Rethinking Cole Hall teardown

Desire for common sense outweighs public's sympathy

By Mark Brown

Sun-Times, Chicago, IL

Published Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Opinions are Like Belly Buttons (everybody has one) -- also known as Brown Picks Lint From His Navel.

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There's an oft-dispensed piece of advice for those who have experienced a major life trauma or upheaval -- such as a death in the family -- that goes something like this:

Don't make any big decisions right away. Let things settle a bit.

In other words, don't quit your job, divorce your spouse, sell your home or run off with your secretary. It's too much to digest at one time.

As is now apparent, it's also pretty good advice for institutions of higher education still in the throes of recovering from a mass murder on campus.

Without demeaning the intentions of anybody involved in the decision to tear down Northern Illinois University's Cole Hall, site of the Valentine's Day shootings that killed five students, and to spend $40 million in public funds to replace it, it's pretty obvious they moved a little too hastily.

The public's sympathy does not outweigh its desire for common sense in the spending of its money, especially not at a time when every level of government seems to be raising taxes.

A state legislator for the DeKalb area now says the demolition plan is "off the table" because of the public backlash, and while university officials don't go quite that far, it's apparent they're doing some rethinking.

Ideally, Gov. Blagojevich will keep his financial commitment to the university after it comes up with a revised response plan that the citizens of Illinois can embrace.

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If Rex Grossman suffers a season-ending injury in Week 5 after the Bears have miraculously gotten off to a fast start, do you think Brett Favre would consider coming out of retirement to lead them back to the Super Bowl?

Nah, I didn't think so either, but a guy can dream, can't he?

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On Tuesday, the taxpayers of Illinois became the proud owners of a Springfield hotel. OK, maybe "proud" is overstating things a bit, but we are now the owners.

The only thing better will be the day when we become the former owners of the hotel.

The Renaissance Hotel, now called the President Abraham Lincoln Hotel, was the best hotel in Springfield for many years, which didn't keep it from being an albatross around the public's neck.

The hotel was built with a state loan made in 1982 when Jim Thompson was governor and Jerry Cosentino was state treasurer. The owners, led by Springfield businessman William Cellini, quickly fell behind in their loan payments and eventually stopped making them altogether. The state has lost about $30 million in the process.

We'll get some of that back when the current state treasurer, Alexi Giannoulias, auctions it off, but only a fraction. Still, it's long overdue, and Giannoulias deserves credit for stepping up to foreclose on the property and forcibly take it away from the Cellini group. Cellini's name is expected to figure prominently in the Tony Rezko trial.

I've been writing about the hotel debacle since 1987. It almost makes me nostalgic to think that its days of providing fodder for investigative reporters could finally be nearing the end.

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How fitting that a federal court monitor would issue a report exposing the continued illegal political patronage operations in Cook County government just days after county commissioners voted to more than double the county's sales tax -- boosting it to 1.75 percent from .75 percent.

Couple that with the report in the Tribune that the Stroger administration is preparing to award a contract to a consulting company recently cited in the Las Vegas indictment of a former Stroger Hospital official, and you can see why some commissioners belligerently withheld support from Todd Stroger's proposed budget.

The county never has got religion on Shakman, not that anybody is convinced that the city isn't still scheming, too. But the county won't change its ways until Patrick Fitzgerald's crew lights up a bunch of county officials with a Robert Sorich-type prosecution, and probably not even then.