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As an aside: anyone have the address for the Trib's "Letter to the Editor"???

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Editorial: Mayor Brandon Johnson doesn’t understand what Ken Griffin and Citadel meant for Chicago

When is a statement technically a fact and at the same time untruthful? Mayor Brandon Johnson gave us a prime example of that dynamic on Tuesday as he was advocating for the umpteenth time for his proposal to tax Chicago’s largest private-sector employers on the basis of each person they put to work.

“We do have the most dynamic, world-renowned companies that are situated here,” Johnson told reporters.

“People talk about Ken Griffin leaving,” the mayor went on, referring to the billionaire who moved to Florida from Chicago three years ago along with the headquarters of Citadel, his sprawling hedge fund and market-making outfit. “But his people didn’t. Citadel is still here.”

Indeed, Citadel remains a presence in Chicago.

But only barely.

Before Griffin’s decision, Citadel employed about 1,100 in the heart of downtown Chicago. At Citadel’s Chicago peak, those extremely well-compensated employees worked out of 500,000 square feet at 131 S. Dearborn St., dubbed (not surprisingly) Citadel Center.

Today? Just 200 Citadel workers are left in Chicago. For now.

The exodus in three short years occurred, by the way, not because Griffin ordered his Chicago workers to move to his South Florida headquarters or to the company’s growing office in New York. They’ve left on their own. Sure, they might have deemed it in their professional interest to do so, but Griffin when he moved the company made it a point to acknowledge that many of his workers had deep ties to Illinois (as once did he) and that Citadel still would have a future in Chicago.

That future has turned out quite minimal indeed. Citadel is downsizing dramatically. The company bought out its lease at Citadel Center and is vamoosing entirely from that tower. Citadel’s Chicago people will work out of a mere 50,000 square feet at 353 N. Clark St. In River North, not the Loop. The move already is in progress.

Not only has Chicago lost nearly 1,000 of those well-paid Citadel workers living in Chicagoland (thereby paying our exorbitant property taxes) and spending each day in the heart of the Loop, availing themselves of shopping, eating and entertainment options downtown. But the small crew here now isn’t even in the Loop; indeed, their absence contributes to the malaise that afflicts the central business district. We’d also venture a guess that the just-graduated talent that flocks to Citadel isn’t flocking to the office here, given this reality. And those sought-after 20-somethings actually are the kinds of workers this city badly needs to be competitive on the international stage.

Not to mention how Citadel’s shrinkage has exacerbated one of the nation’s worst downtown office vacancy rates.

Of course, the mayor doesn’t seem to think in those terms when he considers what Citadel means to Chicago now. He’s focused overwhelmingly on how many heads he can tax. What Chicago has lost with Griffin’s departure goes far beyond the people he employs.

Before he departed, Griffin had become Chicago’s foremost philanthropist, rebuilding the entirety of the lakeshore bike path, for example, and making transformative donations to the Museum of Science and Industry , the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Chicago, Lurie Children’s Hospital and countless others.

He’s doing the same now in South Florida. In just a few short years, Griffin’s philanthropy in the Sunshine State has totaled about $335 million. As a former teacher, Chicago’s mayor might be interested to learn that Griffin has made $14.5 million in public school donations, including $9 million directly to Miami-Dade County Public Schools to expand math tutoring for disadvantaged middle schoolers.

Griffin has given $50 million each to two area institutions for cancer research and treatment of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other similar neurological disorders.

Mayor Johnson likes to extol Chicago’s community colleges. Another $20 million of Griffin’s money has gone to the Miami equivalent, Miami Dade College, for scholarships for first-generation and low-income students.

We could go on. But it’s just depressing.

The point is, Mayor Johnson’s comments displayed not only his apparent ignorance of just what a shadow of its former self Citadel has become in Chicago. They also undermined his entire point in using Citadel to bolster his head-tax case. Citadel, in fact, is the poster child for how government policies truly can chase away a city’s most important corporate citizens. Politicians like Johnson — he’s not the only one, by the way — would do well to stop daring business leaders to follow Griffin’s lead.

And here’s the ultimate irony of Johnson’s choice of Citadel as his example of how the “most dynamic, world-renowned companies” are in Chicago.

Johnson’s ever-shifting threshold for when he would apply the monthly per-worker tax to businesses now has landed at those with Chicago workforces of 500 or more. They would pay $33 per month per worker.

At its current local size, Citadel would be exempt from the head tax.


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Behind a paywall here...

https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/editorials/