It was one step forward and, alas, another step forward on the road to financial ruin.
As I explained last week, Mayor Emanuel recently agreed to give Wall Street lenders $110 million in fees—which will come out of your property taxes—as part of a deal to lend CPS $725 million to pay off old debt.
Yes, my oldest obsession. Yes, I’m writing another column about TIFs. I really don’t want to. In fact, I’m ready to cut a deal with Mayor Rahm in which I agree to stop writing about TIFs if he agrees to stop abusing them.
But in an effort to shed some light on this matter, Alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa recently introduced a nonbinding resolution calling on the city to use the TIF surplus to “mitigate any [CPS] program cuts, layoffs of staff, and reductions in services.” In other words, to use the TIF slush fund to pay for the schools.
On the day of the hearing, the mayor sent his budget director, Alex Holt, to testify against the resolution. Holt’s the bureaucrat who’s been assigned the unenviable task of trying to convince people that the TIF program isn’t a scam.
Anyway, the scene was set last Tuesday for a monumental debate on the TIF slush fund.
