These are hard times for local government and the taxpayers who fund it. The city’s schools are so broke they’re firing special ed teachers, the county is about to borrow $200 million just to cover its basic bills, and soaring property taxes are forcing longtime residents and merchants out of their homes and businesses. So what’s Mayor Daley planning to do about it? He wants to funnel at least $550 million in desperately needed property taxes into a new downtown TIF.
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Set aside for a moment the ques-tion whether an area that includes the Sears Tower, the Civic Opera House, and City Hall itself truly verges on blight–and for that matter, whether yet another TIF district would do anything but make matters worse. The real issue is whether taxpayers can afford one at a time when reassessments will send property tax bills rising as much as 100 percent.
Daley insists that TIFs aren’t tax increases. But while that may technically be true, it doesn’t mean that they don’t cause property taxes to rise. Quite the contrary: home owners and business and commercial property owners are forced to pay more in property taxes in order to compensate for the millions being diverted into the hands of developers.
Cook County Board commissioner Tony Peraica, the Republican candidate for president of the board, says he plans to make TIFs an issue in his campaign. “That [a TIF] applies to LaSalle Street is outrageous. You have a wealthy area and you’re giving them tax incentives? Certainly, I would fight this.” Peraica says that if elected he’d at the very least appoint a representative to the Joint Review Board who would genuinely scrutinize TIF deals.
