If Mayor Lightfoot wants to end the teachers’ strike, I know where she can find the money to settle the union’s demands about class size and hiring nurses, librarians, and counselors.
Over the years, I’ve called the TIF slush fund everything from a honey pot to the banana stand, a nod to a line from Arrested Development, one of my favorite sitcoms.
My guess is there’s a lot more mayonnaise in that TIF jar. Just how much, I can’t say, because the mayor—taking a page from Daley and Mayor Rahm—won’t tell us. An outrage for another column.
It’s possible that the city has obligated some of that $1.5 billion for projects since the annual reports were filed this summer. But the slush fund has got to be more plentiful than a scraped-out mayonnaise jar.
When the City Council and the mayor create a TIF district, they freeze the amount of property in that district CPS can tax for 23 years.
Actually, it’s worse than nothing. They could lose money on the deal. If kids who live in Lincoln Yards go to public schools, CPS will have to hire more teachers to teach them. And these are going to be wealthier kids—so CPS can’t get away with packing 40 of them into a classroom like they do with students in the poor parts of town.
