Chicago Tribune Editorial: It's our money

Chicago Tribune Editorial: It's our money
Copyright by The Chicago Tribune
November 9, 2009
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/chi-1109edit1nov09,0,6184823.story


Desperate times call for desperate measures. To bridge a $520 million deficit in the 2010 budget, Mayor Richard Daley says he'll cut 220 vacant jobs, require city employees to take unpaid furlough days and tap into the reserves set aside in last year's parking meter lease deal.

At the same time, Daley is quietly moving forward with plans to spend hundreds of millions of property tax dollars on projects he refuses to discuss publicly.

The city's 160 tax increment financing districts, or TIFs, have generated more than half a billion dollars in property taxes in each of the last two years -- money that's off-limits when it comes to balancing the budget. The average taxpayer isn't particularly sympathetic to the legal explanation for that, especially in hard times. Our property taxes are going into a mayoral slush fund while the city can't afford to pick up the trash?

TIFs are meant to revitalize blighted areas that wouldn't otherwise be attractive to developers. By designating an area a TIF district, the city lays claim to the new tax dollars generated by rising property values there. Those dollars are supposed to be reinvested in the district to promote growth.

TIFs are one of the better redevelopment tools available to local governments. But Chicago has gotten carried away, creating a vast redevelopment wonderland controlled by the mayor. More than a third of the city, including the LaSalle financial district and most of the Loop, now falls within TIF districts. Though it stands to reason that an area that raises hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes is no longer blighted, if it ever was, the Daley administration insists the TIFs are needed to keep those skyscrapers from falling into disrepair.

Daley's refusal to account for TIF spending feeds the complaint that he's maintaining an off-the-books piggy bank, doing favors for his friends and financing his own pet projects. Even the City Council isn't privy to the complete TIF budget, though Daley officials recently shared parts of it with individual aldermen, who in turn shared them with the Reader's Ben Joravsky and Mick Dumke.

When the reporters asked for a copy of the whole document, city officials >told them it was exempt from the state's open records law because it's based on estimates, "not final or official projections," they reported.J oravsky and Dumke point out that this also is true of the "real" city budget.

Whenever Daley is questioned, he stresses that the TIF funds pay for feel-good expenses such as libraries, parks and schools -- and leaves out the ones that might require, at the very least, a stronger sales pitch. The documents shared with the Reader show, for example, that the city plans to spend at least $28 million and perhaps much more to rehab the privately owned Willis Tower, which is in the LaSalle Central TIF district. They also show that Daley plans to tap the Calumet-Cermak TIF funds, in the South Loop, for $38 million to build a new Green Line station and $40 million to rebuild a high school -- both outside the district.

The law allows TIF district money to be spent in an adjacent district, or one that's adjacent to one that's adjacent, etc., giving the mayor even more room to do as he pleases with the money.

That has included some basic infrastructure fixes like sidewalks and streetlights that would normally be handled through more open channels.

Thanks largely to Joravsky's and Dumke's reporting, aldermen are starting toagitate for more say in how those dollars are spent. There's talk about >using them for things like low-income housing, job training and the sort of ward improvements that traditionally fall to Streets and Sanitation. There's a lot of mission creep going on, in all directions.

It makes a strong case for greater transparency, which would no doubt lead to a lot of criticism and unsolicited input from citizens and their aldermen, which Daley doesn't want. But it's not his money. Open the books, Mayor. Put everything out in the open so taxpayers can see how their dollars are spent.
Copyright © 2009, Chicago Tribune