[Plus: Mick Dumke on the Illinois Senate Democratic primary.]
But with the February 2 election only days away, the time has come to make up my mind.
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Yes, I’ve been known to rail against the abuses of the TIF program a time or two before. But there’s a real connection to this office. The program collects about $500 million in taxpayer money each year, and roughly 10 percent of that would otherwise have gone to Cook County. Proposed TIF districts must be approved by the Joint Board of Review, which consists of representatives of the schools, parks, county, and other taxing bodies affected by TIFs. The board president could easily show up and raise a stink about the program’s abuses. But none ever has.
But my hopes aren’t terribly high for any of the board president candidates. I’ll start with O’Brien. He’s been campaigning as the guy who helped bring good government to the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, which is responsible for wastewater treatment. O’Brien has been on the water rec board since 1988 and its president since 1997. But he can hardly be called an independent or a reformer.
Hmmm. As much as I love Alderman Stone—he’s one of my favorite characters in Chicago politics—I’m not sure I’m ready to vote for a guy backed by what’s left of the north-and-northwest-side Democratic machine.
But every time the impulse rises, I think about the 2007 county budget battle, when Stroger closed clinics and laid off hundreds of nurses, doctors, and other health-care workers. And then how he looked the other way in 2008, when Mayor Daley raided the Central West TIF district fund to give $75 million in property tax dollars to Rush University Medical Center, a private hospital and medical school with a $300 million endowment and a solid base of privately insured patients, so they could rebuild their near-west-side medical campus. Part of the project included building a new parking garage. Tax dollars for parking garages over health care for the indigent? What a system.
Still, did I mention that back in 2006 Preckwinkle voted against the creation of the LaSalle Central TIF district? Well, she did—and was one of only three aldermen to do so (the others were Rick Munoz and Joe Moore). That’s the TIF that declared much of the downtown business district a blighted area. Before it expires in 2030, it will have collected more than $1 billion in property taxes that otherwise would have gone to fund county government (making Stroger’s sales-tax hike even less necessary), the schools, the parks, and other cash-strapped public bodies. Instead, if recent history is any indication, much of it is likely to be showered on well-connected downtown developers.
