One of the organizers of this summer’s Atlanta Olympics was in Chicago last week to speak to a luncheon gathering of our city’s civic and business leaders.
Maybe I was imagining things, but I thought I saw a lot of people in the audience staring at their shoes.
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They weren’t being rude or inattentive. They were wistful, I think, or even a little embarrassed.
After all, here was this guy from Atlanta, a whistle-stop on the Georgia Piedmont, a sun-baked upstart with a third of Chicagoland’s population and hardly any of its industrial muscle. Here was this guy from Atlanta, where they are about to stage the world’s largest peacetime event, the equivalent of three Super Bowls every day for 17 straight days.
Meanwhile, up here in Sarajevo-by-the-Lake, our big summer project will consist of the Democratic National Convention, an event which will have less of an economic impact than the prior week’s National Hardware Show, and probably about the same dramatic impact. (Apologies here to anyone who gets excited about drip—less faucets, or who would rather watch Vice President Al Gore being renominated than Team USA’s Scottie Pippen slamming over the head of Team Croatia’s Toni Kukoc.)
So here was this guy from Atlanta, this A.D. Frazier, chief operating officer of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games, explaining the Herculean level of civic and political cooperation that goes into the planning and execution of the Olympic Games. And there we sat, we Chicagoans at the Metropolitan Planning Council’s annual members’ luncheon, trying to pay attention but inevitably looking away, musing about how different things are here in Illinois.
The comparisons are unavoidable:
In Atlanta, where they’ve already finished their domed stadium at the convention center, Olympic revenues are now subsidizing the construction of $500 million worth of athletic stadia and dormitories, including a new home for baseball’s Atlanta Braves and new facilities at Georgia Tech, Morehouse College, Clark Atlanta University and Georgia State.
In Chicago, we’re still fighting over whether to rebuild Soldier Field or attach a domed football stadium to our convention center. This dispute, in one form or another, has been dragging on for more than seven years.
In Atlanta, the entire state of Georgia has been cut in on the Olympics’ action, and pretty much the entire state backs the enterprise. From the new tennis center in Stone Mountain to the aquatics center at Lake Lanier, from the Wolf Creek shooting complex in the piney woods to the equestrian complex in suburban Conyers, the residual benefits of the 26th Olympiad are being spread all over the Peach State.
In Chicago, the governor and the mayor remain locked in a never-ending series of disputes over who gets and who pays. Daley and the Democrats, for instance, claim it’s unfair that the existing penny tax on downtown restaurants be used to help pay for McDome, what with so many Chicago Bears fans coming from the suburbs. Suburban livery companies, meanwhile, are suing to avoid a passenger tax at O’Hare International Airport, since the money goes to fund McCormick Place, which, after all, is in the city.
In Atlanta, minorities and women will claim from 30 to 50 percent of the 100,000 jobs and $500 million in contracts that go with the building and operating of the Olympics.
In Chicago, the Builders Association of Greater Chicago, comprising many of Illinois’ largest construction firms, just filed suit to void the minority contractor set-aside programs in Chicago and Cook County. Black activists have vowed to retaliate by shutting down major construction sites across the Chicago area.
In Atlanta, 600 college students will have internships this summer, working behind cameras and microphones on the technical side of sports broadcasting. Meanwhile, a “Youth and Education” program will bring the history and meaning of the Olympics into every K-12 classroom in Georgia.
In Chicago and Illinois, election-year posturing in the state legislature likely kills any chance of school financing reform this year, even though scores of public school districts throughout the state have slipped into fiscal crisis.
In Atlanta, an Olympic admission ticket will double as an all-day pass on the recently-expanded MARTA public transit system. Special “high occupancy vehicle” lanes are being dedicated on area expressways.
In Chicago, the long-anticipated downtown circulator project was recently canceled for lack of cooperation between city and state. Republicans and Democrats also are fighting over the closing of Meigs Field, and the use of Downstate road funds to pay for an upstate police helicopter.
And so it goes. Atlanta and Georgia are hosting a $1.7 billion Olympic festival and showing once more why they call it “The City Too Busy to Hate.” Chicago and Illinois, with twice the resources, settle for less because they can’t move beyond the political and racial divisions.
Ron Gibbs, a long shot candidate for the U.S. Senate in the March 19 primary, says Illinois ought to start organizing now to bring the Olympics to Chicago in the year 2008. “A project like that could bring us together,” Gibbs says.
It’s an excellent idea. No wonder he’s considered a long shot.