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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE More information: Tom Tresser, 312-804-3230, tom@tifreports.com, @tomstee
July 22, 2016
CITY HAD $1.36 BILLION IN PROPERTY TAXES IN TIF ACCOUNTS ON JANUARY 1, 2016 TIF ILLUMINATION PROJECT PROVES IT’S A SLUSH FUND
A review of the 2015 annual reports of the City’s 146 Tax Increment Financing Districts by volunteers with the TIF Illumination Project and In These Times revealed some startling facts about local government finance.
The total fund balance at the end of 2015, that is, all property tax dollars sitting in TIF accounts was $1,355,453,630 (a decrease from the $1.44 billion left in TIF accounts from the year prior). The TIF Illumination Project has issued a Freedom of Information Act request to both the Department of Planning and Development and the Office of Budget and Management to secure definitive documentation on the status of these funds. The Chicago Budget Director claims most of it to be “reserved for future development” or obligated to pay existing debt incurred by existing TIF projects.
However, the response to our FOIA requests proves that the money left over in Chicago’s TIF accounts amount to a massive slush fund that can be used at the Mayor’s discretion. For the full trail of our requests and the city’s responses, see https://tifreports.com/slush-fund.
A wide array of civic actors, including the Chicago Teachers Union, Raise Your Hand, affordable housing advocates and organizing efforts such as the Grassroots Collaborative have called into question Chicago’s official budget pronouncements of red ink and service cuts. Citing the staggering amount of property taxes being held in TIF accounts, these groups, as well as the editorial boards of local newspapers, have called for a complete accounting of these funds.
Other findings of our analysis of Chicago’s TIF districts for 2015 include:
The most striking number was the finding $1.36 billion in property taxes was sitting in TIF accounts on January 1, 2016.
The Top Ten TIFs by property tax collection for 2015 were:
These 24 TIFs extracted at least 90% of available property taxes:
The Top Ten TIFs by fund balance in 2015 were:
The Top Ten TIFs by expenditures in 2015 were:
The TIF research was coordinated by Lead Organizer Tom Tresser (www.tresser.com). Tom is a long time civic educator and public defender in Chicago. He was the co-founder of the CivicLab with Benjamin Sugar – America’s only co-working space dedicated to collaboration, education, fabrication and innovation for social justice and civic engagement. The CivicLab operated for two years in the West Loop and closed on June 30, 2015 (www.civiclab.us). In 2008 he was a co-founder of Protect Our Parks which sued to stop the privatization of Lincoln Park (www.protectourparks.org). In 2009 he was a co-organizer of No Games Chicago which worked to defeat the bid for the 2016 Olympics (www.nogameschicago.com).
The research for our 2015 analysis was conducted by a team of interns at In These Times, an independent nonprofit magazine dedicated to advancing democracy and economic justice (www.inthesetimes.com).
Over the past three years dozens of volunteers and interns pitched in at various times to help with a wide variety of research, mapping and graphic projects.
The TIF Illumination Project is online at https://tifreports.com. It has been a mostly volunteer project that has been revealing the impacts of TIFs at the ward level. We show how much property taxes are extracted from inside each ward by the TIFs IN that ward. We produce graphic posters that contain a map of the ward showing:
The TIF Illumination Project distributes these graphic posters at TIF town meetings, or Illuminations, that have been independently organized by residents of the community. Since February of 2013 we have investigated and Illuminated 141 TIFs across 33 wards before over 4,700 people. We have presented at 47 public meetings!
Our heartfelt thanks to the dozens of volunteers who help organize these meetings. The complete record of these is online at https://tifreports.com/tif-town-meetings. Presentations from these meetings can be purchased at our TIF Data Store at https://tifreports.com/store.
We have produced two TIF training videos via crowdfunding campaigns. “TIF 101” (22 minutes) explains the basics of Tax Increment Financing and features Professor Rachel Weber from the University of Illinois at Chicago and Cook County Clerk David Orr. “TIFs Off the Rails – Public Policy Problems with Chicago’s TIF Program (17 minutes) features Professor Richard Dye of the University of Illinois and Professor Stephanie Farmer of Roosevelt University. These videos are available on YouTube at https://tifreports.com/training_videos.
Although the CivicLab is closed we gratefully acknowledge the support of the Voqal Fund which helped keep the CivicLab going from 2013 through 2015 and thus provided a base for the TIF Illumination Project to do its work.
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