Politics
South Side Residents Won’t Get to Vote on Quantum Campus After Election Commissioners Toss Referendum
A rendering of the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park proposed for the Southeast Side. (Credit: Lamar Johnson Collaborative)
Residents of three South Side precincts will not get to weigh in on the redevelopment of the former U.S. Steel South Works site after the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners voted Tuesday to toss the advisory referendum from the March ballot.
Although organizers with Southside Together collected enough signatures to qualify for the March 17 ballot, the question — which poses seven queries about the fate of the long vacant and deeply contaminated land on the city’s southeastern tip — violates state law, the three-member board unanimously decided.
State law requires all ballot questions — regardless of whether they are binding or advisory — to ask just one question, the board determined.
Southside Together had hoped to ask voters in the 17th precinct of the 7th Ward as well as the second and fourth precincts of the 10th Ward whether Mayor Brandon Johnson, Gov. JB Pritzker and Alds. Greg Mitchell (7th Ward) and Peter Chico (10th Ward) should “stop the development of the Illinois Quantum Microelectronics Park on the former South Works site.”
Those precincts are adjacent to the proposed 440-acre quantum campus and are east of the Metra Electric train tracks between Cheltenham Place and 95th Street.
But the referendum also improperly asked whether the land should be “properly remediated,” whether residents should control how the property is used and developed under a “community oversight” structure and whether grocery stores, affordable housing and youth centers should be built on the property.
That violates Illinois’ election law, which requires advisory questions to “be confined to one topic and should not contain alternative or bifurcated questions to avoid running afoul of the ‘free and equal’ election clause’ of the Illinois Constitution,” according to the decision.
Sanya Bhartiya, the staff organizer for Southside Together, said the referendum was designed to give Chicagoans “who live down the street from the South Works site … a chance to give their voice on a multi billion dollar project with dangerous implications being built in their backyard using their taxes.”
“We will continue the fight for residents to have control over what happens in our neighborhoods, and we will continue to fight the quantum development,” Bhartiya said.
Developer Related Midwest told WTTW News that it engaged in “a comprehensive and collaborative process that included over 50 public meetings and events attended by more than 15,000 residents.”
The development will create “thousands of jobs, investing in local schools to bring STEM programs to youth, transforming once vacant land into new housing and expanding and preserving 100 acres of parkland as part of Illinois Quantum & Microelectronics Park and the broader Quantum Shore master plan.”
Both Pritzker and Johnson have backed the $9 billion Quantum Shore Chicago project, 8080 S. DuSable Lake Shore Drive, which is set to include 181 new homes, a new $300 million 52-bed hospital from Advocate Health Care and improved access to South Chicago’s lakefront parks alongside state-of-the-art research and development facilities.
The site will be home to IBM’s National Quantum Algorithm Center, and the University of Illinois plans to build two new buildings to host quantum computing research and community space.
State lawmakers have pledged to invest $500 million into the quantum campus, $200 million for the Chicago Quantum Exchange and $99 million for cryoplant infrastructure.
In addition, city officials have set aside $5 million for the development, which is also eligible for $175 million in county property tax breaks during the next 30 years.
The Cook County Board of Commissioners in October approved a $20 million grant to build a cryogenic facility as part of PsiQuantum’s operations on the campus.
The development broke ground at the end of September.
In December, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency approved developers’ plans to clean up the project site, which was contaminated with petroleum, heavy metals and other chemicals left over from decades of steel production.
Contact Heather Cherone: @HeatherCherone | (773) 569-1863 | [email protected]
