Show Us Your TIFs!

File under: “The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire
We don't need no water
let the motherfucker burn”

So there are two water towers in your town: One marked “MUNICIPAL SWIMMING” and the other marked “FIRE DEPARTMENT”.

During a typical year, both contain several hundred thousand gallons of H20. Both get topped off regularly at taxpayer expense.

But this is not a typical year.

This year, there is a wildfire sweeping through your town. A bad one. A firestorm howling through the streets, igniting the air itself and blasting houses, churches, schools and factories into embers and ashes.

And your fire marshal has just informed you that the tank marked “FIRE DEPARTMENT” is running dry, but the tank marked “MUNICIPAL SWIMMING” is top-full of water.

So as a responsible city manager, what do you do?

From Progress Illinois:

As Layoffs Loom, Daley Sits On A $1 Billion TIF Surplus

by Angela Caputo

Over the past month, Mayor Daley's tax increment financing (TIF) system has attracted some much-needed scrutiny. First came the news that the city is forking over $3.8 million to insurance giant Willis Group Holdings to refurbish their swank new Sears Tower headquarters (despite the fact that the company's annual revenue exceeds $2 billion). Then we learned from the Sun-Times that condo owners in Chicago's University Village had benefited from TIF subsidies, only to flip their "affordable housing" for a profit (essentially pocketing those taxpayer dollars). Cook County Clerk David Orr recently summed it up well: "We’re looking at massive abuse. ...TIFs can be a good tool, but this has become a giant slush fund in the city of Chicago.”

While we could write on and on about the "massive abuse" of TIF, we're going to shift the focus slightly today -- to the hoarding of unspent TIF dollars.

During a City Council Finance Committee hearing last Monday, Chief Financial Officer Gene Saffold and Community Development Commissioner Christine Raguso found themselves on the hot seat as a handful of aldermen demanded some long-overdue answers about how the $500 million in annual TIF revenue -- along with the proceeds of the city's parking meter, Skyway, and parking garage leases -- are being managed. Ald. Ed Smith (28th Ward) got right to the point, saying, "Show us all the money. Where we can see it. All of it."
...

Well the City of Chicago has yelled “Fire”. It’s the reason they’ve already whacked hundreds of city workers, and plan to sack a thousand more, and a thousand more on top of that from the public school system.

It’s the reason they raised every fee, stuck revenue cameras on hundreds of corners and pawned the parking meter system.

“Sorry,” they say, “we realize this is all really brutal and fucked up and means that we have to cut back yet again on services to Chicagoans that we believe are vital, but we have no choice.”

"We are not cutting fat," Chief of Staff Paul Volpe has said. "We are cutting muscle."

They must, we are told, because “tax revenues are coming in $50 million below projections.”

Because the tank marked “FIRE DEPARTMENT” is running dry and so we have no alternative but make some very ugly, triage decisions and let part of the town be consumed by the conflagration.

Except, of course, that the tank marked “MUNICIPAL SWIMMING” has an extra billion dollars in it. Which would seem – if I've gotten my take-aways and gazintas right – to be sufficient to make up for a $50 million dollar shortfall...20 times over.

And there is nothing magical about TIF money; it isn’t local scrip currency that can only be spent at Chicago Company Stores, and it isn’t printed on special, trick paper that will disintegrate if it is taken out into the sunlight. It’s MONEY, that does come with some restrictions on how and where it can be spent, but those restrictions are not laws of Nature or ordained by God.

Tax increment finance laws were made entirely by ordinary, grubby people just like you and me, and can be unmade and remade by those same people if there is the will to do so.

Now in other cities, getting a bunch of lawmakers to sprinkle magic legislative pixie dust over TIF regulations to spend the dough in different ways -- even in a emergency -- might be a problem.

But not in Chicago.

In Chicago, we have our own Maximum Mayor For Life,

Richard M. Daley.

This is Da Mare who gutted a national landmark sports stadium and turned it into a grotesque, battleship-sized bidet that’ll be hanging its tin ass over Lake Shore Drive as a monument to his ego for the next 50 years...because he and some of his real estate pals just fucking well wanted to.

This is Da Mare who sent a battalion of bulldozers to raze an FAA-regulated airport in the middle of the night on a whim.

This is Da Mare who has spent the last twenty years training the City Council to

play “dead” on command.

This is Da Mare who runs big chunks of the governments of Cook County, various suburbs and the State of Illinois like a squadron of Predator drones, and has the leader of the free world on speed dial.

This is also Da Mare whose Administration moved heaven and earth to set things right when the City flooded, and put together a massive Chicago response to Katrina almost overnight.

Because those were crises.

So for all the gov-speak double-talk being thrown at the media, this is actually a pretty simple, binary decision.

Either what is happening to Chicago’s capacity to provide for its citizens right now is a crisis, or its not.

If it is a crisis -- if shouting “Fire!” is the appropriate response -- then treat it like a God damned crisis already. Bust open the “MUNICIPAL SWIMMING” tank, use it to extinguish the blaze, and worry about refilling it some other day when the embers have cooled and the smoke has cleared.

And if it’s not a crisis?

If it’s not a crisis then Da Mare and his people need to shut the fuck up and quit using scare-tactics to head-fake legislators into Hurry!Hurry!Hurry!Now!Now!Now! selling off irreplaceable public assets at fire-sale prices, and sacking thousands of workers everyone knows Da Mare has been itching to rid himself of for years.