Winners & Losers In The TIF Game

From the Chicago Reader, “Those who got, get more. And those who don’t got, get the shaft.

All in the name of eradicating blight.

Beale was absent for Wednesday’s showdown—so he didn’t cast a vote one way or another. But Alderman Foulkes was the only representative of a relatively poor west- or south-side ward who voted against the mayor.

It’s pretty sad that the mayor’s most dependable TIF supporters represent the wards that fare the worst in this ongoing scam.

By the way, I know about the ward-by-ward TIF distribution thanks to Tom Tresser and his colleagues at the CivicLab, a budget watchdog group.

Over the last year, they’ve been going through dozens and dozens of arcane TIF annual budget reports and feeding the info into computers to figure out which ward gets what.

The CivicLab folks could only calculate through 2010—that was the latest info the city had made available when the Civic Lab started their task.

In other words, the Civic Lab’s doing the TIF analysis the mayor doesn’t do. I would submit to you that the mayor doesn’t do this analysis because, among other things, he doesn’t want to have to explain why the 27th gets far more than the 9th ward when it comes to doling out TIF goodies.”

It's the Mayor's show