Orr's TIF tool

11/11/2009 10:00 PM

Editorial

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This week, the Web site Progress Illinois reported that 92 percent of the property taxes Mayor Daley paid last year are routed into the Near South tax increment financing district.

Cook County Clerk David Orr has debuted a new tool allowing such calculations. At http://tif.cookcountyclerk.com, readers can enter in their permanent index number, and see which TIF districts are collecting their property taxes, if any.

On the Near West Side, Ald. Walter Burnett paid nearly 71 percent of his property taxes into the Central West TIF, according to Orr’s calculator.

Stunning.

That’s money not being paid to the park district, the schools, the city’s general fund or eight other taxing bodies.

That puts pressure on their budgets and absolutely kills transparency.

You can go to the park district board, for example, and holler about budgets, programs, spending priorities.

One man, however, controls how your TIF dollars are spent using, as the Chicago Reader recently reported, secret budgets.

As we said, stunning.


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