Will Dems advance reparations proposal
Want Black residents to decide how to spend cannabis tax revenue
The Democratic Will County Board majority is advancing a controversial proposal to use revenues from taxes on cannabis sales as reparations to address economic hardships that endure due to the enslavement of Blacks.
“I know some of the language is pretty bold,” board member Rachel Ventura of Joliet said Tuesday during a teleconference by the Democratic caucus. “I feel this is something we could do historically as a county tomove our country in the right direction.”
Democrats seized four seats and a 14-12 county board majority during the “bluewave” elections in 2018. Ventura first publicly proposed the possibility of reparations in December, when the county board voted to allow and tax cannabis sales in unincorporated areas.
Steve Balich, a Republican county board member from Homer Glen, said he opposes the concept of reparations. He obtained a draft of a resolution that Democrats discussed Tuesday during their caucus. A video recording of the teleconference is publicly available.
“That language is appalling,” Balich said Thursday. “Thewords they used to describe what slavery was … for me it seemed real offensive, that allwhite people are racist and white supremacists, and I don’t see that.”
The draft resolution is titled “Repairing the Transgenerational Damage Done through Slavery, the Black Codes, the War on Drugs, and Mass Incarceration in Will County, IL.”
“The state of Illinois and all its counties owe an incalculable debt to our Black and African American brothers and sisters, for the systemic injustices, brutal physical abuse, insanable emotional damage and economic limitation and theft visited upon them throughout our history,” the resolution states, in part.
During the caucus teleconference, Ventura asked fellow Democrats to be “courageous” and to “negotiate from a moral standpoint.”
“I know there might be some pushback from the Republicans,” she said.
Balich said his Italian ancestor swere oppressed when they came to America and that people of many European ethnicities suffered cruel injustices throughout American history.
“They treated Italians like theywere dirt,” he said.
His point was, if Blacks as a group are compensated for past injustices, what about other groups?
Ventura and other Democratic county board members discussed the process for advancing the resolution aswell as the wording and content of the measure for about 40 minutes during the nearly two-hour caucus.
The draft proposes the county board create a nineperson committee that would decide how cannabis revenues would be spent. All nine members would be Black, the proposal stated, and one county board member would be appointed to serve with eight citizens.
The committee would have equal gender representation, according to the draft. Democratic board members discussed a desire for equal geographic representation of Will County, which covers 849 square miles and is the state’s fourth most-populous county.
Ventura said theremay be a constitutional problem with a resolution that dictated the racial makeup of an official body thatwould decide howto spend public funds. “I am possibly up for negotiation on that,” she said. “If a judge voids it, we could rewrite it.”
Recreational cannabis sales became legal in Illinois on Jan. 1. Through the first four months of the year, Will County received more than $26,000 in tax revenues from cannabis sales, according to the draft resolution.
The resolution proposes paying each of the nine committee members a
$500 monthly stipend. The $54,000 annual cost would come from county funds other than cannabis revenues, Ventura said.
“There is potential for this money to growand be beneficial to communities thatwere harmed,” she said.
Democrats hope to pass a resolution and begin distributing funds in 2021. The county board’s executive committee is expected to consider the resolution next month and assign the proposal to a committee for additional study.
The resolution symbolizes efforts to acknowledge systemic racism and injustices that have denied Blacks opportunities to obtain wealth, Ventura said. The proposal is a legislative response to messages in the Black Lives Matter movement, she said.
“Instead of standing on the side of the road with signs and chanting, we are actually going to try to take some steps tomove our country in that direction,” she said.
North suburban Evanston is among the few governmental entities nationwide that has advanced ameasure to create a reparations fund. During a town hall in August, officials fielded citizen suggestions on howthe money should be distributed.
Suggestions included building a new school focused on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, and offering a series of $25,000 grants to support homeownership for Black victims of housing discrimination.
Will County Democrats discussed how eligibility for the all-Black committee would be determined. Ventura said the “one drop rule” would be applied. The principle holds that anyone with any Black ancestry could claim to be Black.
Ventura said she has spent the last several months working with Black community members throughout the county to draft the proposal.
Balich questioned the timing of the discussion by the Democratic caucus and howthe county board would take up the proposal after the Nov. 3 election.
“I don’t like the idea of bringing it up now,” Balich said. “It’s a very opinionated thing. They’re worried it might hurt them in this election.”