A TIF for Schools

TIF fighter Steve Stanek is from McHenry, but has a wide reach because he is Managing Editor of Budget & Tax News, a national monthly publication of The Heartland Institute. Yesterday he laid out academic findings of the failure of TIFs.

Now, Stanek came up with the “modest proposal.”

Here's a thought:

Maybe we should create Tax Increment Education districts that force municipalities to give up any increases in property taxes within the attendance boundaries of a school that creates a TIE, just as TIF districts force schools (and other local governments) to give up increases in property taxes.

Because municipalities have many revenue sources in addition to property taxes, municipalities would also have to give schools future growth in sales taxes, motor fuel taxes, utility taxes, building permit fees, etc., apportioned based on the population within the TIE boundaries.

Municipal officials would have no way to stop school districts, just as school officials have no way to stop municipalities from creating TIF districts. And a TIE district could last 23 years, the same as a TIF district.

How about it, municipal officials?

Want to give up nearly a quarter century of future tax revenues for your schools, the way you force schools (and other local governments) to give up nearly a quarter century of future tax revenues for your TIF projects?

Isn’t turnabout fair play?

TIF was meant to help blighted communities get a leg up to attract new development. Think burned-out and run-down neighborhoods in Chicago, East St. Louis, etc.

Corporations and municipal officials soon twisted that aim to their own aims. The leg up truly poor neighborhoods badly need has been wiped out by wealthy and fast-growing areas, such as McHenry County, that use TIF.

I've heard Huntley--one of the fastest-growing communities in the region--is talking about another TIF, and they already have one of the worst TIF abuses in Illinois.

The shopping center at Route 47 and the tollway is a TIF. People complain about "welfare queens" and think nothing of giving millions of dollars to wealthy developers and businesses they favor.

Even the hacks who defend TIF acknowledge that TIF shifts tax burdens, yet they make the absurd argument that TIF does not raise taxes.

Try shifting your future increases in property tax burden onto your next-door neighbor.

The total amount of tax collected from your two homes would be the same, so there'd be no net tax increase, but your neighbor would end up paying his full property tax bill in addition to some of yours.

Try telling your neighbor this would not be a tax increase for him and a subsidy for you.

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If you have never read Jonathan Swift's 1729 "Modest Proposal," I would recommend doing so.

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