It appears that the Chicago city government doesn't care much for the 25,000 illegals who have come to the city in the last seven months. With no room in any of the city-run shelters, Mayor Brandon Johnson hatched a plan to construct a tent city that could hold 2,000 people.
The state authorized the funding and Governor J.B. Pritzker signed off on the plan. Johnson chose a 16-acre site in Brighton Park, permits were let, and the only thing remaining before the governor approved the project was an environmental impact inspection.
What the scientists found was unsettling, to say the least.
Soil testing found mercury, arsenic, lead, manganese and a chemical used in PVC…. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, "these contaminants were detected at levels that require cleanup to protect human health, according to a nearly 800-page report City Hall released late Friday evening."
When confronted with the fact that Johnson was trying to place people with families in what amounted to a toxic waste dump, the mayor said that the city had removed most of the dangerous chemicals and the site was now fit for human habitation.
Not so fast, said Gov. J.B. Pritzker. The governor had the city's environmental study reviewed by people who aren't quite as biased in favor of the mayor. What they found was startling.
Because of the toxic chemicals in the soil, there needed to be extensive cleanup, a process that could take months.
“My administration is committed to keeping asylum-seekers safe as we work to help them achieve independence,” Pritzker said in a statement. “We will not proceed with housing families on a site where serious environmental concerns are still present. My administration remains committed to a data-driven plan to improve the asylum-seeker response and we will continue to coordinate with the City of Chicago as we work to expand available shelter through winter.”
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There is no "available shelter." Hence, the necessity of the tent city. This is Pritzker's way of passing the hot potato back to Mayor Johnson.
And Johnson immediately tried to pass the problem on.
At an unrelated public appearance on Tuesday, Johnson maintained “third-party validators” found the site to be safe, then pivoted to city efforts to get migrants out of district police stations.
“The state did not provide any additional guidelines or any sort of methodology in which they were requiring us to go by, so we used the standards that were available to us,” the mayor said.
Johnson’s office later said the state was responsible for kicking off construction last week, and the environmental sampling analysis was done according to “an emergency response protocol under the Illinois Emergency Management Act.”
“Despite being made aware of the above assessment and remediation process, the State provided no additional guidance on its preferred methodology or assessment criteria, nor raised any concerns about its own decision to move forward with construction,” the mayor’s statement said.
This war between Johnson and Pritzker had been brewing for months after Johnson began to complain back in June that he was getting no assistance from the state to deal with the migrant crisis. Pritzker slow-walked the mayor's proposal for a tent city and now has shot it down after Johnson tried to make an end run around environmental regulations.
Pritzker spokeswoman Jordan Abudayyeh shot back at Johnson’s statement, saying state environmental standards “are clear and known to the city.”
“Those are not the standards the city chose to use,” Abudayyeh said in a statement. “The city did not engage with IEPA or the state before releasing the report and when it did release the report, was unable to explain the lesser standards they did choose to use and how they arrived at those standards.”
In other words, Johnson didn't care about the illegals who would live in the tents and have to breathe the air after the city had churned up all those toxic chemicals, building the structures.
The bottom line is that he didn't care if they got sick or died. The only thing Mayor Johnson was concerned about was the political fallout from the migrant crisis tarnishing his reputation.
