I got an e-mail from a reader telling me: you’ve got to see it to believe it, but the city made a movie about TIFs.
Like I said: progress.
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Not a bad line, though I’m not sure what Mayor Emanuel hopes to accomplish by depicting Chicagoans as charming and clueless . . . unless it’s his subterranean way of assuring Wall Street investors they don’t need to worry about trouble with his infrastructure trust, which will privatize the funding and selection of government projects. In other words, maybe it’s a message that says, “The mayor can slip any scam past this bunch of dimwits.”
At which point, Alexandra Holt—the mayor’s budget chief—appears on camera to assure us that “it’s actually really simple.”
Well, I’ll give her a C for that explanation—though, keep in mind, I’m grading on a curve, which means she has the benefit of going against the Daley folks, whose explanations didn’t get much right beyond identifying the first three letters of the alphabet.
I believe the lady who made the TGIF joke could understand that.
It’s also true, as Holt says, that shortly after taking office Mayor Emanuel appointed a TIF task force to look into reforming the program. But the mayor larded that task force with enough yes-men and -women that it wasn’t inclined to recommend any real changes. And so the mayor gives himself credit for reforming something that he never really reformed.
