Quote:
Originally Posted by cannedairspray
It's fine if you're upset this project has hit a snag; I like it a lot, too. But all this bitching about Reilly is really weird and misplaced at best, at worst just an emotional response that's not rooted in any rationality. The guy is doing what the people in the ward want. You might say they're dickheads, but it's their ward, not yours or mine. Does anyone have any plans to move there or do we just like walking around their neighborhood sometimes, seeing the pretty pictures, and enjoying the view when we're on the LSD?
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You continue to dodge the real issue. This has very little to do with this development (which I still think will happen) or Reilly. My gripe is with a system that doesn't just allow for but encourages undemocratic outcomes. There are tens of thousands of people in Reilly's ward who would benefit from more social infrastructure near the Ogden Slip. Instead, he's making a policy decision based on a group of probably no more than 50 people. So your claim that he's representing his ward is just plain false. He's representing a tiny minority in his ward at the expense of everyone else.
This isn't to say that it's all his fault. The system actually encourages Reilly to kowtow to monied interests. If Reilly didn't have the excessive, unilateral power to pervert developments for a small but powerful minority, they couldn't use political extortion to make him do it.
And even if Reilly were acting in the best interest of all of his constituents, downtown Chicago is special. Its success or failure affects all Chicagoans in a way that the fates of other wards do not. So limiting development oversight to Reilly and his constituents gives them a disproportionate amount of power and undercuts what I'm pretty sure a supermajority of the city feels: downtown is a playground that should be as open and accessible as possible.
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