As summer reading goes, nobody’s going to mistake the inspector general’s recent audit of TIF spending in the Loop for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.
The money’s supposed to go toward eradicating blight in low-income, investment-starved communities. But the law concerning oversight is so loosely written that Daley’s basically free to create TIF districts wherever he wants. Hence, some of the city’s wealthiest communities are the program’s biggest beneficiaries while truly poor and blighted communities like Englewood and Roseland get the shaft.
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The IG zeroed in on the Central Loop TIF district, created in 1984 by the City Council at the urging of Mayor Harold Washington to seed development of Block 37, which is bounded by Randolph, Washington, Dearborn, and State. As it turned out, a good chunk of Central Loop TIF money was spent building Millennium Park three blocks away.
Ferguson doesn’t even pretend to have prepared a comprehensive report on all Central Loop or even Millennium Park expenses. His report is what auditors call a sample—a snapshot thought to represent the bigger picture. He assigned two auditors—Larry Dakof and Wendy Funk—to scrutinize expenditures from 2003 to 2007 in several projects funded by the Central Loop TIF, including the construction of Millennium Park and the rehabilitation of Harold Washington College.
The city had spent $329,000 in TIF funds to buy artworks for the college. That’s a no-no: even TIF rules, loose as they are, list allowable uses for the money, and art isn’t one of them. And the auditors discovered that a little more than $1.2 million in TIF funds appropriated for the projects ($9,092 for Millennium Park and $1,193,404 for the college) had been left sitting in a bank account for three years—where it might have sat for all eternity if Dakof and Funk hadn’t stumbled upon it.
I’d love to tell you what the city is going to do about the money spent on art, but the press release Pete Scales sent me didn’t mention it.
If so, we’re talking real money. Over the course of 24 years roughly $1 billion went through the Central Loop TIF, so if 4.5 percent of all Central Loop money has been misused or misplaced, it adds up to $45 million. There you go, Mr. Huberman—money to hire back all those teachers you fired last month.
