agency often has to depend on a one-year capital appropriation that makes long-term planning very difficult, he said.

About the only thing that surprised me was that Mr. Boardman went out of his way to say nice things about the freight rail companies whose tracks Amtrak uses.

"The railroads are, in fact, good partners for Amtrak," he said, even though singling out that Union Pacific and Canadian National have been harshly criticized by U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin in recent years for allegedly delaying passenger trains to give priority to freight.

"They want the same thing we do. They want us off their tracks as fast as possible," he joked.

In response to audience questions, Mr. Boardman offered little hope of any action soon to extend Amtrak routes to O'Hare, allowing easy transfers between trains and planes, or on redeveloping Union Station here. Both take money, and the company doesn't have it, he said.

Emanuel steps on own message with DePaul announcement

Thu, 16 May 2013 12:00:00 EST

Ask any communications pro what the secret is to getting your message out and they'll almost certainly give you two pieces of advice. One: Keep it simple, so that listeners don't get swamped in data overload and tune you out. Two: Don't overstate your pitch, lest listeners mistrust the message and, um, tune it out.

So why can't Team Emanuel figure that out?

Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his advisers live and die by the news cycle. They spin me and other reporters morning, noon and night. Lovely. But they keep stepping on their message, as in today's revealing announcement that a deal finally has been cut to lure the DePaul Blue Demons back to town to play in a new arena that will be built across the street from McCormick Place.

I call the message "revealing," because once again Mr. Emanuel shows he's the mayor of Chicago and no place else. If that means luring a corporate headquarters from Libertyville (Motorola Mobility), a huge operations center from Elk Grove Village (United Airlines) or a basketball team that now plays in Rosemont, well, #%$ you.

Of course, that invites the kind of response Mr. Emanuel is getting from Rosemont Mayor Bradley Stephens, who is hinting that he might work to block approval of legislation needed for the arena unless Rosemont gets something too. Details of that wish list to come.

But the most revealing thing is this propensity to get in the way of the core message.

Instead of just announcing the arena, together with a new 500-room McCormick-area hotel, the message got thrown together with a lot of other stuff, including the first phase of renovating and repositioning Navy Pier, construction of a second McCormick Place Hotel that already was announced months ago, etc.

I understand why. On the second anniversary of his inauguration as mayor, Mr. Emanuel wanted to package together a bunch of stuff into a Really Big Deal — 10,000 jobs, $1.1 billion in investment and "hundreds of millions of dollars in economic growth annually."

What a mayor. Let's re-elect him tomorrow.

But lost in all of that was a better message. That is that this mayor has an economic strategy — a jobs strategy — with enormous potential. The strategy is to take key neighborhoods and economic sectors and pour in resources, hoping that that will catalyze already favorable trends.

In that setting, the DePaul arena — the city calls it an "activity center" that it believes also will lure concerts, other sporting events, and big meetings in conjunction with McCormick Place conventions — is only the latest in a series of steps that makes sense.

McCormick Place hosts millions of people a year. But it's hard to get to, and has few of the ancillary creature comforts like hotel rooms, restaurants, bars and the like nearby.

So, early in his term, Mr. Emanuel announced that a new el stop on the Green Line will be built at Cermak and State. Then McCormick officials — pushed by the mayor — announced they're building a 1,200 room headquarters hotel right across the street, one with frontage on State Street, where the city hopes to turn the old Motor Row into an Old Town-ish night-life district. Now comes two more pieces: the arena/activity center, and a second, 500-room hotel.

That, I suspect, really is approaching critical mass — even if the rumored new gambling casino doesn't go in the neighborhood.

All of this development, collectively, could turn the area around Cermak and the lake into one huge job generator, the biggest between the Loop and the University of Chicago in Hyde Park. Clustering works. And the jobs aren't, for the most part, for Mr. Emanuel's corporate and investment banker buddies. They're for folks without college degrees, most of them immigrants and minorities.

Who do you think work at hotels and bars and restaurants and convention centers anyhow?

The message ought to be jobs – jobs in an area that is crying for jobs. That's the smart answer to yapping from the teachers' union and the police union and so forth about spending $55 million in Tax Increment Financing on the arena-plus plan (instead of salaries for members of the teachers and police unions).

Instead, Mr. Emanuel risks this all coming across as using public money to help a private institution, DePaul, which a good number of connected Chicago pols happen to have attended. Either that or something about bicycle flyovers and grand staircases at Navy Pier.

Jobs, Mr. Mayor, jobs. Try focusing your message and your life actually might get a little easier.

Emanuel unveils $1.1 billion DePaul arena, Navy Pier plan

Wed, 15 May 2013 18:49:21 EST

Hoping to send a loud message that Chicago is serious about luring tourism and entertainment spending, the Emanuel administration today released details of two initiatives that have been developing for more than a year and that it says will mean $1.1 billion in investment.

In one, a final deal has been struck to build a 10,000-seat arena across the street from McCormick Place that will be the new home of the DePaul Blue Demons basketball team and host smaller conferences, meetings, concerts and other sporting events. As part of that undertaking, a 500-room hotel will be erected kitty-corner from a 1,100-room "headquarters" hotel that already had been announced.

In the other initiative, Mayor Rahm Emanuel's team announced that it's ready to move ahead with the first, $163 million phase of the redevelopment of Navy Pier. Included: a new park and bicycle flyover at the pier's west end, an expanded Children's Museum and 54,000 square feet of new dining and entertainment space, mostly on the pier's lightly used east end.

“We're trying to get more bang for our buck,” said Deputy Mayor Steve Koch. “By putting this together in a big package, we think we have a chance to dramatically change people's perceptions” about coming to the city to play and relax.

But the twin announcements — which come not coincidentally on the same day Mayor Emanuel begins his third year in office — already are stirring opposition, with doubts about whether the projects will pay for themselves and the Chicago Teachers Union objecting to the proposed use of $55 million in tax-increment financing for the McCormick Place-area work.

That controversy could rise if the legislature approves a proposed Chicago casino and it goes near McCormick Place. City officials say they're not now planning a gambling hall, but insiders predict it will happen.

Even without a casino, the city needs the General Assembly to act on the mayor's plan. City Hall says it will need one “tweak” that would allow McPier to issue bonds that could be spent on renovation and not just new construction.One by one, here are the details of what's being proposed, with the official announcement to come at a series of news conferences tomorrow. (Click here to see the whole plan below.)

The new arena — officially dubbed an event center — will cost $140 million, plus $33 million for land acquisition. That's substantially less than the $300 million figure that had been whispered in recent months. A spokesman for Mr. Emanuel says the arena will create 10,000 construction and 3,700 permanent jobs.

The facility will cover most of the block bounded by 21st Street, Indiana Avenue, Cermak Road and Prairie Avenue. That's a block west of a property that the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, the agency that runs McCormick Place, originally wanted. But that land has been stuck in bankruptcy proceedings and “it was taking forever to acquire it,” said authority CEO Jim Reilly. So the agency switched gears.

DePaul's board has approved an agreement in principle to hold its men's and women's basketball games there, as well as some other events such as graduation ceremonies, Mr. Koch said. The school, which now plays its basketball games in Rosemont, will finance half the cost of the new building (or $70 million) and, according to Mr. Reilly, it will pay “market rate” rent of $25,000 per men's game, $15,000 for women's, which attract a smaller crowd.

DePaul will get naming rights on the facility, and it is believed the school has lined up a major donor. The timetable calls for the Blue Demons to begin playing there in the 2016-17 session.

McPier, as the convention agency generally is known, will pay the other half of building costs by using leftover funds from bond sales that have been held in reserve. Those revenue bonds are secured by McPier revenues, primarily a tax on hotel rooms.

Messrs. Reilly and Koch said the arena/event center will at least pay its own operating costs, thanks in part to raiding the concert business that the United Center has dominated. But the United Center's primary owners, Jerry Reinsdorf and Rocky Wirtz, don't like that at all. And some sports insiders argue that spending the $70 million may cause the city to squeeze Chicago hotel guests for even more money, even though they already pay the highest room tax in the country.

“Not true,” responds Mr. Reilly. “In fact, the development ought to help . . . attract more people to more hotels.”

Among those interested in using the new arena for convention-related gatherings are shows for hardware merchants, dentists and the solar-power industry, the city says.

We had heard about the 1,100-room hotel to McCormick's west before; it will be financed by McPier, though run privately. What's new is another 500-room hotel that would be developed somewhat later, depending on demand. It would go next to the basketball arena.

A total of $33 million in TIF money will be used for land acquisition and streetscaping. The investment “absolutely” is worth it because the development overall will spur the type of night life, dining and entertainment venues the McCormick Place area has lacked, Mr. Koch said.But the idea already is getting a thumbs down from Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis, who is battling Mr. Emanuel over school closings that, at least partially, are being prompted by government financial woes.

“When the mayor claims he is facing unprecedented budget problems, he has a choice to make,” she said in a statement. “He is choosing between putting our communities first or continuing the practice of handing out millions of public dollars to private operators, even in the toughest of times.”

Other opposition comes from those who live near the increasingly populated Near South Side and potentially from Rosemont Mayor Brad Stephens, who told reporters in Springfield on Wednesday that his village might like to get something as part of the McPier legislation.

At Navy Pier, the decision was made a year ago to go with designer James Corner, of New York High-Line fame. But it's now clear that some of the more exotic proposals that were considered, including wetlands, an underwater fish-viewing area, curving boardwalks and a “giant urban hot tub,” have been permanently axed in favor of more conventional modifications.

“We felt the pier was becoming too carnival-like,” said Navy Pier President Marilynn Gardner. “We're creating a more authentic experience . . . celebrating the fact that it's a pier.”

Officials now have $60 million on hand from old bond issues and expect to sell $55 million more in bonds, Ms. Gardner said. The restaurants and Children's Museum collectively will bring about another $50 million of their own capital funds to the project.

Among other features included in the first phase: reconstruction of the family area near the children's museum on the pier's west end, a grand staircase from water level to the Ferris wheel at mid-pier and a 50 percent increase in the size of the museum.

Look for lots, lots more debate on all of this. Meanwhile, the big plan, said Mr. Emanuel in a statement, “is a vital step in tapping the full potential of the city . . . I have focused on attracting people to Chicago and showing off this wonderful city, and these two projects will leave a lasting impact.”

DePaul McCormick Place Plan (Click to Enlarge)