In the middle of protracted negotiations over the state budget, with health care insurance, education funding, and public transportation at stake, the state’s top political leaders broke for two precious hours last week to talk about my favorite municipal topic: Mayor Daley’s tax increment financing districts.
When Blagojevich figured out what Daley and Madigan were up to, he countered by calling in Cook County commissioner Mike Quigley, until then the only elected official who had dared to criticize TIFs.
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Blagojevich convened a closed-door meeting on June 20. In attendance were Madigan, Jones, Republican house leader Tom Cross, Republican senate leader Frank Watkins, and Quigley. On hand representing the mayor were two of his top aides, chief of staff Lori Healey and executive director of Intergovernmental Affairs John Dunne, as well as four aldermen loyal to the mayor: George Cardenas (12th), Latasha Thomas (17th), Ray Suarez (31st), and Carrie Austin (34th).
In response Austin brought down the house by telling Quigley, “Professors never built nothin’.” Her point? Aldermen don’t care if the TIF program is logical, fair, or ultimately bound to drive taxpayers bankrupt. They just want the goodies that TIFs provide. Want a new school, a new park, or money for your pet redevelopment project? TIFs are the only game in town. And to get yours, you have to support everyone else’s.
It was the Terry Bruner show at City Hall last week. The 69-year-old former federal prosecutor, who used to make headlines in this town as the publicity-loving, crime-busting head of the Better Government Association, came to offer closing arguments on behalf of Frank Coconate.
I didn’t sit through the hours and hours of previous hearings–the transcripts cover 30,000 pages of testimony–but based on the closing arguments, it seems that the worst thing the city has on Coconate is that on one occasion he was somewhere other than he said he was while he was on the clock. But it’s not as though he was caught with his pants down. He said he was at one work site when in fact he was at another. Bruner dismissed the offense as trivial and attributed it to sloppy record keeping on Coconate’s part. As one eye-rolling journalist put it at the end of the five-hour ordeal, if they held every city worker to those standards, “there’d only be about 100 people left on a payroll of 35,000.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration by Kurt Mitchell.
