I was all set to give a little love to Mayor Rahm Emanuel for finally getting around to making good on his long-delayed promise to create an easy-to-search TIF portal on the city’s website.
Right on, Mr. Mayor—jobs are good!
My guess is that Mayor Emanuel deliberately timed the release of the TIF portal announcement to gain a little positive PR on the day he was firing a couple thousand of school employees, in part because of the millions of TIF dollars he’s hoarding.
Now that the cuts are official, Emanuel is blaming them on the teachers—or at least the $400 million contribution he has to make to the teachers’ dastardly pension system. Speaking of cynicism.
As you can see, TIFs were not the only scam Mayor Daley got away with.
There’s so much money flowing into the TIF accounts—$457 million this year alone—that even two all-powerful mayors couldn’t spend it all. And so the surplus sits in bank accounts.
