The fact that they take place in 2016 should not make Chicagoans slack. The final determination by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) on which applicant city has sufficiently supplicated to the fickle commissioners comes in October of 2009. This is not even a year and a half from today, and nearly two full years before the end of Mayor Daley's sixth term. Two years full of planning and contracting decisions that will impact the character of the city for a generation or more — potentially as influential (or traumatic) as the Columbia Exposition or the 1933 World's Fair. While opinions on the potential benefits of a Chicago Olympics vary, there can be little doubt that an Olympic games in Chicago would be a watershed event, fundamentally changing how the world sees Chicago, how Chicago sees itself, and how Chicago looks. It is a little more than symbolic that Alderman Ed Burke mused that we should add a fifth star to the city's flag if we win our bid for the Olympics (one humorous side effect of course would be the number of anachronistic calf muscle and shoulder tattoos among 18- to 34-year-olds).
Although focused on the near South Side and Hyde Park/Washington Park, the games would sprawl across the city; they would bring not tens but hundreds of thousands of tourists into the city. Our public transportation will have to operate at capacity for the entire two weeks of the games and for weeks beforehand. As local businesses seek to maximize their profit from their captive audience (and who could blame them?) costs across the city will rise; the city will assuredly institute new taxes and raise the applicable current ones. None of these things are necessarily bad — they could have long term benefits, in fact. The potential windfall in tax revenue could provide relief to property tax payers, the spike in revenue for local businesses could lead to a blossoming of new local investment by homegrown entrepreneurs. The investments in our infrastructure, including road improvements, adding capacity and efficiency to our mass transit, and the concentrated influx of cash could mean a renaissance in Chicago's infrastructure, economy and even culture, just as the Columbian Exposition lit a spark in one corner of the city that grew into a beacon that could inspire Chicagoans young and old in every corner of the city.
Here are the other things that could happen.
There could be massive cost over-runs, as there have been in most of the Olympiads in the recent past, and which we in Chicago are particularly prone to, cf., "Millennium Park."
There could be an exploitation of the need to improve the infrastructure, as when Atlanta, a city one sixth the size of Chicago, created a sanitized corridor that displaced 30,000 people, according to the United Nations Human Settlement Programme.
There could be massive fraud and abuse of the contracting process, as thousands of contracts for minor and major improvements and services are pushed through in the final years of the Daley Mayoralty, with supposedly "independent" aldermen, whose wards' business communities stand to benefit from the games, find themselves politically and practically unable to force a transparent process without potentially sacrificing their ability to influence the process.
There could be a continued dilution of any top-down negotiated "Community Benefits Agreement," as happened in New York City in the now-infamous and loathed Atlantic Yards development, as reported by In These Times' Michael Gauss. In that case, developers sought political cover by enticing a community group (in that case, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN) into a backroom deal that left plenty of room for developer wiggle room.
In other words, there could be a political dog-and-pony show between developers, government and coquettish community organizations eager to be courted.
There could be pay-to-play politics winding to the state level, where collar county, downstate and out-of-state legislators will surely balk at their lack of participation in a process that will make demands on the state coffers.
There could be a massive spending program in 2010, after the announcement and as preparations begin, that would re-concentrate power away from a City Council that will internally compete to either win benefits or mitigate damage, and towards the Fifth Floor, where the still-dominant Office of the Mayor will act as determinant and mediator of factional disputes. If 2011 is widely seen as the year when Chicago could finally kick the Daley habit and decentralize power back to the neighborhoods, the temptation of billions of dollars of pinstripe patronage the Olympic games could offer just the excuse to keep the monkey on our backs.
There could be massive private and public investment with zero public benefit. This is what happened in Sydney in 2000. The games ended up costing the Australian public approximately A$2b, did not increase tourism, did not increase GDP significantly outside of the 17 days of the games, and that was that. Of course, in our case, we would likely have the added "benefit" of "urban cleansing," which, if the last 15 years of Chicago's history are any indicator, is priceless. There could also have been a slight benefit; it is nearly impossible to measure. The economic scholarship on the matter has not concluded that there is any significant benefit from the Olympics — of course, the government contractors would find that quite surprising.
There could be a net negative economic impact for the people generally. A study by Lake Forest College scholar Robert Baade (also quoted by Gauss in the In These Times piece) argued that the nature of highly-anticipated events actually tended to act as a sort of diversion for private and public dollars, rerouting them from their usual, quotidian job-creation targets in a big city. While tourism increases, the increased prices keeps others away in anticipation; you could call it Big Event Capitalism.
There could be an enormous assumption of debt by the public. Athens and Sydney had to finance massive public works programs that were technically kept off the books; the London Olympic project for 2012 has already far exceeded its expected budget.
There could be an excuse to avoid making necessary improvements. Should we really make major infrastructure and development policy changes — such as the construction of the long-hyped "Circle Line" that would connect the city's redundant through-the-Loop train lines — based on a two-week event, rather than our inter-generational needs? Why should it take an event like the Olympics to finally convince the city, state and private sector to pony up the dough to make our city a more livable place? And should that decision, once made, be based on the needs of a single event that will disproportionately benefit a very small group of people? You know the answer, of course.
These are the things that could happen.
Take another quick skim through that list and ask yourself: is there anything in the last hundred years of Chicago's political history that makes any one of these things less likely to happen, rather than more likely?
Mayor Daley wants his big shiny Olympics to play with, but he has not been a good boy. If he wants his toy, he's going to have to show he can play nice, and share.
Our position then as Chicagoans shouldn't be to just accept that His Elective Majesty getswhat he wants, so let's try to get the best deal we can. Our posture should be resistance until resistance is futile. And then coming to the table, when both sides are well bloodied and eager for resolution.
For that reason, I respectfully disagree with Washington Park Advisory Council President and Washington Park Olympic Coalition member Cecilia Butler, who was quoted by Monique Garcia in the Chicago Tribune as saying, "We all know Mayor Daley can get what he wants and the focus should be not on stopping him, but how to make it a good thing for everyone."
The focus should be on stopping him. Absolutely. And, if he and his supporters on the Council and in the business and political community really still want the Olympics, then let them come begging for them. The people shouldn't just go on bended knees to the City (as though the City is some third party, separate from the people) and beg for some easily manipulated community benefits.
Chicagoans need to take a step back from our habitual boosterism and pride to see the Olympic Games bidding and siting process for what it is: a non-democratic process controlled by a small group of unelected, unaccountable international businesspeople who are wined, dined and sometimes bribed to grant a given municipality the right to concentrate huge sums of public and private funds into a very small set of bank accounts, and using the hypnotic promise of revenue and "improvements" to get into a city's DNA and engineer whatever monster they feel will best serve them.
At every possible hurdle to Chicago winning these games, we should be there raising the obstacle higher. Harrying and harassing the process. We have to start subverting the efforts of the Mayor's Office and the bid committee to portray the IOC as Johnny Olympicseed, traipsing across the globe with the torch in one hand and a sack of magic tax revenue seeds slung over the other shoulder.
Here are the institutions that we would have to contend with: the Mayor, the County Democratic party, state legislators and the Congressional delegations, the business community, established community organizations, most of the City Council and possibly the trade unions.
Sounds like a fun fight: Chicago, say no to the Olympics!
Pedro / June 25, 2008 9:29 AM
I had to do a double take on who authored this column.
Its good to see that you have finally figured out that Chicago political institutions are too corrupt to be trusted with additional tax revenue. The Olympics would be a disaster to this city and its citizens.