TIF is Not Untouchable!

I spent my Wednesday evening at a CPS budget meeting. This is one of three CPS budget meetings planned. Wednesday night's event was held at Lane Tech H.S. you have two more opportunities to see the presenation.

Thursday, August 11, 2011
Westinghouse High School
3223 W Franklin Blvd
7:00 p.m.

Friday, August 12, 2011
Simeon High School
8147 S Vincennes
7:00 p.m.

This meeting was not a 'Let's get together work on the budget', it was more 'Here it is and it's going to get worse.'.  The format was a brief PowerPoint presentation that you can also download from the CPS website, 2011-12 Budget. And then speakers were allowed two minutes to ask a question or make a statement.  There was not much discussion since the budget seems like a done deal. The gist of the budget is that once again there is a huge deficit of $712m that will be filled by leftover funds from last year, money from CPS reserves, cuts to Central Office and a property tax hike. 

CPS painfully pointed out they gave extra funds for kindergarten (but as we know not all schools benefited), early childhood, magnet schools and kept the classroom size fairly consistent with last year.  Where you will see a difference is that there seems to be a lot of security guards and custodian staff let go.  So our kids won't be too crowded but it sounds like the schools will be a little less secure and a little less clean.  It was heartbreaking to see many of these people speak up about losing their jobs.

Several times the CPS budget team said TIF is only for capital improvements and is untouchable for operating expenses.  That may be debatable but surplus TIF when returned to the taxing bodies, who should have gotten it in the first place, can be used for operating expenses.  I know Daley only declared a TIF surplus once but many other municipalities do it fairly often.

I was there because I have been a little upset since I heard about the budget last week. Here is the statement I made at the meeting:

My name is Sonia Kwon; I am a member of the Raise Your Hand coalition.  Our group advocates for improved funding for public schools. I am also a graduate of CPS and currently have two children in CPS.

As we know school will be starting soon or has started for CPS students.  These children will be entering out-dated, un-air-conditioned classrooms. They will start another year of school not knowing that a well-rounded curriculum should include art, music, language and recess.

We all know of the severe budget shortfall that CPS has this year, just like last year. This year, the new mayor and the new CPS board have proposed a property tax hike to give an additional $150 million in revenue to CPS.

I am not against increasing taxes, to me it makes sense that we all contribute to pay for shared resources.

But when I heard about the proposal to increase property tax without even a discussion of using unallocated TIF as a possible source of revenue, I was flabbergasted.  Chicago currently has a TIF balance of almost $1.5 billion dollars and of that $867 million is unallocated*.  TIF money is our property tax dollars.  For every dollar of property tax 53.5% is for CPS, so in my basic math $464 million of the unallocated $867 million would have gone to CPS. In these times of job losses and foreclosures, how can the city justify increasing property tax when they are holding onto $867 million unallocated funds and will collect another $450 million in TIF this year alone? Why is this money from our property taxes untouchable?

Why is TIF so holy to the mayor and the aldermen of this city?  Why are they fighting tooth and nail to keep these TIF balances when the children of Chicago desperately need it?  When will they fight for our children as hard as they fight for TIF?  When they do, I would gladly pay more property tax.

*TIF figures are from the city of Chicago website. Currently 166 active TIFS in Chicago, the amounts referenced in statement are from the TIF Balance Sheets and TIF Projection Reports.