Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
That’s what Ellen Shepard (executive director of the Andersonville Chamber of Commerce) and Michael Shuman (author of The Small-Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses Are Beating the Global Competition) propose with regard to the big-box wage ordinance. It was a no-win decision: pass the bill and lose jobs to the burbs, or veto the bill and endorse poverty-wage jobs. “This quandary could have been avoided,” they write, “if the city’s eggs had been in the right basket all along–with an economic development policy emphasizing locally owned business.”
“A smarter policy by the city would be not to waste another penny–whether in the form of grants, loans, loan guarantees, industrial bonds, capital improvements, or TIFs–on nonlocal business. Precious taxpayer dollars should be reserved exclusively for the local businesses we know contribute the most to the city’s well being.” (Background on this theory in the Andersonville Study and in my article in the July 7 Reader.)
