Preckwinkle Tables Tax Plan

Responding to strong opposition to her proposal to charge residents of unincorporated Cook County more for policing from the county sheriff’s police, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle announced today she will hold off on pursuing the plan for at least the next budget year.

But she remained committed to the concept, saying, “It’s only a question of how this gets done, not whether this gets done.”

Preckwinkle announced a 13-member task force to study the issue, with a target of recommending a plan to the president by March 1, 2012. She said that in talking with county commissioners and others about her proposal, she had been “impressed with the breadth of the communities and the necessity of taking some time to figure this out.”

Among the members of the ask force will be two county commissioners, Tim Schneider and Deborah Sims, Preckwinkle said. Schneider and Commissioner Jeffrey Tobolski appeared at the news conference with Preckwinkle.

The loss of $5.5 million in expected revenues from the proposal will be offset by allocating an additional $5 million from the Motor Fuel Tax Bonds, Preckwinkle said.

Preckwinkle had sought to have the 100,000 or so residents of the more than 100 pockets of unincorporated Cook County to pay more toward the costs of the county sheriff’s police, whose primary responsibility is to serve residents of unincorporated Cook County. In her budget proposal for the fiscal year that begins Dec. 1, Preckwinkle included additional fees on those residents that would average about $50 per person.

The issue is one of equity, Preckwinkle said. She argued that 98 percent of the county’s 5.2 million residents who live in incorporated areas are subsidizing the cost of policing and other county services for the 2 percent living in unincorporated areas. Residents of Chicago, for example, pay taxes toward police services for both Chicago and the unincorporated areas.

“The county is going to be out of the business of providing them the level of service that they’ve gotten free in the past,” Preckwinkle said before changing her plans.

Preckwinkle faced strong pushback from residents and Cook County commissioners.

Lenny Goldfarb, 41, likes what he calls the “country setting” of Glenbrook Countryside, a subdivision of about 280 homes in an unincorporated corner of Northfield Township in northern Cook County, where he is president of the neighborhood homeowners’ association. There are no sidewalks and no streetlights in the community, a diverse hodgepodge of ranch homes, split-levels and multi-story homes. Goldfarb said he might see a police car patrolling in the neighborhood once every couple of days, if that.

Residents of unincorporated areas already pay taxes toward public safety in Cook County and some, like the residents of Glenbrook Countryside, also pay a special tax toward policing, in Glenbrook Countryside’s case, to Northfield Township.

On Thursday, Goldfarb told county commissioners at a budget hearing that it would be difficult for many of the residents in his community, which includes many retirees, to pay higher taxes.

“When people say that we don’t pay for the police protection we receive, people in my subdivision get very offended by that,” Goldfarb told commissioners. “We do not utilize a lot of police protection. When we have our annual meeting, the sheriff comes by and tells us we are one of the easiest areas to deal with even though we are one of the furthest away.”

Kurt Summers, Preckwinkle’s chief of staff, said the negative response was not surprising.

“We expect the folks who live in unincorporated Cook County would like to continue to be free riders, so we expect to hear from them,” Summers said. “But the rest of Cook County I think would probably agree with us that they shouldn’t continue to subsidize these folks.”

The administration presented several options to get residents of unincorporated areas to pay more. They include creating Special Service Areas for unincorporated residents, which would add a special tax for those residents specifically to pay for police services; having the unincorporated areas be annexed into neighboring municipalities, which in some cases would require expensive upgrades of infrastructure such as sewer and water lines; and paying neighboring municipalities for police services on a contractual basis.

Jessey Neves, a spokeswoman for Preckwinkle, noted that the median household income in unincorporated Cook County is 13 percent higher than in all of Cook County, and that the median value of housing in unincorporated Cook County is $279,000, compared to $267,000 for the entire county. Unincorporated areas, which cover about 63 square miles outside of Forest Preserves, include about 1,800 businesses from small mom-and-pop stores to large corporations such as Aramark, United Airlines and Advocate Lutheran General Hospital, she said.

Many county commissioners have also registered their opposition to the proposed new taxes. Commissioner Larry Suffredin, whose district includes Goldfarb’s community, disagrees with Preckwinkle’s logic that 98 percent of county residents are subsidizing 2 percent.

“This is a wrong idea, it’s the wrong time, we’re going to fight this,” Suffredin declared at a budget hearing.

He said many county residents use only a fraction of the services offered by county government, citing the county hospitals as an example of a service that many of his constituents will never use. “The problem is this leads to a libertarian approach: If I don’t use the service I don’t pay for it,” Suffredin said. “It’s a very dangerous argument when you start trying to allocate that way.”

Commissioner Gregg Goslin holds a similar view. “Our society has made an agreement that we’re all going to chip in and start paying for these services,” Goslin said. “We don’t start dividing – you live here, you pay for this. It’s almost getting into class warfare, which makes me very uncomfortable.”

Suffredin also pointed out that many of the tax and fee increases in Preckwinkle’s proposed spending plan would hit residents of unincorporated areas the hardest, including a doubling of the wheel tax, an annual sticker required for all vehicles purchased by residents of unincorporated areas in Cook County, from $40 to $80 and increases in various building and zoning fees, both of which apply only to residents of unincorporated areas.

Commissioner Schneider said he has heard from many constituents who are upset about the proposal and was glad Preckwinkle had decided to hold off.

“I believe a proposal as dramatic as this one clearly needs to be planned out,” Schneider said. “To the administration’s credit, we are doing just that.”

Laurence Msall, president of the Civic Federation, a non-partisan government research organization, supported Preckwinkle’s original proposal. He argued that unincorporated areas are “anachronistic to a mature and fully-developed county such as Cook.”

According to a 2010 report by the Civic Federation, the cost of law enforcement, building and zoning, highways and animal control for unincorporated areas of Cook County in fiscal year 2010 was about $54.7 million, or $501 per resident of unincorporated areas. According to the report, many municipalities provide government services such as law enforcement and building and zoning for less per capita than Cook County, which means the county could save millions of dollars by paying local municipalities to provide those services.

“It’s not responsible that 2 percent of the population are receiving services for free that are underwritten by 98 percent of the broader population,” Msall said.