The Central Loop tax increment financing district—the oldest and largest TIF of them all—came in with a boom and went out with a binge.
I’d like to tell you what the city was thinking when it decided to spend all this money, but I can’t because the Department of Community Development, which oversees TIFs, didn’t get back to me about it.
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And before I tell you where all that money went, please allow me to offer one more tutorial on the TIF program—or as Mayor Daley has called it more than once, the only game in town for economic development.
The Central Loop TIF was the first in the city, created in 1984 at Mayor Harold Washington’s urging to pay for the transformation of Block 37, the city block bounded by Washington, State, Randolph, and Dearborn.
By the end of 2007 there was about $255 million in the fund that hadn’t been allocated yet—apparently not even Mayor Daley could figure out how to spend so much money. The TIF collected another $103 million in 2008 before it was finally closed last December, in large part because then-governor Rod Blagojevich refused to support Daley’s plan to extend it another 12 years. (Hey, maybe the guy wasn’t so bad after all.) By then all of the money had been spent—and then some.
Please, ask me again why I wouldn’t trust the mayor and his people with an Olympics.
And so one TIF ends and another begins.
