Progress Illinois

Yesterday, I joined members of the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus in a press conference on school funding reform. Recent calls for a boycott of the Chicago Public Schools have, predictably, focused new attention on an old problem: Illinois’ overreliance on local property taxes to fund public schools.

This is not a new issue for me.

In 1998, I was the staff analyst for the Senate Education and Appropriations Committee.

Two years later, I organized a statewide coalition on school funding reform that included unions, businesses, civil rights groups, and civic organizations. We brought in outside experts to demonstrate the state's failure to devote adequate resources to high quality education for our children. We showed how the lack of state support for public schools increased district's reliance on local property taxes, and how the need for property tax reform skewed economic development decisions and created perverse incentives for urban sprawl. All to no avail.

The guaranteed minimum of per-child education spending in the state is still significantly lower than what is needed to adequately serve our children. On the national level, Illinois ranks 49th in state support for public education.

As I learned on the campaign trail this past fall and winter, the consequences are pernicious.

Continue reading »

Nine years ago, Chicagoan Mark Emerson left his job with a large company that offered group health coverage to pursue the American dream and start his own business. He did not know that this would begin an ordeal in which he was "charged back into the stone age” as a customer of the private health insurance market. Mark and his wife now pay more in health care costs than they do on their mortgage payments and real estate taxes. Despite being two healthy people, their insurance costs continue to climb. Though he has reached the point where he can no longer afford his premiums, Mark is unwilling to drop coverage and face the potential nightmare of going without insurance. He feels stuck, and help is nowhere to be found.

Mark is an American icon—a middle class entrepreneur. But he is just one of many middle class folks in cities across the country who struggle with similar situations. Escalating health care costs. The foreclosure crisis. The rising price of energy. Food prices and urban food deserts. Our perceived freedom as ordinary people to decide who to be, what to do, and how to live has increasingly drifted out of our control. We have to ask whether we are making progress as a country in improving our quality of life.

And, for that matter, what defines progress?

A report issued this month by the Columbia University Press and Social Science Research Council, titled “The Measure of America: American Human Development Report,” gives a fresh perspective on the concept of progress. It is the first and only report to combine the three issues Americans care about most -- health, education, and income -- in one measure.

Continue reading »

Imagine, if you will, traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of imprudence. A wondrous land where more than $500 million a year is spent off-budget; a land where $500 million does not appear on a single tax bill; a land where $500 million is spent to spackle the cracks of waste, bloat, patronage, and corruption.

Welcome to the land of Tax Increment Finance districts (TIFs). Although that $500 million figure is merely the amount of revenue collected through TIFs in Chicago in 2006, the TIF twilight zone extends throughout Illinois, scooping up hundreds of millions more in taxpayer dollars every year.

Tax increment finance is one of those issues that bores you silly before you learn something about it -- and then it outrages you. Simply put, TIFs are widely-used economic development tools which capture all new property tax revenues within a specified “district” and reinvest them within that area’s borders for public improvements and private development incentives. Originally intended as a way to spark redevelopment of blighted or near-blighted neighborhoods, the network of TIFs now extends to such downtrodden areas as Chicago’s Loop -- encapsulating such notable tenements as the Sears Tower, Chicago Board of Trade, and City Hall.

Once a district is designated, any additional property revenue generated there over the next 23 years is directed to a TIF account and therefore is unavailable to the city agencies that oversee the schools, parks, libraries, etc. As a result, these agencies are often forced to raise their tax rates to generate the same amount of revenue. Of course, those higher rates fall directly on the taxpayers.

Continue reading »

In the weeks since the adjournment, at least temporarily, of the General Assembly's spring session, I have been thinking a lot about how the dysfunction under the dome has dragged down the environmental agenda.

In recent years, Illinois' environmental community has had an impressive run of big legislative victories on some of the major policy questions of our time. In 2007, the electric rate relief package included some of the strongest clean energy provisions of any state -- as a result, 25 percent of household electricity will come from wind in the future and ComEd and Ameren are busy getting ready to roll out major new energy conservation programs. We've required a 90 percent reduction in mercury from our coal plants, and banned mercury in car parts, thermometers, and other products. We got nearly all of the phosphorus, which causes nasty algae blooms in our rivers and lakes, out of dishwashing detergent. Illinois ratified the Great Lakes Compact, to protect Lake Michigan from being drained by thirsts outside the region. We passed the nation's first Cool Cities Act, to give state support to mayors fighting climate change at the local level. We have new champions in all four caucuses of the General Assembly, and are more active than ever in electing new leaders across the state.

Given all this, we set our sights high for 2008, and launched ambitious campaigns to fight global warming, protect open space, and clean up toxins. As the dust settles on this spring's legislative session, none of these initiatives crossed the finish line, despite heroic efforts by many.

So what happened?

While the Capitol’s green engine is building steam, the wheels have fallen off the rest of the train. Unfortunately, no amount of strength or smarts by advocates or individual legislators was enough to pull some very bright ideas through some very dark, deep tunnels.

Continue reading »