Seemingly lukewarm interest in a highly taxed downtown casino forced Lightfoot to push back her original summer deadline for casino bids.īut that didn’t stop major players from stepping forward last week. Our expectation is that we will bring the various respondents in and let them do presentations,” the mayor said. “Our team is still going through and analyzing them.

Lightfoot would only say that she is “very excited by the proposals” because they were “all very interesting, very robust and very well thought out.” “I won’t until we make a final decision,” said Lightfoot, who has left the all-important question of site selection up to the developers. Pretty much as expected, they include McCormick Place Lakeside Center the truck marshaling yards adjacent to McCormick Place the vacant South Loop site known as “The 78” and the Chicago Tribune’s Near North Side publishing plant. Lightfoot again refused to discuss specific sites recommended by the four development groups. “We’re very, very interested in moving this process along as expeditiously as possible because, as you know, the revenue from that casino will fund our police and fire pensions and no time the present for that,” Lightfoot said Friday at an unrelated news conference. With police and fire pension funds hovering dangerously close to insolvency and mounting police retirements putting even more pressure on the police pension fund, Lightfoot set an aggressive timetable for moving forward on the downtown casino that had eluded Chicago mayors for decades. Mayor Lori Lightfoot said Friday she is “very excited” by the five “well thought out” bids she was dealt last week for a Chicago casino and plans to send a “final list to recommend” to the Illinois Gaming Board “sometime in the first quarter” of next year.

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