MAYOR FACING TIF OPPOSITION
Like Rahm, Lightfoot’s reforms derided as too little, too late
Former Mayor Rahm Emanuel couldn’t win no matter what he did when it came to the political pinata otherwise known as tax increment financing.
Neither can Mayor Lori Lightfoot. One day after the mayor unveiled what she promised will be a first round of TIF reforms, the same groups that branded Emanuel’s changes “too little, too late” said essentially the same thing about what Lightfoot is proposing.
Particularly offensive to the Chicago Teachers Union and the Grassroots Collaborative, which the CTU supports, is their concern that Lightfoot is somehow relaxing Emanuel’s five-year-old ban on new TIF projects in the downtown area.
Mayoral spokesperson Lauren Huffman maintained that, even under Emanuel’s downtown spending freeze, there were exceptions made in the La Salle-Central TIF for critical infrastructure projects, including CTA stations.
“There has been no change in the La Salle Street TIF spending policy. The City will continue funding critical public infrastructure projects based on needs, which would be reviewed on a case-by-case basis by the [new committee]. However, we will not fund downtown private developments from the La Salle Street TIF,” Huffman wrote in an email.
Amisha Patel, executive director of the Grassroots Collaborative, was not appeased.
“Downtown is not blighted. La Salle Street TIF district covers one of the wealthiest parts of the city. To loosen restrictions on spending that money is a real problem,” Patel said.
“Those dollars shouldn’t be spent for economic development downtown. That is a violation of TIF statute and the goals and intention of the program. Money should be spent in low-income communities. And the La Salle Central TIF districts and other downtown TIF’s should be sunset instead of actually having the spigot re-opened.”
CTU Vice President Stacy Davis-Gates argued that “hundreds of millions of dollars” need to be “redeployed to neighborhoods that have not received resources in years.”
Lightfoot has promised to do just that with an Invest South/West program that targets 10 inner-city neighborhoods for an unprecedented $250 million city investment and $500 million more from other government agencies.
But, Davis-Gates said: “Saying that you are open on a case-by-case basis to explore downtown again receiving more of what they don’t need is completely tone-deaf — and opposite of what she said she was going to do when she was a candidate.”
Equally troubling to Patel is Lightfoot’s decision to hire the multinational firm AECOM to put what deputy mayor for economic development Samir Mayekar has called “much more quantitative rigor behind” the so-called “but for” TIF subsidy standards.
That refers to the part of the TIF statute stating that TIF money should go only to projects that, “but for” the TIF subsidy, would not move forward.
For years, critics have accused the city of violating the “but for” clause.
Last year, the lame-duck City Council voted 38-to-8 to approve an $85 million contract with AECOM to design and build the two-building complex in West Garfield Park slated to become Chicago’s new police academy. It’s a project that Lightfoot has promised to make bigger and better.
AECOM is a design, engineering, construction and consulting firm specializing in infrastructure projects; Patel was upset that TIF reform was being “handed over” to them.
“That goes totally against the spirit of saying that we’re gonna make this more equitable and more fair. How is that possible if the entity that is going to be driving those decisions is an entity like AECOM?” Patel said.
“They’re a multi-national corporation that is not rooted in neighborhoods and communities. They are the entity that is building the cop academy against the wishes of residents in the neighborhood where it’s being built.”
The mayor’s office had no immediate response to the critics.