I can barely believe what I’m about to write: Thank God for Mayor Daley and his tax increment financing program.
Of course, it was never the mayor’s intention to use TIF money for emergency relief, and he might have to be dragged kicking and screaming to the point of actually doing that.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Despite the hullabaloo every fall when the City Council approves Mayor Daley’s budget, the city’s general fund only gets about 19 percent of the property taxes paid in Chicago. The Chicago Public Schools get the most—roughly 50 percent.
When the City Council creates a TIF—at the mayor’s urging—what it does, in effect, is freeze the taxes that taxing bodies receive from properties in the TIF district. Let’s say, for simplicity’s sake, that when a TIF is created a property in the district has an assessed value that throws off $100 in taxes. As far as the schools and other taxing bodies are concerned, that assessed value won’t change for the next 24 years, the life of the TIF, even if the property’s actual value doubles. Taxes paid on the added value go into the slush fund—er, piggy bank.
Welcome to part two of the scam. TIFs are intended to subsidize economic development deals in blighted communities that but for the public subsidy would never get developed.
Whatever. The International Olympic Committee gave the games to Brazil, and today the mayor has $700 million sitting in banks.
I’m reminded of a conversation I had years ago with a high-ranking Daley administration number cruncher who made me promise never to tell anyone that he’d met with me.
