Once in a while I read something in the newspaper that makes me want to scream.
It happened twice last week.
First there was the op-ed piece in Sunday’s Perspective section written by an old friend of mine, Monsignor John J. “Jack” Egan. It was a red-hot attack on Mayor Daley’s bid to develop a riverboat gambling/family entertainment complex near the Loop.
In his 51 years as a Catholic priest hereabouts, Jack Egan has gone to bat many times for Chicago’s poor and forgotten. His anti-gambling essay was a rhetorical home run, clobbering the notion that casinos will do anything for Chicago other than drain the pockets of its citizens.
Instead of gambling, he wrote, Chicago needs to pull itself up by “honest change through honest work.”
I favor Mayor Daley’s riverboat plan; yet I have a lot of respect for Jack Egan. That’s why I felt like screaming. It hurts when a kindred spirit takes the opposite side on an important issue, especially when he does such a good job arguing his case.
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The monsignor didn’t tell the whole story, though, which brings me to the second news item that got me going.
Motorola Inc. announced last week that it will build its state-of-the-art cellular-phone assembly plant on farmland near Harvard, about 65 miles northwest of Chicago.
The $100 million high-tech facility will employ 3,000 workers at good wages, $12 to $15 an hour. When it opens in 1996 it will be McHenry County’s largest employer.
Asked why they chose Harvard, a dairy town of just 6,000 souls, Motorola executives said they wanted to move beyond Chicago’s urban sprawl to a place where taxes are lower and there’s room for expansion.
They also appreciated the $30 million in public subsidies-mainly in the form of road improvements-that Illinois pledged to keep Motorola from choosing Wisconsin, which had promised the moon.
So why did I groan at this news? Why not shout “hooray” for Illinois, as others did? After all, corporations are free to build wherever they like, and Motorola-the brightest star in the constellation of Chicago business-might have invested that $100 million in Wisconsin, North Carolina or Tijuana.
I groaned because Motorola rejected Chicago . . . just like scores of other companies reject Chicago every year.
The city has plenty of room for Motorola’s new plant. And the same package of tax incentives, or more, would have been available in a city industrial park such as Lake Calumet or at a city-owned site near O’Hare.
But Motorola wasn’t interested. Why they dare not say, other than to repeat the now-familiar code words about future expansion, campuslike atmosphere and the relative savings of doing business “out there.”
Forget that. Motorola rejected Chicago for the same reason Sears’ Merchandise Group went to Hoffman Estates, Kemper Insurance went to Long Grove and Spiegel Inc. went to Columbus, Ohio.
They hope to distance themselves from the violence, the vandalism and the graffiti. They want to get away from schools that don’t teach and graduates who can’t read; from workers who fail to show up or arrive strung out on drugs or booze.
So many companies have made this decision-the city lost 128,482 manufacturing jobs in the 1980s-that the problem long ago began feeding upon itself.
As the tax base erodes, Chicago and Cook County have been forced to raise tax rates. There is waste and inefficiency at City Hall, but the main reason taxes are higher in Chicago and the close-in suburbs is that the tax base has stagnated while problems have mounted.
There is no AIDS clinic in Harvard. No public housing, either. You can’t get there on the CTA. It isn’t even near an interstate highway.
Which is just as well for Motorola, because that means not many “problem” people will find their way there to apply for a job.
That’s what’s really going on here. And that’s why Mayor Daley, who probably doesn’t like gambling any more than Jack Egan does, is desperately trying to bring in a new tourism draw that will stop the economic bleeding.
Egan wrote: “It’s time we tell our leaders their job is not to construct a hiding place from reality: Theirs is the much harder job of making Chicago’s reality hospitable, habitable and healthy for all of us.”
Right on, Jack. Tell that to Motorola.