At 2:00 p.m., the staff report pertaining to a scheduled agenda item was posted. That gave all good citizens 2.5 hours to drop whatever employment engaged them and perform due diligence to prepare their public comments. If they rode the bus, they would have half an hour more to prepare. If experts they wished to consult were unavailable, oh, well. If, like most of us, they were dufuses not in-tune with the spirit, they would have been blindsided.
Worse, this was the contract for the Eagle Market Street development. It has been in the incubator for about thirty years. To date, it has received $17.1 million in public funding. I had asked for a summary of funding, and there it was flashed on the screen for a couple seconds. For those who still want to dream big and pay later, I implore you, once again, to visit Chuck Marohn and his merry band at strongtowns.org. Unlike me, they are not trying to pass themselves off as global capitalist Chicago-Austrian wannabes. They just want people to follow the money on its current trajectories.
Mayor Terry Bellamy, however, took a different tack. She was appalled that this part of the city had been neglected so long. In not so many words, she shamed us all for leaving African-Americans a disproportionately small share of the bubble-and-cliff action. Councilman Gordon Smith could see the buildings appear with the execution of the documents. I felt torment, torment, torment.
