Just when the public has finally begun to show signs of seeing through the fog that surrounds tax increment financing, the state has floated the idea of a rigging up a new kind of TIF. When Sam Zell bought the Tribune Company, vowing to break it up and sell off the pieces, one of the most valuable pieces was the Cubs, Wrigley Field included. In January former governor Jim Thompson, chair of the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority, revealed that Zell had come to him and Governor Blagojevich with a proposal to have the state buy Wrigley and use public money to pay for its makeover.
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Under the plan, the state would issue bonds to pay for rebuilding Wrigley, adding new skyboxes and club seats and constructing the parking garage and retail operation the Tribune Company had planned to build. Here’s the tricky part: sales taxes going to the city would be frozen and any increase in revenues spurred by the renovation would go to the state to repay its loans. “The city would have to give up their share of the sales tax increment for the next 30 years,” Thompson said.
Clearly the state’s trying to bamboozle the public—it’s a variation on the spin the city puts on conventional TIFs, which freeze property tax revenues going into the pool for schools and parks and the like, sending increases to a discretionary fund controlled by the mayor. Just watch: Thompson will try to tell you that a sales tax increment doesn’t do any harm, the renovation will pay for itself.
But that was in the bad old days, two years before Mayor Daley took control of the school system in the great reform of 1995. That could never happen today, right?
It was even more chaotic in geometry, where substitute teachers were brought in while school officials juggled schedules. Mojica’s first geometry teacher got transferred to another class, so Mojica got a substitute who didn’t know much about math—”he told us it wasn’t his specialty,” she says. Then that substitute left and was replaced by another one—”At least she knew math,” says Mojica. But then that teacher left, and now she has a fourth. “I haven’t really learned a lot of geometry,” Mojica says. “It’s hard to learn anything when they keep changing your teachers.”
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