TIF Money

Now this crap comes up in a main stream publication? After Shortshanks is all set to leave office?

• Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel and some newly-elected aldermen say they are prepared to overhaul and rein in the city’s Tax Increment Financing system, which they say has grown into a tax-gobbling menace over the last 25 years.

  “Over the years, it’s kind of morphed from a tool for blighted economic communities into an all-purpose vehicle,” Emanuel told the Sun-Times. “We need to return it to its original purpose — it should not be used for high-rent areas.”

  Emanuel is not prepared to abolish the program, as some of the aldermanic candidates who ran anti-TIF campaigns would like, but he pledged to appoint a commission to recommend reforms and say which TIFs should end.

• The 160 districts that now cover nearly a third of the city collect $500 million a year in property taxes that go into a quietly administered program run by Daley’s Planning Dept.

$500 million? That's enough to cover the budget shortfalls, isn't it? Amazing how that works out. It would appear that city government has plenty of money - they just don't know how to spend it.

Ben Joravsky from The Reader has to be shaking his head after covering this for years.