By law they’re supposed to be limited to blighted communities that would find it difficult to attract investment without the sweetening offered by a TIF. Last year they diverted about $335 million in property taxes, up from $287.4 million in 2004. Obviously, Daley and the City Council love TIFs–they’ve created more than 100 of them over the last ten years. In fact, if your property was built after the TIF was created, all of your tax dollars could be going to it. Under the line item for the TIF it will say the fund draws zero dollars. If you live within a TIF district, your tax bill lies. You can’t even get a straight answer as to how much of your property tax bill is going to a TIF. You can only get them from the planning department or at the municipal reference section at the Harold Washington Library Center. There’s an annual budget statement for each TIF, but it’s little more than an actuarial statement–money in, money out. ![]() The city offers no easy way for you, the citizen, to track a TIF over time to see how much is raised and spent. They’re not listed in the city budget or even, believe it or not, on your tax bill. Once adopted, TIFs practically disappear from public view. The idea is to use the funds to spur development within the TIF’s boundaries, theoretically increasing the property tax base in the future. The extra–the increment, as they call it–goes into the TIF, to be spent at the discretion of the city’s planning department and the local alderman. That’s roughly what they can expect to get from you, no matter how much your property assessment goes up in the meantime. So let’s say you were paying $1,000 a year in property taxes when a TIF was created in 1995, with about $500 going to the schools, $70 to the parks, and $73 to the county. “He’s just putting on the window dressing to make it look good to the public.”Ī TIF caps the property taxes that get paid to entities like the Chicago Park District, the Board of Education, Cook County, and the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District for a period of 23 years. “If you think Daley’s going to give that up, you’re naive,” says one county official. ![]() As insiders see it, city officials are quietly gauging the accommodations they’ll have to make in order to win support for extending or even expanding the TIF. The administration’s addicted to TIFs, which let the mayor keep his grip on city operations and give him a powerful weapon for keeping the City Council in line.įor the record, administration officials say they haven’t decided whether they’ll ask the City Council to extend the Central Loop TIF, which collected about $88 million in property taxes last year. It’s a bit of a stretch to say the battle for the downtown TIF, set to end next year, is as crucial to Daley as his reelection, but it’s not that far off. The word around City Hall is that the flurry of announcements heralds the start of two campaigns: Mayor Daley’s run for reelection and his effort to extend the soon-to-expire Central Loop tax increment financing district to pay for a major portion of the proposed development. In the past few weeks city officials have been leaking their plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars rehabbing downtown office buildings, building new transit lines, and improving infrastructure throughout the Loop. Best of Chicago 2022: Music & Nightlife. ![]()
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