Developers Pay to Raise Your Taxes

McHenry County Blog has looked at the developers who have contributed to past efforts to raise Carpentersville School District 300’s taxes and taken a look at other communities where they want higher taxes.

What conclusions can one draw? I see these so far:

· If any of the developers listed below come to your town, you can expect tax hikers to get their generous financial assistance.

· If Cambridge, (Isenstein/)Pasquinelli, Kennedy, Lakewood, Neumann, Pulte, Realen , Crown or Zale come knocking, prepare to fight a minimum of a $5,000 campaign.

· Lakewood and Crown are willing to write much larger checks.

· Campaigns against school tax hike and bond referendums have been ratcheted up from the level of volunteers asking people to “do the right thing” and “help the kids.” This kind of money buys excellent professionals. Expect cable TV ads, direct mail, phone campaigns, along with yard signs and maybe billboards. If you don’t organize the opposition, expect your taxes to increase regularly as growth occurs.

· Many of the contributions are made quite late in the campaign. Rest assured this is deliberate. It is so local voters will have little chance to find out who is financing the tax hike campaign before the election. Here’s some campaign advice. If you check the State Board of Elections web site every day here, you might notice when the local tax hike committee is getting an infusion of cash, but your time would probably be better spent getting an opposition campaign under way. (If an opponent is homebound, you could assign him/her to look for such contributions and use the information to get some press about the identity of the real backers of the referendum.)

· Use this information to rebut the argument that “Growth pays its own way.” If growth paid its own way, these homebuilders would not be helping extract more tax dollars from your pocket.

Below is what was found about other tax hike support activity of developers who have been interested in District 300. (The most recent contributions are listed first.)

For the details and links to all of the committees that got money, click here.

Find out whether a $5,000 or $10,000 campaign contribution is a big deal to a developer here.

If you are specifically interested in Carpentersville 300's proposed $152,000 campaign, click here for articles I have posted.