CHOOSE CHICAGO…OR CHOOSE MORE POLICE OFFICERS?

2/21/13

Mayor Rahm Emanuel today appeared before something called “Choose Chicago,” a group whose stated purpose is to promote tourism in the city of Chicago.   Promote tourism?  Talk about an open ended, vague, and incomprehensible mission, ideally suited to evading accountability and thus serving as a means for pols to shower dollars on their friends, toadies, and financial admirers!   But I digress.  The Mayor, at the end of his speech to the esteemed assemblage, announced that he was ordering the Department of Aviation to contribute another $5 million, on top of the $2 million the city has already given to Choose Chicago, to market Midway and O’Hare airports.

Surely, the Mayor knows as well as anyone that the city is broke and thus can’t be handing out money even to worthy causes, let alone to groups like Choose Chicago.   He thus stated that the $5mm for Choose Chicago, which is packed, in one way or the other, with the Mayor’s friends from the “private sector”   (See my 2/20/13 post, THE PRIVATE SECTOR’S ROLE IN “MODERN” CHICAGO:  SHUT UP AND PAY.), will come from nebulous “savings.”

Hmm…

Even assuming that these “savings” are somehow real, isn’t the point of saving money to save money, rather than spend it elsewhere, when one’s future budgets are swimming in red ink?   Rather than spending the money the city manages to save, perhaps it should instead NOT spend the money, lower its deficit, and thus reduce the amount of money it will have to borrow, or tax, in the future.  

Perhaps I am being uncharacteristically starry-eyed here in suggesting that politicians like Rahm Emanuel can actually exercise anything like fiscal discipline in any but the shortest of runs.   Perhaps I am being hopelessly naïve when I assume that Rahm Emanuel, or any pol, can avoid using the taxpayers’ money to pay back their friends in the “private sector” who do so much to advance the careers of those who strut and preen for the cameras for a living.   Let’s instead get realistic and assume that a pol will spend any nickel he can get his hands on; why save for the long run when one’s next election is at most only four years away?

So if Rahm Emanuel feels compelled to spend any “savings,” real or imaginary, and he really wants to promote tourism, why not put the $5mm he wants to spend on Choose Chicago into hiring more police officers?   Despite the Mayor’s, and Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy’s, vehement denials, Chicago’s growing and highly visible crime problem has to be having a desultory impact on Chicago tourism.  So rather than spending money on such trendy piffles as Choose Chicago, the Mayor could better promote tourism by making Chicago a safer place to visit.   Even $5mm, enough to hire a few more police officers, would be a good start.

See my two books, The Chairman, A Novel of Big City Politics and The Chairman’s Challenge, A Continuing Novel of Big City Politics, for further illumination on how things work in Chicago and Illinois politics.