Daley Lied....Again

Gee, we called this years ago. And so did half our readership:

• Mayor Daley finally sounds ready to give the International Olympic Committee the financial guarantee it is seeking.

  The mayor told reporters in Switzerland that he’ll sign a host city contract with the committee putting taxpayers on the hook for any financial losses if the city wins the summer 2016 games — even as some aldermen grumbled Daley is exceeding his authority.

Jackie Heard is spinning so fast that if you wrapped her in copper wire and surrounded her with magnets, she could power Chicago for a month:

• Back in Chicago, mayoral press secretary Jacquelyn Heard stressed that Chicago 2016 has come up with a series of guarantees and private funding formulas for the proposed $4.8 billion game plan, so taxpayers won’t be footing the bill.

Unfortunately for Jackie, the record shows something completely at odds with her contentions:

• Daley initially vowed that not a dime of taxpayer dollars would be spent on the 2016 games, but after the last election — and a prod by the United States Olympic Committee to “put some skin in the game” — the City Council approved the financing.

And guess what? There are PILES of money lying around. Piles that should be funding our contract, our retro and our pensions:

• The net already includes: a $450 million “rainy day fund;” as much as $375 million in IOC cancellation insurance; an additional $500 million in insurance coverage, a state guarantee of $250 million and a “last-resort” $500 million guarantee of taxpayer money from the city of Chicago.

Here's what ought to happen:

• The Pension Fund, or a member of it, needs to file a lawsuit in Federal Court demanding that these "rainy day" monies be used to fund existing pension liabilities. The pension must be funded by State law;
• Gannon's people need to march. They are actually talking about 1,500 layoffs and pay cuts while Daley sits on billions? Step up;
• The FOP better have an ace up it's sleeve that guarantees retro or face the possibility of being dissolved as the bargaining representative. Daley has all this money and we're getting screwed?

Government has obligations. Those obligations must be paid for before spending money on some ridiculous waste of time like the Olympics just to assuage Daley's swelled ego.

This would be exactly the time for someone to start a run for mayor based on a "Daley lied" mantra. He's vastly exceeding his authority it would seem and when these construction contracts start rolling through the City Council, we'd hope that the Feds have everyone wired up the ass for deals and quid pro quos. The challenger could also run on a "referendum" platform that would submit the question of an Olympics to the voting public and then when it loses, refuse to spend a dime on the entire event.