Mayor Daley’s $500-million-a-year tax increment financing program is like the Creature From the Black Lagoon. From time to time one adversary or another—Cook County commissioner Mike Quigley or Cook County clerk David Orr—emerges to try to shoot it down. But bullets bounce off its hardened skin and it lumbers on, chewing up billions in property taxes.
To compensate for the taxes they don’t get from the city’s 161 TIF districts, local taxing bodies—the schools, parks, county, etc—raise their tax rates. Don’t be fooled into thinking that TIFs only affect people who live in the districts. They result in citywide tax hikes.
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Bradley Winters, representing the developer, and Robert Sprague, representing the city, countered by asking Gleeson to dismiss the case on the grounds that Malec had no standing to sue: he didn’t reside in the TIF district so he wasn’t affected by it, and the TIF didn’t draw on general revenues including his own tax dollars but instead generated its own.
Hallelujah! Finally, a judge who gets it.
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