That’s $555 million in property taxes that might otherwise have directly gone to schools, parks, police, and so on and so forth. Instead it was funneled into TIF accounts that are essentially slush funds controlled by Mayor Daley. Because there are so few oversight bodies and the program is largely unregulated, the mayor is free to spend that money virtually anyway he likes. I suspect he’s holding on to as much of it as he can in order to pay for the 2016 Olympics, should the International Olympic Committee award us the games.
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For all the property taxes the TIFs have collected, however, the painful irony is that they may not have collected enough. The 2007 total is up by 11 percent over the $500 million TIFs collected in 2006, according to Orr’s report. But last year’s hike was up 30 percent over 2005 — thus the rate of increase has been cut by more than half.
