As hard as it might be for yours truly to say this, the
recent collapse of the Midway Airport privatization deal might be just what
Mayor Emanuel and his floor leader, Alderman Patrick O’Connor (40th),
say it is: a failure of a deal that
just didn’t make sense from the taxpayers’ standpoint and that wasn’t going to
get any better due to the absence of competition in the bidding process in the
wake of one of the last two competitor’s dropping out of the process.
Yes, the city’s Chief Financial Officer, Lois Scott, who
quarterbacked this Hindenburg of a project, has her problems; the mutual back
scratcher she recommended for the job of city comptroller, Amer Ahmad, has been
indicted for placing his hand in the cookie jar back in Ohio and apparently was
the subject of federal curiosity even as Ms. Scott wrote Mr. Ahmad a glowing
recommendation. Perhaps as
problematical for Ms. Scott, at least in the short run, the hiring of Mr. Ahmad
has embarrassed the seemingly omniscient Rahm Emanuel. But one suspects that the failure of the
Midway deal had nothing to do with Ms. Scott’s growing problems, which should
provide plenty of grist for the mill of future posts.
Indeed, Alderman O’Connor may have unwittingly told us why
the deal fell apart when he, defending his master Rahm, opined
“All it’s (the
collapse of the Midway deal) gonna do is
tell private investors we’re getting smarter as a negotiating adversary. They’re not gonna be able to come in and
make a ton of money off us at our sufferance.”
(A point of parenthetical digression: why has the Chicago
media taken to printing the contraction “gonna” for “going to”? Yes, we know how much the media are gaga for
their boy Rahm, who uses that bastardization of the words “going to” with great
frequency, but must their adoration of their consanguineous heart throb take
the English language as a casualty?)
Whether the adjective “smarter” is the most apt term here is
questionable, but Mr. O’Connor is correct.
The city is negotiating more aggressively; in this case, the most
salient manifestation of this determination is its insistence on a 40 or fewer
year term for the Midway lease deal.
With such constraints, the potential lessees were not going to “make a
ton of money off” the city. And that is
why there was ultimately only one bidder for this project.
Genuine businesses exist to make money, one way or another, for
their shareholders and partners, not to serve the whims of Super Rahm and his
minions in exchange for a photo-op with the Mayor for their CEOs. And when they don’t make money, they don’t
do deals. One suspects that people like
Messrs. Emanuel and O’Connor, despite having spent their entire lives on the
public payroll or selling the influence they garnered on the public payroll,
know this. Further, Mr. Emanuel will
keep this simple concept in mind as he tries to light a fire under his
seemingly moribund “infrastructure trust.”
Therefore, maybe we should take some comfort in the infrastructure
trust’s halting progress and in the failure of the Midway deal. If either results, or resulted, in too good
a deal for taxpayers, one can be sure that side deals were being cut to make
sure the contractors were making it somewhere else.
One more thing…
People are decrying the hundred of thousands of dollars
spent on consultants, lawyers, etc. spent by the city and the publicly funded
“Midway Advisory Panel.” What a waste,
we are told. Baloney. That money surely found its way into the pockets of
politically connected people who make sure the politicians get their cut at
election time and/or otherwise. Thus,
though the taxpayers may be stuck with the bill, the politicians are doubtless
very happy with these seemingly pointless expenditures…mission indeed
accomplished.
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.
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