The hype Monday surrounding Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s release of the report from his “TIF Reform Panel” represented sweet redemption to the king of Chicago’s policy nerds, Democratic U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley.
Before he won the election to succeed Emanuel in Congress, when he was still a Cook County commissioner, Quigley’s criticism of City Hall’s tax-increment financing program drew a defensive response from then-Mayor Richard M. Daley. But even in taking on one of the most cherished initiatives of a rarely criticized mayor, Quigley could not attract much media coverage for his own TIF reform recommendations when he issued them in 2007.
In his North Side district on Monday, Quigley recalled that a reporter once told him, “Mike, all you need is TIF dollars to be spent in a strip joint” to put the issue at last in the local headlines.
Quigley was surprised when Emanuel met with him twice last year, shortly before Emanuel left his job as White House chief of staff to run for mayor, and quizzed him for hours for his thoughts on TIF. The recent growth in mainstream attention to the once-arcane topic, Quigley said, reminded him of the title of an album by The Doobie Brothers: “What Once Were Vices Are Now Habits.”
“It’s a good day,” Quigley said. “I’m not after Rich at this point in time, but this report is in such sharp contrast with past TIF policy.”
How much real change follows the recommendations from the mayor’s 10-member panel now becomes the half-billion-dollar question for not only city government, but also public schools, county government and other local taxing bodies that watch the city drain $500 million into TIF accounts annually.
In their recommendations, the panelists echo Quigley’s four-year-old suggestion that the city TIF program “should include specific goals and budgets, and should be subject to periodic review.” The panel recommended that the city clearly set out what TIF spending is meant to accomplish in each redevelopment district and evaluate whether those plans are working every five years.
“The city should make the justification for public funding of private projects more explicit, monitor projects more systematically to ensure recipients of TIF funding meet their obligations and ensure there are consequences for not delivering expected returns on public investment,” the new report states.
The panel also cited data that is similar to the findings of a recent Chicago News Cooperative analysis. The CNC found that the billions of dollars in TIF spending in recent years was split almost evenly between subsidies to private companies and public works projects, such as school construction.
On Monday, some long-time TIF critics continued to question whether city use of the program would truly change under Emanuel.
Cook County Commissioner John Fritchey, a North Side Democrat, said the report felt like vindication, but he added, “The fact that we are right isn’t a surprise. What would be a surprise is if we do something about it.”
Fritchey again called on Emanuel to return about $800 million in TIF funds that have not yet been spent. The move instantly would create an infusion of roughly $400 million for Chicago Public Schools, $160 million for City Hall and $80 million for county government. Emanuel recently rejected that idea.
“At a time when everybody from the police to the schools needs more money, the city is stockpiling hundreds of millions of dollars,” Fritchey said. “It escapes me how city officials can talk about the importance of education while taking money from schools and giving it to car dealers and grocery stores.”
Fritchey said true change would have to come from Springfield, which passed the legislation allowing cities to create TIF districts more than 30 years ago. Last year, shortly before Daley announced he would not seek re-election, he bristled at TIF legislation introduced in Springfield by Fritchey, who was a state lawmaker at the time.
On Monday, Daley’s spokeswoman Jacquelyn Heard said Daley’s views on TIFs were unchanged. As mayor, Daley had often defended the program as essential to economic development in the city, even as critics derided it as a highly secretive “slush fund” to reward corporate Chicago.
For years, among the few activists to track the city’s TIF activities and publish the information on the Internet was Jacqueline Leavy, who led the now-defunct Neighborhood Capital Budget Group. “We were sort of voices in the wilderness,” Leavy said Monday.
Her group long had called for the city to restrict TIF spending “to areas of the city that were truly blighted,” she said, noting that much of the money was spent in and around downtown Chicago. The new report from Emanuel’s panel does not call for strictly limiting where the program would operate.
Quigley acknowledged that nothing suggested by the panel would necessarily change the way that TIF ultimately works. But he said he was confident that the increased focus on the issue would lead to a better outcome for the public.
“My point is greater transparency almost always means greater policy, and definitely more democratic policy,” Quigley said. “There could still be mistakes and bad policy but that is true of all tax dollars.”