It’s hard to find the good news in David Orr’s TIF report for 2007, which the independent-minded Cook County clerk released last week. The bad news begins with the bottom line: the city’s tax increment financing districts sucked up $555 million in property taxes last year, up 11 percent from the $500 million they took in 2006. All in all TIFs have pocketed well over $1 billion in the last two years, diverting money from schools, parks, police, and your wallet.
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With the report, available at cookctyclerk.com/sub/TIF.asp, Orr again makes good on his promise to cast a spotlight on a program that Mayor Daley and the City Council would rather keep in the shadows. Nearly everyone else in city government, from aldermen to oversight board members, looks the other way as the program delivers hundreds of millions of dollars to the mayor to be spent as he sees fit—and aside from Orr’s report, there’s really no other public accounting of how much there is to spend or what he spends it on. While aldermen and the mayor conduct their annual ritual, haggling over relatively small changes in the official city budget—this year they promise no property tax hikes—the TIF take steadily rises, year after year, by as much as 30 to 40 percent.
Yet there’s always the possibility that this goose has finally stopped laying golden eggs. TIF revenues go up as properties within the districts get redeveloped and generate new tax dollars. If development slows because of the economic meltdown, it raises a new problem with the TIFs—they’re overextended.
The exact amount of the city’s TIF-related obligations is buried in the arcane language that governs dozens and dozens of TIF-funded projects. But I’m starting to realize why Mayor Daley’s aides cautioned aldermen at last year’s budget hearings that they shouldn’t expect to be able to bond against future TIF revenue. A few aldermen—most notably Eugene Schulter of the 47th Ward—rebelled, and the mayor told his bean counters to back off. Unwisely, the city’s been running up more TIF obligations ever since.
