Every time I go out into the world to talk about the evils of tax increment financing in Chicago, one of the first questions the audience asks is whether there’s anyone, anywhere, willing to fight this monstrosity.
Mayfield, a Democrat, recently introduced a proposal that would take a step toward reform by keeping schools out of the TIF equation. “I used to be on the board of education in Waukegan,” says Mayfield. “So I know all about TIFs and what they do to school funding.”
How can he get away with this? That’s easy: no one in a position of power tries to stop him. Even worse, other elected officials are complicit, justifying the program as somehow beneficial to the public schools.
Of course, CPS officials are members of the mayor’s team. He appoints them to their jobs and they do what he says. If they don’t want to be on the mayor’s team, they should quit and write columns for the Reader, or whatever it is that guys who aren’t on the team do in this town.
The proposal would kill the TIF program as we know it. So you can expect the mayor and his acolytes at CPS to fight Mayfield’s proposed amendment as if it were an invasion from Mars.
But Farr also wrote that the bill would “undermine the financial viability of future TIFs—thereby limiting the ability of CPS to use TIFs to fund future capital projects.”
