For the past several years Cook County Board commissioners have been promoting themselves as fearless reformers protecting the beleaguered property tax payer by taking bold stands against former board president John Stroger.
It’s left to the county commissioners to take a stand. Why them? To understand the answer you have to know a little about how TIFs work–don’t worry, I’ll keep it brief. TIFs are districts where property taxes flowing to taxing bodies such as the schools, parks, and county are frozen. If those taxing bodies got $10,000 out of a TIF district when it was created, that’s pretty much all they’ll get until the TIF expires in 23 years. The additional property tax revenues generated by rising assessments and new development are immediately rebated by the taxing bodies back to the TIF district, which is controlled by Daley and the local aldermen (provided they’re well behaved). The more TIFs the city makes, the fewer the properties the taxing bodies can draw added revenue from. Thus, the schools and parks must raise their tax rates even more to compensate for the money they’re losing to the TIFs.
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Through his brother, Mayor Daley let the commissioners know he considered Quigley’s proposals an unwarranted intrusion into city matters. (The last thing Daley would want is for the state to tighten TIF regulations.) Only 4 of the board’s 17 commissioners–Jerry Butler, Bobbie Steele, Carl Hanson, and Tony Peraica–signed on to Quigley’s proposal, and Steele later asked Quigley to remove her name as a sponsor. The other 13 said they’d have to study it. John Daley held the proposals in committee for weeks before finally granting them a hearing last week.
Quigley needs nine votes to pass his property-tax-bill ordinance. It looks as though he can count on Butler, Hanson, Roberto Maldonado, and probably Peraica. But after that it’s up in the air. His usual allies–Forrest Claypool and Peraica–were notably absent from the debate. They showed up for the early portion of the meeting but were gone from the floor when the proposals came up for vote. Claypool’s clearly in a bind–this may be the hardest vote he’s ever cast. He owes his career to Mayor Daley, who made him his chief of staff and named him president of the Park District. When Claypool ran for president against John Stroger in last spring’s primary, Daley cleared the way for his top political operative, David Axelrod, to work for Claypool. But if Claypool doesn’t vote for the measure he loses all credibility as a reformer. “I know they [the commissioners] don’t want to have to vote against this,” says Quigley. “How can you vote against truth in taxation?”
