Lightfoot touts Chicago as tech destination on trip to San Francisco

Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Thursday talked up her trip to San Francisco this week as a chance to sell Chicago to corporate leaders there as a good place to do business.

The mayor said she met with companies and Bay Area tech executives with Chicago affiliations, urging them to set up shop here or expand their footprints.

The mayor acknowledged that some of the executives she spoke to expressed concerns about the violence in Chicago and whether it would be safe for their employees to move here. But she said they understand the increasing violence in cities nationwide.

“There were certainly some conversations about that, and we had a long conversation about what, from my perspective, I thought we were seeing, not just in Chicago, but really across the U.S.,” Lightfoot said in a Zoom call with reporters to discuss the trip. “They’re in the city of San Francisco. They’re proximate to LA. They obviously know a lot about New York and other markets they’re in that are experiencing the same kinds of challenges that we are over this last year around public safety.”

Lightfoot also said she would be doing some fundraising in San Francisco before returning to Chicago Friday, but declined to discuss who she would meet with “on the political side.”

Lightfoot was accompanied on her trip by a handful of local tech executives, among them Garry Cooper of startup Rheaply, Chris Gladwin of Ocient, Suzanne Muchin of Bonfire and Jai Shekhawat, who co-founded SAP Fieldglass.

The mayor said she expects a federal strike force to Abe in place soon, but wouldn’t predict exactly when it would start. President Joe Biden, who met briefly with Lightfoot Wednesday at O’Hare International Airport on his way to a Crystal Lake appearance, announced recently that strike forces would come to Chicago and other cities to combat gun violence.

Chicago leaders are talking to federal law enforcement officials about the best makeup of the group to deal with Chicago’s problems, she said.

Lightfoot’s West Coast jaunt is straight out of the Chicago mayor playbook.

Mayor Richard M. Daley made several trips around the country and to China and elsewhere to pitch Chicago as a global city worthy of business investment.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel took a large official delegation of city officials and business heavyweights to Asia, seeking to drive foreign investment and perhaps curry favor with Chicago CEOs by getting them highlevel meetings with officials in China and elsewhere.

World Business Chicago, the quasi-governmental agency funded in part by Chicago taxpayers, paid for Emanuel and some government and nonprofit officials on those overseas trips, while business leaders paid for themselves. The Lightfoot administration did not immediately provide information on how much of the San Francisco trip was funded by WBC.

A big delegation featuring many campaign contributors also joined Emanuel on a 2016 trip to Rome for the elevation of Chicago Archbishop Blaise Cupich to cardinal. WBC raised money to cover the mayor’s travel costs, those of his wife and other city officials.

Emanuel also made occasional out-of-state visits to woo students from prestigious schools like Harvard, UCLA and the University of Michigan to move to Chicago after graduation,

part of his effort to grow the city’s technology startup

economy.