- Brian Jackson/Sun-Times Media
- Mayor Rahm Emanuel swears the Lucas Museum won’t cost taxpayers a cent. We might want to ask a few questions anyway.
Soon after George Lucas gave Mayor Emanuel the thumbs-up, the mayor’s press office issued one of its classic good-news press releases.
And Jorge Ramirez, president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, said: “This is a major win for Chicago and our workers.”
Actually, the mayor has released almost no details about this project. So, at the very least, we might want to hold off on turning cartwheels just because Lucas chose us over San Francisco and Los Angeles.
In fact, as a rule, you should never, ever believe anything a mayor tells you when it comes to financing a deal that he desperately wants—a lesson we ought to have learned from the Olympic debacle.
As a result, there has be a public hearing by the Plan Commission and the deal has to be approved by the City Council.
But the museum is not proposed for a helpless low-income community. It’s proposed for valuable lakefront land that’s highly prized by environmentalists and park enthusiasts, some of whom are not controlled by the mayor. As hard as that is to believe.
