Olympics News Roundup (8/27)

The watchdog policy group Civic Federation finds that Chicago's Olympic bid may have financial might, thanks to Chicago 2016's "safety net" insurance plans:

The report also cautioned that some of Chicago 2016's revenue estimates appeared optimistic. "Local sponsorships are predicted to be substantially higher than previous Games, and estimated revenues from donations are aggressive when compared to past Olympic budgets," the report noted ...

...Crain's takes a closer look at the report's forecast on the Olympic Village, which may cause "continuing real estate risks that must be managed."

The report recommends that the city purchase additional insurance to protect against cost overruns on the $1-billion project.

...And Chicago 2016 wraps up its series of town hall meetings to foster community support for the bid and clear up lingering questions on money, transportation and the venues.

Behind the bid: Ald. Manny Flores rethinks rallying-cry, “No free check!”

It’s no news that 1st Ward Alderman Manny Flores is unhappy about how city government is handling Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics. But less clear is what he plans to do about it.

Last month, Flores introduced legislation to the City Council that would cap the city’s spending at $500 million—a figure the council arrived at earlier in the planning stages of the bid, but later gave up once the International Olympic Committee made it clear back in June that host cities must agree to give the Olympics a full financial guarantee.

That bill is still pending in committee (Spokespeople from Flores’s office say they are waiting to hear word from City Hall, but the projected date of the hearing is Sept. 8). But some pundits have wondered whether Flores was actually abandoning the bill after he presented a new plan to make sure Chicago 2016 gets “No free check,” in a recent e Op-ed in the Chicago Tribune.

In the piece, Flores outlines a five-point plan for greater transparency from the city and Chicago 2016—and doesn’t mention the $500 million cap. But, he explained to me last week, this doesn’t mean he’s backing off; he’s just rethinking how a spending cap could help, and hurt, the city.

“I would not characterize [the op-ed] as backing down,” he said. “The thing is, you can’t have your cake and eat it. We could impose the cap, but we’ve already been told [by the IOC] that it would not be possible for us to win the bid.”

Flores originally suggested a cap on using city funds for the Olympics to safeguard against surprises like the one Mayor Richard Daley gave city aldermen back in June, when he seemed to tell the IOC that Chicago would sign the host city’s agreement on Oct. 2 if selected, and thereby pledge to fully insure the Olympics.

The aldermen, Flores added, “were informed that $500 million was the most the city would have to commit… and that the city was not going to be pursuing that type of guarantee that the IOC had imposed on other cities. We were under the impression we would not commit tax dollars or open ourselves up to a blank check.”

Flores now thinks his spending cap legislation stands to be modified in committee, hopefully along the lines he laid out in his op-ed, which asks for an independent oversight committee, and public records of all Games’ related spending.

According to Flores, that five-pronged mandate for transparency is the only way to keep the bid officials honest while still making Chicago a viable contender for the Games. Does this mean $500 million cap is history?

Not exactly, he said. “If we have protective mechanisms in place, we should pursue the Games. But I’m telling the 2016 Committee, if you don’t want to be transparent, then you’re going to get capped at $500 million dollars. If that kills the Games, then that will be it.”

Olympics News Roundup: 8/16

It's a mixed bag of news this week for Chicago 2016

Pat Ryan, Chicago 2016 chairman, stands down more community opposition at latest forum on the Olympic bid in Bronzeville, according to the Chicago Tribune's David Greising...

...While Chicago 2016 wraps up its fundraising efforts, netting just $5 million on Wednesday at the 2009 U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame induction ceremony—its lowest amount of three fundraising events...

...And the United States Olympic Committee backs down on plans to host an Olympics television network with NBC after speculation that the proposal would jeopardize Chicago's bid.

Burnham Plan Centennial invites comparisons to 2016 Olympic Bid

How would you get to the Near North Side if Michigan Avenue ended at the river? Chicagoans have Daniel Burnham to thank for widening and extending that street into what is now the city’s bustling “Magnificent Mile” shopping district. One hundred years later, the city is celebrating the legacy of Burnham, one of its most influential urban planners, and looking to him for guidance in planning the city's future.

Among Burnham’s achievements are designing the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Washington Park and setting a tone for Chicago’s 20th century urban development epitomized in the often-quoted phrase “Make no little plans…make big plans, aim high in hope and work.” Now, as the city prepares to celebrate the centennial of Burnham’s Plan of Chicago this fall, some citizens are asking, “What would Burnham have to say about the 2016 Olympic bid?” —an event that would bring international attention back to the park and neighborhood where he once orchestrated a World’s Fair.

“Daniel Burnham was very influenced by his work on the World’s Fair, and that transference of ideas [between nations represented at the fair],” MarySue Barrett, president of the Metropolitan Planning Council, said at a recent panel discussion about Burnham’s anniversary. “I wonder if the Olympics could be another transformative moment for [Chicago], where we think beyond what we’ve done in the past.”

To some, Burnham’s vision of Chicago’s urban landscape invites comparisons to the city’s ambitious bid to host the Olympics.

One feature the Olympic bid shares with the Burnham Plan, which was co-authored by architect Edward Bennett in 1909, is its emphasis on the value of parklands.

According to Mary Woolever, art and architecture archivist for the Art Institute of Chicago, Bennett was particularly interested in using public parks to benefit citizens’ health, and this is reflected in the Plan of Chicago.

For Bennett, she said, “The parks were a way to take a very progressive approach to building citizenship. He thought…he would make a healthier citizen that in turn would make a healthier city.” This line of thinking led to the creation of field houses in many of the city’s parks, including Washington Park, which offered lunchrooms, bathing facilities, and classrooms for English and vocational training, among other public resources for citizens.

Likewise, the hallmark of the city’s bid, according to Chicago 2016 spokespeople, is the way it will take advantage of existing parks and public structures along the lakefront to host the Games and accompanying ceremonies.

But if you ask Carl Smith, author of The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City (this fall’s One Book, One Chicago selection), “What would Burnham do?” might be a bad question for understanding how significantly the Olympics will impact the city.

“The real question is what do we think about the bid,” Smith, a professor at Northwestern University, said in an interview. According to Smith, the command to “make no little plans” should be interpreted as the ethos behind a large redevelopment vision in the wake of the 1871 Great Chicago Fire—not the rallying cry for particular events.

“Regardless of whether the Olympics is the issue at hand, people try to invoke both the example of Burnham and that particular quotation whenever they propose an idea,” Smith said. “They try to use the success of his example and the obvious rhetorical power of that phrase as an endorsement of whatever their idea is… but we have to remember this is a different city and a different time.”

At the time of Chicago’s World’s Fair, the city was just recovering from the 1871 fire and many saw the fair as an opportunity to showcase its “rebirth,” Smith said. In fact, the similarities between the World’s Fair and the Olympics may end with their choice of venue, Washington Park.

At the turn of the century, Chicago was predominantly an industrial city with just above one million residents, less than a third of today’s population. In comparison, the city now faces a host of post-industrial, twenty-first century concerns from globalization to mass-transit that could not have factored into Burnham’s plans.

“What the Olympic committee is talking about is taking a mature park and building a temporary competition space within it that will be in significant part broken down afterwards,” Smith explained. “The Olympics run for three weeks—this was a fair to run for six months. And at that point Jackson Park was a swampy mess.”

“It's a different city and a different time," he added. "The example that Burnham offers is someone who learned from other places and other examples and then tried to decide what was best for Chicago...and we should do the same.”

Olympics News Roundup: 8/11

Paralympians discuss how Chicago is an ideal city to host the Paralympics, thanks to the city's wheel-chair accessible transit system and "curb cutting" initiatives.

The Chicago Tribune stays on top of Chicago 2016 committee members like Michael Scott, a real-estate developer who could stand to profit from some development projects near proposed Olympic venues.

As the United States Olympic Committee readies itself for the Oct. 2 announcement, Denver, CO and Reno, NV have reportedly expressed interest in hosting the 2018 Winter Games, and Pittsburgh in the 2020 Summer Olympics. The USOC has reiterated its support of Chicago's bid in light of these reports.

As bid for the 2016 Olympics heats up, Chicagoans find a natural refuge in Washington Park

One of Michael LaBarbera’s favorite weekend past-times is wandering through Washington Park, snapping photographs of the herons and dragonflies that surround its lagoons. He appreciates the park’s peacefulness, and the opportunity to get a great shot of a dragonfly hovering over the water, or a heron fishing.

But LaBarbera, a Hyde Park resident, knows that his neighborhood haunt will be transformed over the next decade if Chicago wins its bid for the 2016 Olympics. Washington Park contains one of the cities largest arboretums and is host to many species of birds and insects that stand to be effected should the city move forward with plans to put the Olympic Stadium and aquatic center in the Park’s north end.

“I am very much in favor of the Olympics,” LaBarbera said. But he is also worried about how the construction projects and influx of hundreds of people will impact the park’s nature areas and fauna.

“I don’t know how to reconcile those two things,” he added.

LaBarbera, a biology professor at the nearby University of Chicago, sometimes brings students from his class on invertebrate zoology to the Park to study water from the lagoons. The lagoons are host to several varieties of native-Midwestern birds, including Caspian terns, great blue herons and white-crowned herons.


An autumn meadowhaw perches on a twig in Washington Park (Photo by Michael LaBarbera)

“The lagoons are artificial, and those are surrounded by some areas that [the Chicago Park Service] planted with native plants,” he said. “They’re not unique plants, but given that we’ve plowed onto the prairie, they’re not exactly common either these days.” Though Washington Park was designed in 1871 to host the Columbian Exhibition and is not a natural park, “it’s the closest to a wild piece of land we’ve got in Hyde Park.”

Preservationists worry that Washington Park, one of urban planner Fredrick Law Olmsted’s most significant design projects after New York City’s Central Park, will have its National Landmark status revoked if Olympic proposals do not conform to the Park’s historic design plans. Some preservationist organizations and members of local sports teams have also probed Chicago 2016 officials in recent community forums on how many years the park may be closed to traffic during construction.

According to LaBarbera, the wildlife should not be affected by Olympics construction much more than it currently is during the summer months, when the park plays host to several festivals and a Fourth of July celebration.

“The whole park is completely packed with people, and more smell of barbecue lighter than you can imagine,” he said. “And you do see an impact on the wildlife. The birds go away for a couple of days. But then they come back.”

"It's very hard to construct a venue without devastating the area around it, and if you later disassemble the venues then there’s nothing but field around you," according to architect Martin Felsen, who spoke at an open meeting about the legacy of the Burnham Plan on Tuesday.

Felsen, co-founder of the urban design firm UrbanLab and professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, has been working with the Chicago 2016 committee on creating ecologically-forward plans. "We've looked at how communities can use the parks more, since [parklands] are not in such great condition some times, and then asked how people can engage open space more." To him, the Olympics could be an opportunity to promote physical health and community spirit, while exploring "green" urban planning initiatives.

Madiem Kawa echoes LaBarbera’s ambivalence. Kawa is a resident of Washington Park, the neighborhood on the park’s western border, and volunteers as the park’s nature area stewardess, organizing community clean-up events and tending to the park’s butterfly and dragonfly habitats. “I’m not opposed to the Olympics,"she says, but Kawa still has reservations.

“I don’t know what kinds of construction [Chicago 2016] will ultimately have in the Park, but I am concerned. If our tree population is taken away, for example, that would impact the number of bird habitats we have,” she said.

The Washington Park Arboretum, which Kawa describes as a ‘living tree museum,’ contains Lindens, Hickories and Bur Oaks, some of which have been alive since before the 1893 Columbian Exhibition. The arboretum is located in the park’s northwest end, close to the proposed Olympic Aquatic Center.

Like LaBarbera, Kawa can also list the species of birds she has seen in the park with ease: ducks, cardinals, finches, warblers, and one great white egret.

Kawa helps organize free bird-watching tours of the park and classes on plant-identification. “How can we educate the public and the Olympic committee to make sure [the nature areas] are not effected? That’s what I’m concerned about.”

Chicago 2016 has not responded to interview requests.



A green heron grabs lunch in Washington Park (Photo by Michael LaBarbera)


“If Chicago 2016 controls access to the park, I think they could actually preserve that wild area quite well,” LaBarbera said of the arboretum. “If they allow people to roam, it won’t be protected. But if they’re smart, they could actually take advantage of the peace and the tranquility of that area.”

Olympics News Roundup: 8/3

(Today's roundup is Chicago Tribune heavy, but not intentionally so)

The Chicago Tribune suggests that Lollapalooza organizers are trying to cement the annual music festival's Chicago identity by offering high-profile support and promotional opportunities to Chicago 2016—for example by giving the bid-organization the chance to name one of its largest concert venues ...

... And lauds World Sport Chicago, an off-shoot of Chicago 2016 that has been funding youth sports programs from the outset of the city's Olympic bid, for inspiring children to pursue swimming, track and field, and gymnastics. "There's a reservoir of untapped potential in Chicago because of a lack of facilities and programs for kids," the article says.

Meanwhile, Chicago 2016 hopes to postpone (again) filing its tax forms with the IRS, citing "a work-flow issue." A tax-exempt, non-profit organization, Chicago 2016 was originally asked to file a detailed report of its revenues, expenses and employees' salaries last May.