For those who say I’m too tough on Mayor Emanuel, I’d like to take the time to credit him for doing something I never thought possible: uniting Andy Thayer and Rick Garcia around a common cause.
He’s generally the guy in the T-shirts and jeans bellowing into the bullhorn while the cops haul him away to jail. He’s been arrested for civil disobedience so many times he’s lost count.
He was there to protest a TIF deal under which the mayor proposed to spend about $16 million on an upscale high-rise at Montrose and Clarendon, just a few blocks from the lake.
“We weren’t arrested,” Thayer says. “They just kicked us out of the meeting.”
Garcia says he and his friends should have been the first people let into the council chambers. Instead, the guards made them form a line behind the metal detector. There, they watched as a steady stream of latecomers, many of them schoolchildren, were ushered in ahead of them.
“You’re keeping the public in the dark,” says Thayer.
