Janine Jackson interviewed Tom Tresser on Chicago’s budget and the assumption of scarcity for the March 18, 2016, CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Tom Tresser: “We need to be very much present in all these dialogues about where our money is being spent and what kind of city we wish to live in, what kind of country we wish to live in.” (image: Chicago Tonight)
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When Chicago financial officials declared last fall that the city was facing a 2016 operating budget deficit of hundreds of millions of dollars, media asked how Mayor Rahm Emanuel would face the “tough proposition of asking Chicagoans to dig deep” for the property tax increases presented as necessary, if not sufficient, to slow the city’s financial slide and keep it from becoming, in Emanuel’s words, “unlivable”.
Our guest suggested instead that Chicago’s dreaded, ruinous red ink should be considered a mirage. Americans seem very accepting of the idea that we’re living in objectively dry economic times, and tough choices have to be made. But that tendency is precisely why it’s so important to hold a light on what, precisely, politicians and the press mean when they talk about public money we “don’t have” or “can’t spare.” Because a whole lot of human hardship gets predicated, gets accepted and normalized, on that assumption of scarcity.
Part of what’s called for is civic education, and that’s what Tom Tresser does. He was co-founder of Protect Our Parks, a neighborhood effort to stop the privatization of public space in Chicago, and a lead organizer for No Games Chicago, a volunteer grassroots effort opposing the city’s 2016 Olympic bid. Right now, he’s lead organizer for the TIF Illumination Project, investigating the impacts of Chicago’s Tax Increment Financing districts, the sort of phenomenon that may be coming soon, if it’s not already there, to a city near you. He joins us now by phone from Chicago. Welcome to CounterSpin, Tom Tresser.
Tom Tresser: Janine, thank you for bringing me on your air. I really appreciate it.
(cc image: pan.li75)
Janine Jackson: Well, we’re told day after day, at the local, state and national level, that while we might want social goods like healthcare for everyone, access to healthy food and livable wages, sad to say we just can’t have them, because the resources don’t exist. That idea defines our sense of the possible and hence our political life. What do you mean when you say Chicago’s claim of a budget hole of, I’ve heard as much as $480 million, that that’s a mirage?
TT: Well, it comes down to your opening statement about what is valuable and who gets to claim that. And it’s a frame of scarcity vs. abundance. And we have seen over and over again in America, when people in power wish something to be done, money materializes almost miraculously, whether it’s going to war or, sad to say, bailing out our financial services industry to the tune of 14 trillion—that’s with a T—dollars. And so that’s the first thing that your listeners should hold in their minds.
But here in Chicago, we have our particular set of grievances. So the way I look at it is, there’s three kinds of monies for the public here in Chicago, that I think are relevant in other jurisdictions, when we’re just talking about civic dollars. This is aside from what is printed in the mayor’s press releases and his budgets. So what I’m looking at here in Chicago, and I think this is applicable in other jurisdictions, is: money that’s stolen from us, money that we shouldn’t have to spend, and that’s quite a lot in the city of Chicago; there’s money that’s hidden from us, that we are collecting but it’s not available to the public or to the public budgeting process; and then there’s money that we’re not collecting. So unless we have a robust conversation about all those three, I refuse to accept the characterization that we’re broke, that there is no money to do these public things that you alluded to.
JJ: Well, let me ask you first about the first of those buckets, as you call them: money that we didn’t have to spend. I think for people in Chicago, here in New York, there’s a particular thing that comes to mind. Every time the city’s law enforcement are sued because of abuse or brutality — it comes up, you might see it in the corner of a newspaper article, but it doesn’t really come home — that the payment, the payout for that abuse, for that lawsuit, is actually coming from us, from taxpayers?
TT: Sad to say the costs are steep, aside from the loss of human life and the tragedy that the families and the victims of police violence suffer. But in Chicago, one particular police commander named Jon Burge, who is in prison now, but was torturing African-American men for years. And it was found out decades ago, but it took that long to work its way through the court system, and by the time he actually faced justice—he actually didn’t serve time for the violence he inflicted on people, it was for lying and covering up — but the cost from his abuse alone is $500 million and rising.
But that’s just one part of a much larger, I hate to say, picture of thievery and incompetence and corruption in the city of Chicago. It’s been estimated that there is a corruption tax in Chicago of 10 percent, that is to say, 10 percent of what we spend on government for the state, the county and the city itself. It’s probably over a billion dollars a year, and that breaks down into what they call ghost payrollers, triple dippers, patronage workers, the son and the daughter and the cousin of the office holder, and outright thievery. So unfortunately that is very present, even in the post-Daley Chicago.
And what I would say is what we would require for our public officials is a forensic audit, an independent audit on our books, to weed out all this corruption. And we’re not even talking about pension abuse, where pension funds have been mismanaged. But that’s one very large bucket right there.
JJ: And yet these are the sorts of things that are parenthetical or off the page entirely when we’re talking about “necessary” budget cuts.
Well, let me move on. For people who don’t like the idea of the state giving things to people, shall we say, like direct assistance, the words “economic development” are sort of holy, almost. It’s one of those phrases that really means nothing at all in itself, but can justify a lot. I want to ask you now about some work that you’re currently doing. Talk about Chicago’s Tax Increment Financing, or the TIF program. What, first of all, is it supposed to be, and then how is it playing out?
TT: Well, TIF, Tax Increment Financing, is a form of economic development supported by the state through property tax dollars, that is found in 47 states. And it may not be called TIF where you live, but if you’re taking property taxes off the rolls and giving them to a developer to do their thing? We’re on the same page. In Illinois, there are about 1,220 of these TIF districts across 550 cities. So what happens is a developer wants to do a thing — a mall, a housing project, a shopping center, something of this nature. And he comes to the city for free dollars, because he says that “the market won’t support me; the area that I wish to do this project in is blighted.”
“Blighted” LaSalle Street (cc photo: Ken Lund)
Now we fall down the rabbit hole of Alice when we deal with this word “blighted.” It’s a loaded term in modern America. Who blighted who, you might ask. But, nevertheless, the statute in Illinois is very elastic and has allowed such areas to be designated blighted as LaSalle Street (which is our Wall Street), the central business district of the Loop, and the booming areas proximate to the Loop. And when a TIF is placed in such areas, it just means you’re going to give free money to developers to do stuff they would have done anyway. And this is the argument you see all over America, where projects that shouldn’t get public dollars do, because someone has got an inside line with the mayor.
JJ: And it’s an opaque process, is part of the problem.
TT: Yes. Oh, yeah.
JJ: You can’t trace where that money is going so easily, I’m guessing, by the fact that your project is called the TIF Illumination Program.
TT: It’s after the fact. I mean, by the time you read about it, you know, in your real estate press, or if you’re a City Hall junkie and you see the agenda item that this is going to be discussed at the local planning body—it’s too late, the deal is done. And in Chicago, there’s 147 TIF districts that cover 33 percent of the entire city’s real estate footprint, that collectively, since they were borned in 1986 under Harold Washington — TIFs come and go, some have lasted decades—the entire program has extracted $7 billion in property taxes, off the table, placed we know not where. Well, that’s not exactly true, we know where a lot of it went, through the TIF Illumination Project, but the general public doesn’t. We’ve done 45 public meetings all over Chicagoland revealing the details, and every time we do one of these meetings, people are furious when they see what has been developed in their name.
So you have a very pregnant question that is relevant to people wherever they live, is who’s developing what for who, and has anyone ever asked the folks, what would you like to make your community a great community? As opposed to having a Walmart or Target or something dropped into your community, being partially subsidized by your property tax dollars, which you have definitely not been consulted about.
JJ: Right. Part of what we’re dealing with is the fact that we have differing visions of what a successful city would look like, what a healthy economy means. As you’re saying, healthy for whom? And it seems like a lot of the problem is the notion that public policy is a field for experts, and there’s a kind of gatekeeping by discouragement, if you will, about who gets to do politics, who’s at the table. That, I’m guessing, is why you are a civic educator — to demystify the political process and to open up participation.
TT: That’s right. And, you know, when they founded this country back in the day, the founding fathers, I guess, if you will, felt that we the folk had to be smart, we had to be informed, we need to be about the public’s business, which means having access to these documents, whether they’re budgets—we are fully capable of being with our hands on the driving wheel. We shouldn’t be always looking in the rearview mirror, or getting run over by the car of policy, if you will, you know, the freight train of policy. No, we need to be very much present in all these dialogues about where our money is being spent and what kind of city we wish to live in, what kind of country we wish to live in.
And so I am for a participatory budgeting process on a grand scale, where citizens control the entire budget of their communities in ways that are pleasing to them. I’m also an enemy of privatization, which is a sort of a sister evil to the things that we’ve been talking about, is when you’re stripmining public assets for private gain and we lose a robust public sector, whether it’s public schools, public libraries, public parks, to the benefit of private interests, who then get rich off of those assets.
The whole thing can be found, folks, on WeAreNotBroke.org, and we haven’t even talked about money we’re not collecting, which includes a progressive income tax, a Wall Street tax, and a public bank. But if you put all those ideas together, it’s a robust little 60-page book that should be hitting the street in the spring and summer in time to influence the 2017 budget debates here in Chicago. So we want our citizens to be armed and dangerous with civic knowledge.
JJ: The website again is?
TT: WeAreNotBroke.org. The book is Chicago Is Not Broke: Funding the City We Deserve.
JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Tom Tresser of the TIF Illumination Project. You can also keep up with the TIF work at TIFReports.com. Tom Tresser, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
TT: It’s been a pleasure spinning with you.
This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission from FAIR.