If you want to know why Mayor Rahm Emanuel will never give up his beloved tax increment financing scam without kicking and screaming, consider these stories that broke back-to-back just last week.
A TIF, remember, is effectively a surcharge added to your property tax bill. Instead of going to schools, parks, police, etc, the money is diverted to bank accounts largely controlled by the mayor, leaving the rest of us to make up for the difference.
Surprisingly, state and city officials were up front about the apparent switcheroo—at least in the e-mails they wrote to each other. James Reilly, the former CEO of MPEA—its board is appointed in equal parts by the mayor and the governor—acknowledged the unorthodox transaction in a July 12, 2013, e-mail, one of many Chase and Ecker secured via Freedom of Information Act request: “There is a somewhat complicated series of cash flow issues that we need to get a handle on between the City, MPEA and [Navy Pier] with regard to the Tiff [sic] funds that will come from the City to MPEA to reimburse MPEA for the purchase of the land for the [hotel and basketball arena] which in turn will enable MPEA to grant $55M to [Navy Pier] for its reconstruction project.”
“We don’t actually get any funding.”
Activists like Amisha Patel of the Grassroots Collaborative, a coalition of labor and community groups, say MPEA should immediately send the $55 million back to the city. I’d take it a step further: Send all $561 million in this year’s TIF tax to the schools, or just return it to taxpayers who paid it in the first place. At least that way we can be sure that Mayor Rahm won’t dump our hard-earned property tax dollars into the lake. v
