Wednesday it was reported that the Illinois Sports Facility Authority will write a check to Sam Zell to purchase Wrigley Field from him so that he can decouple the Cubs from Wrigley Field and sell the Cubs at a higher price.."http://www.chicagotribune.com/... Taxpayers, who are now facing the highest sales taxes in the nation and dysfunctional state government, will be asked to subsidize a billionaire who happens to believe the economy is hunky dory except that Hillary and Barack are talking it down. http://www.salon.com/... Sam Zell is a man who gives to Republicans and whose new toy, The Tribune, trumpets capitalism. But when it comes to his well being, Sam Zell wants a taxpayer handout.
The Tribune stated the deal simply on March 5. "Tribune Co., which also owns the Chicago Tribune, put the Cubs up for sale last year as part of an $8.2 billion transaction led by billionaire Sam Zell to take the firm private. To get greater value for the asset, Tribune officials have been pursuing a strategy to find a buyer for the team while separately seeking to sell the ballpark to the authority."
So here we are in a recession or on a cusp of a recession and Illinois is being hoodwinked into doing the following:
- Paying Sam Zell money for a ballpark that is a complete white elephant unless one, and only one tenant, can be convinced to stay.
- That tenant, the new owners of the Cubs, can walk at any time from Wrigley because it will have no stake in Wrigley. The albatross has been removed from the Cubs' neck. And surely there are Western and Sun Belt cities which can offer spanking new facilities to catch the Cubs. Remember the Dodgers.
- So it leaves the people of Illinois, the citizens of Chicago and the residents of the Lakeview neighborhood at the mercy of demands for rent reductions, demands for more luxury suites, demands for the building of money making emporiums for the Cubs, and demands for more night games in a crowded urban neighborhood without parking.
Let us hear it for the Democratic Party in Illinois. First take care of the billionaire. Then the millionaire ballplayers. Then the new millionaire owners of the Cubs....... What happened to the public good? What happened to the free market? What happened to using bond authority to build schools and roads and mass transit? What happened to using scarce sales tax resources to fund medical care, energy and housing for the indigent? What happened to genuine economic development?
Though he is a horse's ass in his abject ass kissing of W, the Tribune's John Kass is right. Illinois is run by a combine of moneyed interests in which Mr. Rezko is but a very bit player.