Millennium Park Costing City Millions in Maintenance

By Prescott Carlson in News on Oct 23, 2008 9:00PM

While the $8.1 million in yearly costs for the day-to-day upkeep of Millennium Park seems high, it isn't that surprising. Hell, they probably spend $1 million just on Windex for the Bean. The real shocker probably unknown to most Chicagoans is that it wasn't supposed to cost anything at all. Similar to the Buckingham Fountain Endowment Fund, Millennium Park maintenance was supposed to be funded by a conservancy paid for by private donors. But unlike Buckingham Fountain, the conservancy was not backed by any real dollars, but rather empty pledges. And once donors learned that keeping Millennium Park looking spiffy involved just a bit more than cutting the grass, they bailed:

"People who raised a lot of money for the art were gonna become a conservancy, and they were gonna run the park. They discovered very soon that it was not possible to run the park. They had not taken in all the money even today . . . and it costs a fortune," [Cultural Affairs Commissioner Lois] Weisberg said.

Weisberg -- citing New York's Central Park as an example -- also stated that it could be 20 years or more before a conservancy could be put together. So in the meantime, costs are coming straight out of the city's hotel tax revenue -- revenue that many would argue needs to be spent elsewhere. The 9th Ward's Anthony Beale wants it for "his" parks:

"It looks great. Don’t get me wrong. But I guarantee if you gave me $8 million, my parks would look great, too. . . . My parks look horrible. I can barely get the grass cut on time. But we’re spending $8 million [so that a park] for people outside the city will look great to them. If they came into the inner communities, they won’t have the same outlook on our parks."

Photo by sandcastlematt