Daley Warms to Chicago Casino

Mayor says Chicago casino would need to be government-owned

By NICOLA ORICHUIA

Updated 12:15 PM CST, Sat, Oct 31, 2009

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After initially opposing the idea, Mayor Richard M. Daley now says he wouldn’t oppose the construction of a casino in Chicago -- with the caveat that it would need to be government-owned in order to deal with “all the repercussions of gambling.”

"You don't want a casino to hurt all your restaurants. You want a casino only to be for a casino -- not for food and beverages and everything else. You go in there for one reason: to gamble," the mayor said Friday during a taping of the WBBM-AM radio program, "At Issue," to be broadcast at 9:30 p.m. Sunday, the Sun-Times reports.

The casino option, which could somewhat help the city’s projected $550 million budget gap for 2010, has been on Daley’s table for quite some time now.

"The last time I proposed it, the governor [Rod Blagojevich] said he was 'morally opposed' to it. Remember that? He was legally and morally for it. Then he became morally and legally against it. So, there's where it ended," Daley said.

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Now that the city won’t be getting the 2016 Olympics (and all the money that comes with that), various projects and ideas have surfaced on how to use some of the venues that had been included in the original Olympic project.

What is crucial, Daley says, is to be able to introduce a casino without hurting existing businesses.

"If you look at other cities, they have . . . not gotten the benefits outside the casino. It's not helped restaurants or anything else. They go in there and stay there," Daley said.

In the beginning of October, a proposal for building a casino on the site of Michael Reese Hospital (which is currently being demolished) was turned down by Daley.

“I don't know why everybody is going around thinking casinos is the answer to all the problems of society,” Daley said at a City Hall news conference on Oct. 9. "Even without the 2016, it was never a concept of any type of casino or anything like that."

First Published: Oct 31, 2009 10:32 AM CST

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