Source: http://www.chicagotribune.com, July 19, 2016
By: John Byrne
City and county officials will set aside tens of millions of dollars to try to help jump-start industrial investment in struggling neighborhoods, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle announced Monday.
The “Industrial Growth Zones” program is targeted at seven specific areas, with the money going to help companies pay for the costly environmental cleanup the two officials said often stops companies from developing long-vacant pieces of land.
Over the next three years, the city will make available about $5 million in special property tax zone money in each of five districts: the Northwest, Greater Southwest, Burnside and Calumet Industrial corridors, and the Roosevelt/Cicero redevelopment area.
And the county is set to provide about $1 million in community development block grant funding in two south suburban “growth zones.” One zone stretches through industrial areas of Chicago Ridge southeast to Lynwood, and the other advances east from about Frankfort Square to Sauk Village. Preckwinkle spokesman Frank Shuftan said the county “will pursue additional resources as the pilot program advances.”
The idea is to persuade companies to set up shop in once-thriving industrial parts of the county that have fallen on hard times, in some cases decades ago. Chicago and Cook County have relatively high tax burdens for businesses compared to other part of the country, and some neighborhoods that were once hubs for industry also must now overcome aging infrastructure and reputations as hardscrabble, dangerous areas.
When investors are looking at possible spots to build, they need to have as many hurdles as possible removed, Emanuel said at an event in the West Humboldt Park neighborhood where he was joined by Preckwinkle and several other elected officials. Among the biggest deterrents is the need to clean up land that was often the site of environmentally damaging industrial processes during the region’s heyday.
“So Indiana and other areas that offer, basically, farmland (that doesn’t need environmental cleanup), cannot out-compete Chicago if we can actually eliminate some of the uncertainty around environmental remediation for old industrial areas,” Emanuel said.
Companies looking to open a factory in one of the zones also will be able to avail themselves of “industrial concierges” to streamline the byzantine process of getting all the appropriate licenses and permits.
“You do not want a company, if you’re trying to recruit them from outside the city of Chicago or outside the state of Illinois, to try to figure out the myriad bureaucracies and departments who are literally here supposed to have the same welcome mat to industrial and manufacturing jobs,” Emanuel said. “And so it’s a point of entry and a point of contact where the city and the county will be seamless in their exercise of welcoming new industrial and manufacturing jobs.”
After the announcement, Emanuel spoke briefly about the weekend slayings of three police officers by a gunman in Baton Rouge, La., the latest event in a violent summer in which a series of shootings has heightened the focus on the relationship between police officers and minorities. The mayor declined to answer directly when asked whether a large number of Chicago police officers might resign rather than continue to put themselves in harm’s way; he instead called on Chicagoans to show appreciation for officers.
“We’re doing our job anyway, on recruitment, but I’m not going to say that because I don’t want my words twisted,” he said. “I don’t want my words twisted, but I think the best thing we can do to keep morale up is to say, simply, ‘Thank you.'”