I’d like to echo Jack Crowe’s recent column putting the blame for our current tax malaise on the previous elections and referendums. And I would like to add some comments about the people who long ago were bravely yelling “fire” on these issues and were ignored. Jack Crowe, to his everlasting credit, was one of those people.
For many years this town was controlled by a small number of voters who pretty much toed the party line on all issues. And, with the exception of the high school, this party controlled all the other organizations that made decisions about funding.
Now in the early days of its existence, during the 1950s and 1960s, this group of people made many wonderful brave and important decisions on issues that other communities wouldn’t even touch. They made a huge difference. They took a stand and gained national prominence in the bargain. Then a new group came along in the same party who were more dogmatic about issues, and didn’t care about what things cost. They wanted their way with pretty much everything-even down to how they thought the grade schools should be run. They cared more about institutionalizing the latest edu-speak nonsense than test scores.
This political party had a vision for turning the community into Lincoln Park-piles of dense condos with no parking. And this vision they pursued with vigor. They didn’t care a whit for zoning laws. In fact they wrote a zoning ordinance that let them ignore any zoning issue that got in their way.
A few years ago it happened that the 30-year building fund bonds were paid off both in District 97 and the library at about the same time. Additionally, the village was flush with cash from the borrowings of two TIF districts, so they combined these coincidences and went on a spending spree without parallel in the history of the village.
Six-thousand-dollar light fixtures for the new library? No problem. Twenty-million-dollar subsidy for one of America’s richest developers? Chump change. Twelve million dollars over budget on two schools? We can handle it; we’ll use our village Master TIF card.
Nothing and no one could stop them. Many people from all over the village were trying to inject some rationality into these decisions. It didn’t matter if you had experience in what you were doing-like Jack Crowe in education-or if you were just a well-informed citizen. They steamrolled right over you with bombastic nonsense. They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars hiring consultants who bent the studies and the figures to meet their goals. Some of these studies appear to be outright frauds. During an election year when they thought they were slipping a little bit in the polls, they would start a whispering campaign to personally defame anyone who opposed them. They said some pretty nasty things about some very good people-to their everlasting shame.
Then some things happened that they didn’t fight for political reasons. The Cook County Assessor decided to dramatically lower the assessments on apartment buildings greater than six units. He did it not once but twice. Now large landlords’ tax rates are just a few points above homeowners. This shifted the tax burden to single-family homeowners.
Then some things happened that they had been warned about but refused to acknowledge. It turned out the financial projections of the independent citizen finance people who predicted shortfalls in education funding in Dist. 97 were right. The independent education people who warned about a large increase in discipline issues because of the size of the new junior high schools ended up being right.
The people who said that $72 million for two new schools won’t change the test scores were also right. Another group of independent citizens who understood complex zoning issues and had warned about the costs of development, even they ended up being right.
Now it’s a financial morass that we haven’t even begun to pay for and not one of these people who are responsible have had the courage to stand up and acknowledge their mistakes or apologize. In fact at least four of them have run away, and I mean that literally-run away. Can you imagine? Is there no one left to strut around these projects and say, “Yep, that was me, I’m responsible for that one. Pretty great huh? Not only did I piss off every single last one of the neighbors when it was built, but now they have to pay for it!”
In the near term I very much hope that a leader emerges who can see the need for fiscal discipline and can help lead all the taxing bodies to apply the brakes sanely and rationally over the next five years and let the local population catch its financial breath.
I also hope that people like Jack Crowe, who are knowledgeable about the issues on which they speak, get more attention than the short shrift they been given by previous village boards. It’s long overdue.
