Who Gets Credit For Bringing Amazon To Pullman? Voters Like You!

PULLMAN — Nobody cuts down 3,000 trees for nothing.

So, last month, when i heard the roar of a wood chipper that turned an overgrown forest on the former Ryerson Steel property into a giant pile of mulch I was pretty sure made that the simmering political feud between Chicago's mayor and 9th Ward boss over Amazon's plan to build a $60 million distribution center there was settled.

But when a City Council committee on Monday nudged the project closer to approval it didn't happen without a little controversy over who should get the credit.

Here's what happened: Ald. Anthony Beale submitted the proposal to have it fast tracked so the center can open in time for the holidays. But when the measure showed up on the committee agenda for approval it had Mayor Lori Lightfoot's name on it. Because it was a routine measure and Amazon didn't ask for a nickel of taxpayer cash, not a single alderman voted against it.

Ald. Raymond Lopez, who also has a running beef with Lightfoot, accused the mayor of trying to "co-opt" Beale's project, CBS 2's Todd Feurer reported.

“At the last minute, rather than focus on how to assist, this administration is focused on how to co-opt instead, and I think that kind of pettiness is uncalled for, because this is not about what he gets or what she gets, who gets to be this. This should be a partnership. The city wants partnerships not only with businesses, but with its leaders as well, even when they don’t agree,” Lopez said.

Beale didn't want to talk about it. A Lightfoot spokeswoman didn't respond to an inquiry about whether the mayor cared about the criticism. And thank goodness.

Because the dispute over who's the hero for submitting an ordinance to approve construction of a warehouse on the South Side to a company that's not asking for a tax cut might has to rank as one of the silliest political "controversy" in Chicago history.

Guess who cared that former Mayor Rahm Emanuel cut the ribbon on Pullman's Walmart three years after former Mayor Richard M. Daley expended so much emotion and political capital — over the objections of powerful labor unions — to win City Council approval for the controversial store, and eliminating a food desert in part of a long-neglected African American ward?

Nobody.

What mattered most is that folks no longer had to travel extra miles to do their grocery shopping. Some people scored decent paying jobs. The shopping center that so many special interest groups wanted to keep out of Chicago made life in my neighborhood a little bit easier.

Obviously, the overgrown forrest in Pullman wouldn't have been on Amazon's radar if Beale and the two mayors who came before Lightfoot didn't work together to build the Walmart-anchored strip, recruit the Method soap factory, Gotham Greens indoor farms and Whole Foods Distribution Center there first.

And the distribution center project would probably be dead if Lightfoot wasn't smart enough not to let political bad blood get in the way of a project that could generate $400,000 in annual property taxes, a few hundred jobs and result in packages that take days to get delivered in our part of town dropped on doorsteps in a just few hours.

What might be lost on the feuding elected officials is that folks tend to forget which politician deserves credit for making their lives better, and they remember the ones who don't.

Credit should go to the people who deserve it — South Side voters who picked the right mayor and ward boss to do such a thankless job so well.

Without us, they'd be nothing.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting and Emmy-nominated producer, was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docu-series on CNN. He was a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary, "16 Shots."

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