Now that Mayor Daley's Olympic dreams have been dashed, the Chicago 2016 bid team must figure out where exactly they went wrong. Was it the absence of a federal financial guarantee? The city's proclivity for cost overruns on major construction projects? It's creaky transportation infrastructure? Or was it the lukewarm support of Chicago's own citizens?

On the latter point, it's pretty clear that the process by which Chicago 2016 developed the city's campaign -- with little transparency or community involvement -- poisoned it in the eyes of many weary taxpayers. As Mechanics' Ramsin Canon wrote last night, the top-down planning process excluded hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans "who deserved to have a voice in the process."

Amy Dean agrees. In an appearance on WGN this afternoon, the author and former South Bay AFL-CIO president expressed skepticism that the benefits of the proposed Olympic development projects would have ever reached the city's working people. Watch it:

I think one of the things that we saw today, with so many people divided [over the Olympics] in the city of Chicago, is it sends a message that many, many people do not believe in the city of Chicago that economic development will achieve a dual bottom line.  And what do I mean by a dual bottom line? That on the one hand it will create economic competitiveness, but on the other that it will also lead towards community well-being and increase to services and neighborhoods. [...]

I think that Chicago suffers from not having a broad enough range of voices that legitimately get to sit at the table and that legitimately are at the table trying to ensure that when public investments are made or when economic development decisions are made in the city, that those decisions benefit our civic institutions and they go toward community development. And those are the kinds of things we really seriously have to work on in the city of Chicago … We have a way to go, whether it’s the Olympics or any other major economic development project  in the city, we need to see more benefits for real people, and I think that’s the story here.

It's a lesson that city officials should definitely take with them moving forward.