Daley likes Reese site for Olympic Village, but won't pay cleanup tab
Mayor Daley said today he has not given up on Michael Reese Hospital as the site for a $1.1 billion Olympic Village, but only if the property owner is on the hook for demolition and environmental cleanup.
“If could be $30 million now and, [ultimately] $60 million to clean up. That’s a lot of money to clean up a site like that. Who bears the burden? It’s still a liability for the property owners. It’s their liability —not ours,” the mayor said.
(Rich Hein/Sun-Times)
“You get a piece of property and they say it’s $20 million or $25 million. Then, you find out it’s about $50 million to clean up. You go down deeper. You find out the history of it. It gets more complicated. Many times, they dump things that no one ever knew they dumped in there.”
One day after City Hall broke off talks with Medline Industries, Daley held out hope of resuming negotiations. In fact, the mayor insisted that the city was “still in negotiations with” Medline.
He called the 37-acre hospital campus a “perfect site” for the Olympic Village because of its proximity to the lakefront and McCormick Place and the opportunity to build sorely needed affordable housing on the Near South Side.
“Rebuilding that community would really be important to us,” the mayor said.
But Daley said he’s not about to go forward with a transaction that puts Chicago taxpayers at risk.
The mayor’s original plan called for the city to borrow $85 million to finance the hospital purchase and for Medline to make a “charitable contribution” of $20 million that was supposed to be enough to cover demolition, environmental cleanup and five years of interest payments on the loan at a rate of 5 percent.
Instead, the cost of environmental cleanup is $32 million and counting.
“In negotiations, you have to play hardball. You cannot be weak in regards to any negotiations. You can’t give up on it. You keep working at it. If that doesn’t [work], you look at other sites as well. We have a lot of options. They’re not wedded to one site,” he said.
Medline spokesman Jerreau Beaudoin said his company has the “utmost respect” for Daley and Chicago 2016 Chairman Pat Ryan and wishes them “nothing but success” in their bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games.
“That’s what this is all about for us,” Beaudoin said.
If Medline refuses to blink, Chicago 2016 could either revive its original plan to build the Olympic Village on air rights over a truck staging area for McCormick Place or build it south of 31st Street on a massive parcel being developed by Draper & Kramer.
Daley appears to favor the Draper & Kramer site for the same reasons he pushed for the move to Michael Reese: The village could be built on solid ground at a lower cost and better integrated into the surrounding Bronzeville community. Draper & Kramer officials could not be reached for comment.
The Olympic Village stalemate marks the first major hiccup in an otherwise smooth planning process. But Daley sought to play it down.
“Every city has stumbling blocks. Tokyo, Madrid, Rio — all of ’em. This is nothing new. It’s all part of planning,” he said.