Name: McCormick Place hospital’s cost to taxpayers? $1.7 million per patient. How the deal happened.
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McCormick Place hospital’s cost to taxpayers? $1.7 million per patient. How the deal happened.

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SHARETaxpayers spent nearly $66 million fashioning McCormick Place into an emergency coronavirus hospital with 2,750 beds this past spring amid fears that COVID-19 patients would overwhelm hospitals in the Chicago area.Those fears turned out to be unfounded. Just 38 patients were transferred to the sprawling convention center — meaning taxpayers’ cost for the makeshift hospital turned out to be more than $1.7 million per patient, on average.But top aides to Mayor Lori Lightfoot say her decision to initiate the project with the federal government and the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority was an important “insurance policy” at a time of “immense emergency.”“It’s something I’m incredibly proud of,” says Samir Mayekar, Lightfoot’s deputy mayor for economic and neighborhood development who says the money was “not spent in vain.”He also notes that the medical equipment is being stored and can be redeployed if needed.To complete the McCormick Place project, the authority — a city-state governmental body known as McPier that runs the convention center and owns Navy Pier — tapped Walsh Construction, a politically connected Chicago company that’s built everything from highways to high-rises.That followed a selection process so frenzied that McPier hired Walsh just hours after receiving proposals from three construction companies, according to interviews and records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times that show:A day before the selection, — the private company overseeing the tourist attraction that’s run by political allies of former Mayor Richard M. Daley — emailed Larita Clark, McPier’s chief executive officer, to put in a word for Walsh. Under Daley, whose daughter is a Navy Pier Inc. board member, Walsh got huge city contracts, and members of the Walsh family gave heavily to campaign funds associated with Daley.Besides McPier’s contract with Walsh to put together the coronavirus hospital at McCormick Place, City Hall gave three contracts for medical supplies and medications for the hospital to a company called that has billed the city $1.3 million.RelatedThose involved in creating the McCormick Place hospital say this was an incredibly unusual situation and that officials acted rapidly to try to fend off disaster.At the time, New York City hospitals were filling, and there were fears that, if Chicago didn’t act quickly, it would “have looked like New York or worse,” says Dr. Nick Turkal, who was executive director of what was formally called the alternate care facility at McCormick Place — one of four in the Chicago region intended to house noncritical coronavirus patients in an effort to keep beds available in hospitals for people more severely ill with the virus.Officials settled on McCormick Place as one of the four sites in part because it was empty given that the trade shows and conventions it normally hosts have been canceled because of the pandemic. The other three facilities were in Blue Island, Melrose Park and Elgin in previously closed hospitals, where the costs of readying them for patients were considerably lower than at McCormick Place — a total of about $50 million for all three, records show.The Army Corps itself chose the construction companies for the renovations required at the closed hospitals — none of which has treated even one patient.If the virus ends up raging back, the Blue Island site — the former MetroSouth Medical Center — will be ready, officials say, with the others less likely to come back on line.Walsh’s contract involved building mobile hospital rooms and acquiring or assembling beds, showers, sinks, nursing stations and pharmacies — jobs for which it enlisted a host of suppliers and subcontractors. Company officials didn’t return calls seeking comment about its selection or how much of the money ended up going toward its bottom line.Pepper officials wouldn’t comment. Robert Gallo, Power’s executive vice president, says he thought the selection process was fair.Based on records and interviews, here’s how that process evolved from a first contact on a Sunday to the $66 million deal by early the following Sunday:“I will be sending out the [request for proposal] today — can you let me know realistically when you’d be able to turn around a response? We might need something as early as tonight/tomorrow morning,” McPier’s procurement director Dao Ngo emailed Pepper Construction at 11:16 a.m. that Saturday.“MPEA staff reviewed the proposals,” says Clark, whose agency has been reimbursed nearly $700,000 by the Army Corps for its staff time and other costs related to the project. “Walsh was selected as the most qualified firm. There wasn’t a dollar amount involved. We looked at the fact that they had the construction management team. “The MPEA board ratified the decision after it was made. I personally signed the document.”Even before construction was finished, the McCormick Place hospital opened in mid-April, with Pritzker announcing April 17 that it had its first five patients.One week later, the Army Corps reported construction was done.On May 8, Clark announced that the last patient had been released and that the temporary facility was being dismantled.Next Up InMost ReadThe LatestThey were in the 7100 block of South State Street when they were struck by gunfire, police said.They were in the 2100 block of West Adams Street when they were shot, police said.Kramer, who survived a suicide attempt in 2015, is the personification of resilience and hope.Plus, a look at cornerback Jaylon Johnson’s shutdown performance, the right guard debate and more.After battling in court for body-cam footage that showed a Chicago police SUV barreling into Martina Standley in 2019, activist William Calloway kept pushing for evidence the police department was acting in bad faith.

SHARETaxpayers spent nearly $66 million fashioning McCormick Place into an emergency coronavirus hospital with 2,750 beds this past spring amid fears that COVID-19 patients would overwhelm hospitals in the Chicago area.Those fears turned out to be unfounded. Just 38 patients were transferred to the sprawling convention center — meaning taxpayers’ cost for the makeshift hospital turned out to be more than $1.7 million per patient, on average.But top aides to Mayor Lori Lightfoot say her decision to initiate the project with the federal government and the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition...

McCormick Place hospital’s cost to taxpayers? $1.7 million per patient. How the deal happened.

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