By John Byrne, Kathy Bergen and Jon Hilkevitch, Chicago Tribune –
CHICAGO — Unveiling a plan for “Building a New Chicago,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Thursday promoted a package of infrastructure initiatives that included very little that was new — except for its $7 billion price tag and its ambitious framing as a mission comparable to the city’s rebuilding after the Great Chicago Fire.
Emanuel told a crowd of labor leaders, aldermen and top aides that his plan would set “the foundations for Chicago to be a leader in the global revolution of ideas and innovation” in the 21st century.
Aldermen said Emanuel’s speech at a West Side union hall was aimed at convincing businesses of his commitment to boost the local economy through new work on roads, transit and public buildings, and also to persuade the City Council to pass his plan for a privately funded Infrastructure Trust to finance major projects.
“The Chicago Infrastructure Trust provides us with the breakout strategy we need to make the investments we need so we can take control of our destiny,” Emanuel said.
The trust’s concept of a public-private partnership has raised the suspicions of some Chicagoans who remain upset over the 2008 lease of the city’s parking meters, which was one of the most unpopular initiatives of Mayor Richard M. Daley’s later years as mayor.
Emanuel, in office for 10 months, acknowledged the sensitivity of the issue by saying the city will keep control of its assets despite private investment. “Already, five leaders in infrastructure finance have expressed interest in investing in Chicago’s publicly owned properties — that will stay Chicago’s publicly owned properties,” he said.
The trust would pull together private and public financing for a variety of projects, such as bus rapid transit service or expanded high-speed Internet access. The deals would in many cases amount to a rent-to-own plan. Private companies would build new projects or replace, expand or upgrade existing ones that the city can’t afford to tackle. The city would then lease the new facility until it had paid back the private investor for the loan.
Just $225 million of the $7 billion Emanuel outlined would come from the trust, for energy efficiency retrofitting on city buildings. But Emanuel made clear that his vision of the Infrastructure Trust is a key part of “Building a new Chicago.”
Another controversial aspect of Emanuel’s message Thursday was his push for further expansion at O’Hare International Airport. Emanuel called on “airlines to begin planning with us today, so we can add a fourth and final (new) runway.” But airlines greeted that prospect without enthusiasm.
Almost all of the other initiatives in Emanuel’s speech, from road resurfacing to rehabbing the city’s water system, have been previously unveiled, some by Daley before he retired from City Hall last year. Emanuel emphasized that no new taxes will be used to pay for his infrastructure plan. Among the means to finance his building plan will be cuts in the city’s bureaucracy and the imposition of user fees, he said.
Alderman Richard Mell, 33rd, said Emanuel’s speech, with its alls to help forge a new identity for Chicago, was in part aimed at aldermen who might be reluctant to vote for the Infrastructure Trust. “It was State of the Union speech in Chicago,” Mell said as he and several other City Council power brokers left the union hall. “I think it was a good blueprint for Chicago’s future.”
And Alderman Patrick O’Connor, 40th, Emanuel’s City Council floor leader, said the mayor was wooing business owners with talk of a long-term commitment to infrastructure improvements.
“I think this speech was aimed toward Chicagoans in general, and aimed toward business, because actually, these types of pronouncements are out there to encourage businesses to say, ‘I’m thinking of coming to Chicago, I want to open a place in Chicago, I want to do business in or with Chicago,’” O’Connor said. “These are all speeches geared toward making us an attractive option in a very global economy.”
But Emanuel’s pitch for O’Hare expansion, a proposal dear to many business leaders, will be a tough sell for the struggling airlines.
Chicago-based United Airlines and its main O’Hare competitor, American Airlines, which is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, are against spending money on expanding O’Hare until more flight capacity is needed.
“We will continue to work with the city on demand-driven projects,” United said in response to Emanuel’s request to help Chicago finish the O’Hare project, which started in 2005 and was originally slated for completion in 2012.
American is “completely focused on our restructuring and we have limited ability to make commitments going forward,” the Fort Worth-based airline said in a statement. “We are very willing to listen to the city and engage in conversation, but our immediate focus is on coming out of restructuring a strong and vigorous competitor in the Chicago market.”
When reminded during a Chicago Tribune interview Thursday about the difficult financial issues confronting the airline industry, Emanuel responded: “And I’m trying to manage the city. We worked through these issues in the past and we’re going to continue. It’s not that big a deal. It’s just not.”
Addressing the bumpy road faced by Chicago drivers, Emanuel said he will step up resurfacing work by repaving 2,000 miles of roads in the next decade, or approximately half of the 4,100 miles of non-expressway roads in the city. That’s in addition to repaving 1,000 miles of roads in connection with repairing water and sewage lines.
But Pete Scales, spokesman for the Chicago Department of Transportation, said the mayor’s announcement “isn’t different from our current schedule, but more than were done annually in previous years.” Scales said the mayor’s numbers represent “a simple calculation of what our resurfacing program will be going forward.”
Another big-ticket item among the transportation improvements in Emanuel’s blueprint is to renovate, repair or rebuild more than 100 CTA rail stations.
Absent from the mayor’s list of CTA projects is the long overdue modernization of stations, track and viaducts along the Red-Purple Line corridor on the North Side and in Evanston. The Red-Purple modernization, affecting stations from Belmont Avenue north through Evanston, would cost from $2 billion to more than $4 billion, depending on the scale of the project, CTA officials said.
No funding currently has been identified for the high-priority Red-Purple modernization or for the proposed $1.4 billion Red Line expansion.
The more than 100 CTA stations alluded to in the mayor’s infrastructure plan include a deep cleaning of stations and relatively minor repairs that the transit agency announced last September; emergency repairs scheduled to begin this spring that are needed to prevent the closing due to safety issues of seven Red Line stations on the North Side; slow-zone track repairs on the Blue Line; and a new Cermak station on the Green Line.
On the bus system, the mayor mentioned the start-up that’s already set for later this year of a bus rapid transit route on Jeffery Boulevard. The CTA and CDOT received an $11 million federal grant in 2010 to implement the ultra-express bus service.
