City dumps lease for Daley nephew's warehouse
Trucks moving to outside lot at city-owned site
City Hall is breaking its month-to-month lease for a warehouse that Mayor Daley's nephew and his partners bought with city pension funds.
City water department crews were ordered Thursday to move their dump trucks from the warehouse at 3348 S. Pulaski to a city-owned property at 750 N. Kilbourn.
(Brian Jackson/Richard A. Chapma
But city officials say the move had nothing to do with the controversy that exploded last month when the Sun-Times disclosed that the city had been leasing space in the building Daley's nephew Robert Vanecko bought with some of the $68 million in city pension funds managed by his company, a deal now under investigation by a federal grand jury and the city's inspector general.
"We're reducing the number of trucks utilized for the water department construction, and we will no longer need that large indoor facility this winter,'' said Daley's deputy chief of staff, Lisa Schrader. "So, instead of continuing to pay for indoor leased space for the remainder of the summer and fall months, we are moving those trucks to a city-owned outdoor location while we search for other city-owned sites that will allow us to park the trucks indoors.''
City trucks had parked outside the warehouse for several years, but after Vanecko and his partners struck a deal to buy the building two years ago, city officials decided to move the trucks inside, under a more expensive lease. The city signed the lease 13 days before Vanecko's group closed the deal. The city has paid more than $480,000 in rent since then.
Vanecko had said he would leave DV Urban Realty Partners, the company he co-founded to manage city pension funds, by July 1.