Museum fiasco and other city news
Monday, Sep 24, 2007 - Posted by Paul Richardson
* How the museum fight got ugly
* Neighbors bristle at Daley’s comments
* Laura Washington: Daley’s museum gambit aimed at Olympics
As the summer legislative debacle dragged on in Springfield, Daley laid low. In September, while the clock was ticking down to midnight of the CTA’s doomsday scenario, he was tooling around Paris on a bicycle.
Mr. Gets Things Done is dawdling over a decision on a new police superintendent while schoolchildren are being shot down on the streets, and his administration remains recalcitrant about slamming down hard on police brutality and corruption.
Why? Because right now, Daley has only one agenda. Anyone who has been around him for more than 10 seconds lately knows he has caught a bad case of Olympic fever. Real bad. Snaring Chicago as the site for the 2016 Olympics will forever seal his legacy as the Mayor Who Made Chicago a World Class City. Forever.
* Freshman alderman Reilly tries to hold his own
Aside from the mayor’s blow up at him, the toll on Reilly is not unexpected given that he is the local elected representative of the city’s marquee ward.
It’s a ward brimming with high-stakes development, from Trump Tower on the Chicago River to the 2,000-foot Chicago Spire planned for the lakefront.
Reilly has already put the brakes on Northwestern University’s plans to sell the historic Lake Shore Athletic Club to a developer who intended to tear it down.
He’s also dealing with Streeterville residents’ concerns about traffic congestion, inadequate parking and a proposed helipad with Children’s Memorial Hospital’s $850 million plan to relocate to Streeterville.
Reilly sought to dispel any notion that he’s against development, stressing that he has already given the green light to a number of projects.
* Zorn: If alderman is in ‘prerogatory,’ where is Daley?
“There’s aldermanic prerogative,” conceded Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley last week, during feisty remarks in support of the effort to move the Chicago Children’s Museum to a new home in Grant Park. “But when it comes to a statement that kids are not welcome to Grant Park, that’s not an aldermanic prerogatory.”
It sounded to me as though Daley inadvertently came up with a very useful new word.
Prerogatory — a state of suffering and repentance in which an alderman must abide until he gets right with the mayor and has his building and zoning motions approved.
* Tom McNamee: Daley likes easy fights
* Mayor’s nephew to make millions from city-connected pension funds
* Taxpayers on hook for city employee pension