Bridgeport Democrats trying to stave off Amtrak’s attempt to move maintenance operations into the neighborhood find themselves in a rare bind — fighting both longtime union allies who support the project’s promised trade jobs and the rail company they are convinced advanced its plans for years without their full knowledge.
Gov. JB Pritzker entered the fray Friday, saying via a spokesman Amtrak pulled a “bait and switch” on government officials and neighbors in its rollout. And the governor’s office suggested a state-owned easement in the Bridgeport property could complicate Amtrak’s efforts to move ahead without state support.
A Wednesday City Council hearing with Amtrak exposed those tensions — with Bridgeporters booing union members and aldermen grilling company officials about their transparency around the evolving project.
Public records reviewed by the Tribune reveal some early awareness of Amtrak’s Bridgeport plans by local officials, though questions remain about how much they knew about its scope.
The standoff has unfolded in the 11th Ward — a longtime center of local Democratic strength, home of the White Sox and, historically, a neighborhood full of union workers.
Amtrak says its current facilities at 14th Street in the South Loop are outdated and too small to service its fleet. Upgrades would benefit Amtrak’s national network and speed trips through Chicago.
A modern facility on an existing rail yard next to the Sox’s Rate Field, Amtrak officials argue, would not only be a safer workplace for employees, but would also get finished more quickly and at less cost than alternatives, including renovating its current site. Trade unions are in strong support, citing some 3,000 new construction and roughly 400 permanent jobs it would bring.
But despite the touted economic benefits, union jobs and promised upgrades to crumbling viaducts, the neighborhood is largely siding against Amtrak and Justin Ishbia. The private equity investor is in line to switch from minority to majority owner of the Sox in 2034 and is pitching in $175 million to the Amtrak project through his development partner, Canal Edge.
The majority of the Chicago City Council and entire Cook County Board are taking up residents’ cause in opposition to current plans, echoing neighborhood concerns about potential pollution and noise, and demands for more information.
To local Ald. Nicole Lee, the company has been hiding the ball in the run-up to Ishbia’s plan to buy the Canal Street rail yard as part of a larger effort to move the team from Bridgeport to Amtrak’s existing South Loop site, across from the in-progress Chicago Fire stadium. Lee’s home is a stone’s throw from the new proposed maintenance facility. Hers and thousands of others’ homes, several schools and Armour Park would be within hundreds of feet of the site.
If Ishbia successfully moves the team, Bridgeport would be left with an empty stadium and declining property values for nearby homeowners, opponents worry.
Though an Amtrak attorney argued in a September letter to the Chicago Law Department that the project “is not subject to state or local zoning, building permit, planned development, subdivision, site plan, design review, or other land use or development approval requirements,” the company agreed to a council hearing last week where it was grilled by aldermen.
Many questions revolved around what Amtrak knew and when. Amtrak maintains its plans to move to the Canal Street Yard haven’t been a secret: At least as far back as 2023, a state planning document showed intent to purchase Union Pacific’s yards for equipment storage. Since then, various public presentations on a broader set of upgrades known as the Chicago Hub Improvement Program, or CHIP, also mentioned Amtrak’s intent to put maintenance operations there.
It has also sought federal grants to upgrade its aging facilities. Between November 2025 and February 2026, city, county and state transportation officials all wrote in support of federal funding for a new maintenance campus at Canal Street, including commitments to match some funding. Amtrak said it no longer needed public matching dollars because of Ishbia’s funding pledge.
“Major infrastructure projects evolve over time, and we recognize that some stakeholders have questions” about those changes and how they were communicated, Amtrak spokesperson Marc Magliari said in a statement, pledging to ensure “stakeholders have the information they need.”
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Canal Edge maintains the Bridgeport and South Loop projects are separate and argued “the only thing that has changed” at Canal Street is its own involvement as developer and funder.
It’s not entirely clear how recently local elected officials learned about plans to conduct a 24-hour maintenance operation just west of Rate Field, let alone the Ishbia-backed stadium. Aldermen are used to some level of ring-kissing any time a development is proposed for their ward. But Amtrak officials referred repeatedly to federal — not local — regulatory hoops during the hearing, with little deference toward “aldermanic privilege” to steer and shape ward projects.
Lee asked when Amtrak’s plans evolved beyond the “storage” referenced in that 2023 report to the round-the-clock maintenance operations. Steve Segerlin, Amtrak’s head of commercial development, suggested storage was shorthand for a variety of operations. “The wording in some of these documents gets very truncated to not be fully inclusive to all the elements of the yard,” he said, and plans for the site evolved as the company sought and secured funding.
Amtrak’s team pledged to follow up with more information later, as well as the environmental review submitted to the Federal Railroad Administration.
Because the project is happening at an existing rail yard on land already in railroad use and doesn’t add more trains, Amtrak said the FRA granted it a “categorical exclusion” from more stringent environmental reviews. Amtrak officials agreed to release the noise and vibration, air quality, and traffic studies it submitted to federal officials and come back for another hearing to discuss them.
Until then, they noted moving operations indoors would have a smaller environmental imprint and be less busy than in 2019, when Union Pacific used the site for freight operations. Ald. Andre Vasquez, 40th, told the Amtrak team he was skeptical of any environmental sign-off given by the Trump administration.
Documents obtained by Bridgeport residents William Boyle and Jack Byrnes and shared with the Tribune paint a complicated picture of city and state knowledge and involvement in the project. Boyle and Byrnes, who are opposed to the project in its current form, received the documents via public records requests.
Illinois Department of Transportation records indicate that as far back as December 2024, the state knew that Amtrak planned to use the Canal Street Yard to provide storage and transition to “a satellite maintenance facility over time.”
IDOT acknowledged it had previously committed state matching funds to an Amtrak proposal that included building a new yard at Canal Street while still operating at 14th Street.
But in a statement Friday, Pritzker spokesman Matt Hill said Amtrak’s current proposal “is significantly different from the project the state originally supported.”
Amtrak, Pritzker’s office said, “planned and executed a bait and switch on state, federal and local officials as well as community members.”
In January, U.S. Senators Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth and others in the Illinois Congressional delegation wrote to the U.S. Department of Transportation in support of Amtrak’s plans for Canal Street with Canal Edge, including “a new mechanical and inspection facility, service and cleaning yard, new storage tracks, a new car wash” and maintenance machinery.
Only after the letter was sent, aides for the senators said, did information about the impact on the White Sox and what they described as Amtrak’s lack of communication with local officials emerge.
Canal Edge, however, said it did inform both senators in December 2025 meetings that it was under contract to purchase the 14th Street Yard. A future development there could potentially be anchored by a Sox ballpark, they said, with the caveat that Jerry Reinsdorf still retained control of Sox-related decisions.
Aides for Durbin and Duckworth, however, maintain they were not informed about the Sox aspect of the plans in meetings with Canal Edge. The senators have since joined calls for transparency.
Lee said there was a meeting with Canal Edge officials in February and she was informed the project was now a public-private partnership. While she was told about a three-story structure between parking lots next to Rate Field, she said they were given no site plans, traffic studies, or any of the materials a developer would typically share. At that time — and given the Trump administration’s slow rolling of other transportation projects — she said she believed funding would be slow to arrive.
A Canal Edge spokesperson said officials at that meeting presented documents to Lee and Cook County Commissioner John Daley showing the project’s scope. They said they also floated a potential White Sox ballpark, with the same caveat about Reinsdorf.
Lee and Daley denied there was any mention of a new ballpark. It “would have set off some other alarm bells for us,” Lee said.
Daley and Pritzker’s office both suggested Amtrak’s plans might cross onto access points at Sox parking lots around the proposed maintenance yard owned by the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority. ISFA CEO Frank Bilecki acknowledged he met with Amtrak officials earlier this month and told the Tribune “both sides are working through historical information to better understand the history of the property.”
Mayor Brandon Johnson’s spokesperson Griffin Krueger acknowledged the city’s Department of Transportation had also previously indicated its ability to provide funds for Amtrak improvements in Chicago, though he said matching funds weren’t committed to any grant application involving the acquisition of the Canal yard, and that the expression of support “did not commit the City to appropriating funds.”
The mayor, Krueger said, wants transparency from Amtrak, a thorough and publicly-released environmental review and “substantive” community engagement.
In April, Amtrak participated in a webinar held by the University of Illinois Chicago’s Urban Transportation Center.
During the event, Joe Shacter, director of project management at Amtrak, gave a presentation about the CHIP program (the Canal Street yard program, Amtrak says, is no longer part of CHIP).
Shacter also said Amtrak hoped to get the Canal Street yard acquisition done soon.
Shacter said Ishbia approached Amtrak in August 2025 with his desire to acquire the 14th Street yard “for commercial development,” and referenced March 2026 reporting in Crain’s Chicago Business that the billionaire was angling to build a new Sox stadium.
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At the top of the webinar, a UIC official noted the presentation would be recorded and posted online afterward. But emails shared with the Tribune by Boyle and Byrnes show Amtrak officials asked UIC staff to take webinar materials down after Crain’s reached out to UIC about the presentation.
Within hours, Shacter wrote to UIC’s Edward Bury: “we need you to pull the deck I used on Wednesday from the UIC website ASAP, please.”
University staff complied, and Amtrak officials continued to flag other posts for removal late into the night. The emails indicate university staff ultimately deleted the PowerPoint and posts about the event from Linkedin, Facebook and Box, an online document storing system.
After Crain’s story referencing the UIC event was published — including what sources told Crain’s were inaccurate renderings of a new stadium — Amtrak’s Magliari thanked Bury “for your work to protect our brand.”
Asked why Amtrak had requested the webinar info be deleted, Magliari said Shacter was not the “subject matter expert” on the Canal Street Yard. The presentation, he said, had an “incomplete/obsolete” layout for the 14th Street site and inaccurate references to a second phase.
Magliari also argued it wasn’t fair to suggest the presentation had been erased from the internet because Amtrak mentions it on its own project website timeline.
UIC spokesperson Brian Flood said university staff agreed to delete the content “after receiving a request from a participant” and the decision was “neither the result of a formal university decision nor of a policy.”
Lee said she got a call in July about setting up later community hearings on the Canal Yards project. On August 14, the feds announced the $696 million in grant funding for Amtrak upgrades in Illinois, including for the Canal Street Yard. Ishbia unveiled his pitch for the new Sox stadium in September.
At a public meeting that month, Lee said she learned about the categorical exclusion for the first time and that the facility — now four stories tall instead of three — would operate around the clock.
Union representatives agreed Amtrak should share more, but officials should be open to negotiating too.
While neighbors “deserve clear answers” from Amtrak, Reiter wrote in a letter of support posted on Amtrak’s project website, that discussion “should help shape a better project, not prevent a worthwhile one from moving forward.”
Tradesmen have similarly come to the defense of data centers, whose construction has fueled a deluge of jobs. But Democrats at the city and state are considering tougher environmental regulations that the trades and tech companies fear will threaten the industry’s expansion. Johnson introduced his own one-year data center moratorium after Pritzker ordered a halt to incentives. The General Assembly is expected to negotiate fresh energy requirements in the coming months.
While in most cases they are steadfast Democratic allies, the trades are considered more moderate and pro-business than dyed-in-the-wool progressive unions representing educators or healthcare workers.
Amtrak opponents from the neighborhood heckled plumbers, pipefitters and craftsmen during public comment at Wednesday’s committee meeting. Commissioner Daley — son and brother of the former mayors Daley and 11th Ward Democratic Party committeeman — had a tense, if indirect, exchange with Reiter in late September when Daley called for Amtrak hearings at the county.
Daley said he couldn’t think of a more contentious public feud between the longtime political and labor allies.
Though she supports transportation infrastructure improvements, Lee said the need for residents to have a seat at the table from the beginning is self-evident: “The very distinct prospect of the Sox leaving, and there not being a plan for what happens if and when the Sox leave, I believe, is really something that will do imminent damage to our community and our future prospects.”