Above photo: From video by the TIF Illumination Project.
WE ASK THE MAYOR ABOUT TIFS AND HE ANSWERS!
Chicago, IL – What a night at Malcolm X College. About 300 people showed up for the first 2016 Budget Town Hall presided over by Mayor Emanuel and attended by all his department heads on September 1. Dozens of folks got one minute to ask a question or make a statement. The room was filled with supporters of the Dyett High School hunger strikers. People young and old expressed their anger and aspirations, stepping up to the mike and demanding that the mayor first meet with the hunger strikers and accept the community-development proposal to transform Dyett into a global leadership and green technology academy.
There were also calls for coming clean on TIFs (Tax Increment Financing Project) and releasing TIF funds into the general stream of local government agencies – especially our beleaguered public schools. Tom Tresser, from the TIF Illumination Project, asked the mayor to release all documents proving his claim that most of the $1.4 billion sitting in TIFs on January 1, 2015 are NOT available for distribution. The mayor and his budget director actually responded. Budget Director Alex Holt promised Tom a meeting in the near future to answer all our questions on where the money is. Stay tuned.
Watch the exchange here:
MORE ABOUT TIF ILLUMINATION PROJECT:
The TIF Illumination Project is a project of The CivicLab, a co-working space in Chicago’s West Loop devoted to civic innovation. Tom Tresser is the Lead Organizer for the TIF work and has been cooking up innovation in community organizing, civic engagement and strategic planning for over 30 years.
The project produce reports that explain the impact of Chicago’s massive Tax Increment Financing Program on a ward-by-ward basis.
We are started our ward-by-ward review of TIFs with the 27th Ward. We want to review and visit all 50 wards. As of September of 2014 we’ve Illuminated 127 TIFs across 29 wards in front of over 3,300 people.
Click here to learn about the TIF Illumination Project editorial team. CivicLab co-founder Tom Tresser has been researching TIFs and related civic issues since 2008. Here is a flier from a February 2008 seminar at DePaul University
that featured Chicago Reader reporter Ben Joravsky.