“Perhaps if the city had engaged with the aldermen on potential sites and helped gear that conversation and guide it with the potential developers and operators, that might have produced less acrimony and more up-front consensus on how best to locate this casino,” Reilly said. Chicago Ave., has been “overwhelmingly negative.” The River North Residents Association, strong opponents of the Bally’s site, said more than 2,300 have responded to an online survey, with 80.5% against that location. Several are committee chairmen.”ĭuring the one and only casino committee meeting last week, Reilly maintained reaction to the Bally’s development at the Tribune printing plant, 777 W. Reilly told the Sun-Times in a text message: “I haven’t heard anything about a Thursday announcement and have spoken with a number of my colleagues already this morning & they haven’t either.

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The Seattle-based online retailer eventually built offices near Washington D.C. In 2017, the city offered the site to Amazon as a potential headquarters. The City Council in 2018 agreed to allow 4.5 million square feet of offices to be built there, plus a hotel and more than 4,000 residences. Supporters of the Bally’s plan note that the property already is zoned for a much denser development than even the casino. Bally’s chairman Soo Kim has argued their plan, with a series of traffic signal upgrades, would actually help reduce congestion. Hopkins said area residents almost universally oppose the site because of its “logistical challenges,” referring to the traffic issues that hundreds of River North residents bemoaned during Bally’s public meeting last month. … Quickest to market is a promise that is unlikely to be kept by this inexperienced team that don’t seem to know what they’re doing.” We will probably wind up with something that is defective in some ways.

It’s going to cause all sorts of inconvenience to the neighborhood. They’re going to do things that a more experienced team wouldn’t do.

This is not a project for beginners,” Hopkins said. “To pick a team with no experience constructing large, multi-use projects is folly.

Bally's casino locations