365 days of
Lightfoot
Mayor Lori Lightfoot has been in office for one
year. Here's what the business community has to say about her performance.
Lori Lightfoot took office a year ago with promises to tackle Chicago's wobbly finances plus decades of inequality, crime and corruption as a political outsider beholden to no one.
Now, the city is in a fight for survival—its
budget problems and inequality exacerbated by the impact of COVID-19, and
thousands of workers and a business community are left shaken.
At her inaugural address on May 20, 2019, Lightfoot told
the crowd at Wintrust Arena that strong, growing and new businesses would mean
stability for the city's finances and jobs for its residents, but that smaller
businesses on the South and West sides needed as much attention as the big
players downtown. "Our neighborhoods have been neglected for too long.
They cannot be anymore."
In a livestreamed address to the Economic Club
of Chicago almost a year later, Lightfoot painted the COVID-19 crisis as an
opportunity to double down on those goals.
"Our people are sick and dying.
Unemployment's skyrocketed. And many of our small businesses are on the brink
of mass closure. But as hard as things have been—and will continue to be—this
crisis also gives us an opportunity to remake our city for decades to
come," she said.
Howard Tullman, general managing partner of
Chicago High Tech Investment Partners and of G2T3V, says it's a risk to focus
on neighborhood development. "I don't think right now that strategy is
worth anything, because millions of small businesses will not come back from
this virus. Putting your eggs in that basket is really frightening. People with
giant war chests are the people she needs to be talking to," he says,
including those at the helm of megaprojects like the 78, Lincoln Yards and
Farpoint's redevelopment of the old Michael Reese site.
How Lightfoot responds to COVID-19 will likely
prove to be the mayor's defining moment, and there's bound to be disagreements
with a business community itching to get restaurants, bars, travel,
conventions, sports and megaprojects running at full speed while balancing
protection of workers and the public.
But so far, business leaders including Sam Toia,
president of the Illinois Restaurant Association, largely give the mayor
passing grades for her first year in office—complimenting her straight talk,
quick mind and collaborative qualities—and agree neighborhood business survival
is key to recovery.
Who does Lightfoot lean on when she thinks of
the business community? Perhaps more than anyone, Deputy Mayor for Economic
Development Samir Mayekar.
(Lightfoot was not available for an interview before press time.)
While former Mayor Rahm Emanuel's deputies were
familiar C-suite faces and go-to sounding boards for Chicago's biggest
companies, the role for Mayekar, a 36-year-old tech entrepreneur who did a
stint in the Obama administration, is as much about social justice and equity
as economic development.
Mayekar says Lightfoot's administration has
broadened Chicago's traditional definition of the business community beyond
corporate CEOs "to make sure we're dealing in the neighborhoods as well,
re-engaging communities that might not have felt engaged previously."
PRIORITIES
The roughly 100 members of her COVID-19 Recovery Task Force illustrate
those priorities. While Chicago's hotel, retail and restaurant trade groups are
included, as are Uptake's Brad Keywell, Frontera's Rick Bayless and P33's Brad
Henderson, so are smaller chambers of commerce from Englewood, Little Village
and Austin.
Administration officials also say Lightfoot
leans on UL's Jenny Scanlon (the new head of the Commercial Club of Chicago),
Ariel Investments' Mellody Hobson (Lightfoot's vice chair at World Business
Chicago), Toia and Chicago Federation of Labor President Bob Reiter. She's also
turned to Ulta CEO Mary Dillon and BMO Harris' David Casper for insight.
While Lightfoot came from the world of Big Law,
she did not have the same personal ties to Chicago's business community as her
predecessors.
Casper says that's a strength. "She comes
in fresh, she doesn't have baggage, and she can deal with issues she didn't
create."
From left: Samir Mayekar, Andrea Zopp and Howard
Tullman
BMO is participating in her Invest South/West initiative, a shuffling of spending
priorities and Emanuel-era programs to build infrastructure and finance
economic development outside downtown.
The mayor benefits from the Emanuel era in other
ways—including administration officials she's kept in place at Business
Affairs, Buildings and Aviation. Andrea Zopp, another holdover as president of
WBC, and Hobson made rotating CEO breakfasts and dinners a regular part of
Lightfoot's schedule to introduce her to the broader business community.
Hobson says she's left their encounters
impressed and says other business leaders from WBC have, too.
Amid the COVID crisis, intimate meals have
transformed into sometimes-massive weekend Zoom conference calls. Those
lengthy, no-BS conversations, Hobson says, involve zero mayoral pandering.
"She has a real clear sense of self, what she believes and what she's
trying to get done, and she holds to that. But she also is open to a
conversation, and that's a unique skill set, especially in times with people
that don't agree with you."
"When she first came in, one of the
concerns I heard from the business community is, 'She won't listen. She won't
hear us,' " Zopp says. But she argues Lightfoot demonstrated right away
that she was willing to balance business demands with organized labor and a
younger, more progressive City Council.
One of Lightfoot's first acts was taking up an
issue that had stalled under Emanuel—the Fair Workweek ordinance. It mandated
employers give workers two weeks' notice of expected schedules. Lightfoot took
an unusual step—stopping by a committee hearing—to signal the ordinance was a
personal priority.
The debate was an exercise in balance, Zopp
argues. Everyone was brought to the table. Labor made concessions over employee
caps. Safety-net hospitals got a six-month break. Smaller restaurants were
almost uniformly excluded, and businesses won some language about how employee
hours could be offered.
"The ordinance was one where you know it's
the right one: You make compromises, nobody's exactly happy, but that's the way
it should work," Zopp says.
While the sit-down around Fair Workweek was
encouraging, there's "lots of room for improvement on where she
started," says Tanya Triche Dawood, vice president and general counsel of
the Illinois Retail Merchants Association. "Employers, I hope, will matter
more in her administration."
With so much uncertainty heading into the
summer, some business groups have bristled that the city didn't grant a full
six-month reprieve from Fair Workweek requirements set to take effect on July
1. The City Council is expected to vote shortly on a tweak that would bar
workers from suing over violations of the ordinance until 2021, but some are
wary that built-in exceptions for businesses during pandemics might not fall in
their favor. They also hoped for a break from a July hike in the minimum wage.
RELIEF EFFORTS
Mayekar says the administration has supported
workers and businesses during the COVID crisis, including tax deferrals,
regulatory breaks and the launch of small-business relief loans and grants. The
city has given out $5,000 loans to nearly 1,000 microbusinesses. But its $100 million small-business resiliency fund has approved
only 316 loans totaling nearly $12 million, with an additional 268 loans in the
final stages of underwriting.
As for Lightfoot's engagement of the tech
community pre-virus, Tullman says, "I don't think she has extended herself
to any material extent to support the business or the technology community in
the way that Rahm did."
Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce CEO Jack Lavin
agrees with Tullman that the mayor should turn her attention toward big
projects, including the One Central development on the city's Near South Side.
He's glad communication lines are open and says Lightfoot is more of a
collaborator than Emanuel but says it's a constant battle to counter the City
Council's progressive flank—a growing concern as the city approaches budget season.
While the mayor has said she wants to focus on
"stimulus" and has described raising property taxes as a "last,
last resort," the city has not yet released estimates of COVID's impact on revenue.
Triche Dawood is nervous. "We all know there's going to be a
significant hit to the budget. The question always is, in every budget, 'Who's
going to pay for it?' Our concern as employers is that we are going to bear the
brunt," she says. "We need to be very careful . . . because these are
the folks that you want to get the economy going again, right?"
