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

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s aides defend her push for little-used coronavirus hospital built by Walsh Construction as important ‘insurance policy’ at a time of ‘immense emergency.’

By By Tim Novak and Robert Herguth of The Chicago Sun-Times. Excerpt:

"Taxpayers 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:

• McPier solicited proposals from three giants in construction: Walsh, Pepper Construction and Power Construction Company. And it hired Walsh even though Power said it either would forgo any fees or donate them to pandemic relief because it didn’t want to profit from the pandemic. Walsh charged $65.9 million, including more than $5.1 million in fees, records show.
• An official with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — which hired McPier to build the facility, for which the federal government is covering at least 75 percent of the costs — said in internal emails that Power or Pepper was the best choice. But that decision was left to McPier, which picked Walsh, saying its rates were not “significantly different” than the others and that it “had the most experience . . . working with the [Army Corps] and working on emergency projects.”

A day before the selection, Marilynn Kelly Gardner, the chief executive officer of Navy Pier Inc. — 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 Vizient that has billed the city $1.3 million.

Those 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."