Bally’s project developers hold community meeting

CHICAGO — Project developers held the second of two community engagement meetings Monday evening centered around the development of Bally’s Chicago Casino in River West.

The more than 2-hour-long meeting focused on updates to a proposal, PD-1426, which included parking adjustments, more residential space, expanded open spaces and reducing the physical density of the project by more than 1.8 million square feet.

In addition to the updates released by project developers and Bally’s executives, the meeting also functioned as a forum for stakeholders to hear input from the community, who continued to raise concerns over how construction noise and light would impact quality of living in the area, whether or not Bally’s was holding up its commitment to vendor diversity and how traffic and public safety would be impacted by the casino.

“The way we distributed traffic wasn’t just rolling the dice,” said Tim Doran, senior traffic consultant with Fish Transportation. “We actually used a market study done by Bally’s.”