Olympic bid threatened by alderman
Smith demands bigger pool at Westinghouse
The chairman of the City Council's Black Caucus is threatening to embarrass Chicago with the U.S. Olympic Committee -- and turn Mayor Daley's Olympic dream into a nightmare -- if an Olympic-size swimming pool is not included in plans for a new Westinghouse High School.
Ald. Ed Smith (28th) said he stormed out of a meeting this week with Montel Gayles, executive director of the Daley-chaired Public Building Commission, after Gayles told West Side community leaders an Olympic pool was not part of the plan.
The new school -- to be built on the site of the old building at Franklin and Kedzie -- includes a "competition-grade" pool half that size.
That wasn't the only bad news to come out of the stormy meeting at the Garfield Park Conservatory.
According to Smith, Gayles said the PBC got only two bids to build the new school and that both were in the $70 million range -- $25 million over the projected budget. As a result, the construction contract had to be re-bid, pushing back the opening of the new high school for one year -- until fall 2009, Smith said.
Little Village High School, the most expensive Chicago Public School ever built, cost $63 million.
To Smith, the one-year delay was less disappointing than the size of the pool. It flies in the face of the ultimatum he delivered to Daley last fall: that the West Side share in the largesse of a 2016 Summer Olympic Games in Chicago to be based on the South Side and along the lakefront.
Gayles said he's building the smaller pool at the new Westinghouse because that's what the Chicago Board of Education asked him to build.
"The PBC is managing construction for our client, the Chicago Public Schools. We were not asked to design an Olympic-sized pool. We were asked to design a competition-grade facility as per state and national standards," Gayles said.
Chicago School Board spokesman Michael Vaughn said an Olympic-size pool at Westinghouse would be a first for Chicago Public Schools. It would "mean starting from scratch," pushing back the targeted opening until 2010.
"Our focus is on providing the West Side community with a first-class education facility open in the fall of 2009. The competition-sized pool, we believe, is more than sufficient to build an interest and passion in swimming," Vaughn said.