Mayor Rahm Emanuel may never get his Amazon HQ2. Other cities look like they’re the front-runners for one of the biggest job-creation engines of the digital age. But it looks like Emanuel is about to get his Tesla.

Not Tesla, exactly. Boring, actually. As in The Boring Co. As in, the underground transport company — created by Tesla founder Elon Musk — which has won a city of Chicago bid to build a high-speed train project from downtown to O’Hare International Airport.

The joke in the name Boring, of course, is that nothing connected to Musk is in any way mundane. And Boring, in its corporate infancy, has fit the Musk bill. Like all Musk concoctions, it has been borne aloft by the mix of Musk’s Flash Gordon imagination, his preternatural talent for hype, and a Musk record of just-reliable-enough achievement that forces us all to take him seriously, no matter how outlandish the plans seem.

Emanuel is betting on an 18-month-old company that has yet to dig anything but a test tunnel in Southern California. Boring also has run into serious regulatory problems with a proposed Washington-to-Baltimore link. And, his big reveal on Thursday disclosed plans for Chicago that are so scant it requires a Muskian imagination to picture completion any time soon.

Read the rest at chicagotribune.com.

David Greising is the president and chief executive of the Better Government Association, joining the BGA in 2018. For nearly a century, the BGA has fought for honest and effective government through investigative journalism and policy advocacy.

Greising’s career started at the City News Bureau of Chicago, with stops at the Chicago Sun-Times, Business Week magazine, the Chicago Tribune and Reuters. He was a co-founder of the Chicago News Cooperative and worked briefly as a consultant to World Business Chicago. Today, Greising writes on government issues in regular columns for the Tribune and Crain’s Chicago Business.

Under Greising’s leadership, the BGA has played a key role in uncovering public corruption amidst the wide-ranging federal probe, starting with an in-depth report about Ald. Ed Burke’s conflicts of interest before the federal charges against Burke. The BGA also has exposed waste and fraud at O’Hare and the proliferation of corruption and poverty into Dolton, Lyons and other Chicago suburbs. The BGA’s policy team has led calls for ethics reform in Chicago’s City Council and in state government.