When Mayor Rahm Emanuel kicked off his re-election campaign last month, he stood amid the backdrop of Cinespace Chicago Film Studios and boasted that the former steel mill where NBC’s “Chicago Fire” and “tons of TV shows and movies” are filmed is “bringing good jobs and opportunity to hundreds of Chicagoans.”
What Emanuel didn’t say: Alex Pissios, the studio’s president, owed City Hall $19,901 at the time of the mayor’s Dec. 6 campaign kickoff on a Cinespace stage emblazoned with Chicago flags.
Or that City Hall had been negotiating to give Cinespace a tax break in 2013 at the same time it was trying to collect $250,000 in city fines from Pissios a few months before he ascended to the top spot at the studio.
Pissios, 42, of Hawthorn Woods, reached a deal with City Hall in September 2013 to pay the city the $250,000 over several months.