Mayor dares gov to sue as Olive-Harvey project restarts
Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Thursday restarted construction on a $45 million transportation, distribution and logistics center at Olive-Harvey College and dared his old friend, Gov. Bruce Rauner, to follow through on a threat to sue City Colleges to stop the project.
“Eight months ago, the state of Illinois put a padlock on that door and said, ‘Stop work. We’re not going to continue to fund our part of the contract . . . That is nuts . . . City Colleges had to file a Freedom of Information [request] to get the blueprints architecturally and engineering to go forward,” Emanuel said.
“The state told us, ‘If you spend your ownmoney, we’re going to sue you.’ So, I say to the state of Illinois, ‘We’re going to do the work. You want to sue us, go ahead. You’ve already added $4 million on top of the cost and this is really your idea of turning around the state of Illinois? It’s leading to a dead-end. It’s time that we put our people back to work. It’s time we open the doors of this 21st Century facility and prepare the people of Chicago . . . for the jobs and careers and industries that want to come here.”
City Colleges Chancellor Cheryl Hyman said she can’t understand the logic behind what she insisted was the Rauner administration’s threat to file a lawsuit to keep a job-generating project that’s already $4 million overbudget and 18 months behind schedule in mothballs.
It makes no sense, when City Colleges is stepping up to the plate and assuming the state’s share of construction costs for the state-of-theart facility needed to train students for an estimated 110,000 jobs over the next 10 years in the burgeoning field of transportation, distribution and logistics.
“I would hope that the state wouldn’t want to sue somebody who’s trying to save them $8 million. The rest of their investment would have been $8 million to finish this building. So, I’d like to think that, now that I’m saving them $8 million, they could find something better to do than to sue me when I’m trying to put Chicagoans back to work,” she said.