Unsolicited opinions:
Overnighting in Hillside:
Got my personal invite today to the Oct. 30 grand re-opening of the Best Western Chicago Hillside hotel. This would be the hotel formerly known as the Hillside Holiday Inn or the Hotel-By-the-Intensely-Stinky-Landfill-Yuk.
To their credit, the invite notes that they are celebrating their six-month-long complete renovation and “celebrating the closing of the adjacent landfill with Allied Waste!”
The unbelievable smell from that long-defective landfill (the gas-burning plumbing broke years ago) could not be ignored. For years I drove by the Holiday Inn and every time I did I know that I thought “How could you stay in a hotel that smelled so bad.”
Well, a few years back I attended an NAACP dinner at the hotel and to my amazement the hotel did not carry the landfill odor. Don’t know how they did that but they did. And the people working there were wonderfully nice.
Corus and those condos:
A few weeks back on this very blog I wrote about the problem facing Corus Bank and their heavy bet on financing huge condo projects across America. I was interested because Corus Bank has its roots as River Forest State Bank.
Last week, the plight of Corus was spread across the front page of the New York Times business section, and not in an encouraging way.
Making fun of Todd:
Today’s Sun-Times did a job on Todd Stroger and his tax raising schemes. A classic tabloid front page with the huge head: TRUST ME I’LL CUT TAXES LATER.
The paper’s editorial page minced him, too.
But what struck me was the almost mocking tone of the paper’s news coverage of Stroger’s 2008 budget proposal.
Here are the first paragraphs:
“Cook County Board President Todd Stroger admits he wants more of your tax dollars than he really needs to operate his government every year
“But, he argues, it’s more fiscally responsible to ask for more now, so as not to have to keep coming back to you for more year after year.
“Besides, he adds, if he can get more from you now, he might even be willing to give back some of it later.”
That strikes me as just making fun.
Now if anyone deserves to be treated with derision it is Todd Stroger. He must be delusional to think this tax grab trifecta is a reasonable request or that any rational person would buy his claim that county government needs 1,200 more employees rather than, maybe, 5,000 fewer.
