State report: Special tax districts too secret

It might not be feasible for your property tax bill to tell you how much Tax Increment Financing districts are raising your taxes, but it is feasible for the bills to tell you a heck of a lot more than they do now, a state study due out today says.

The report by the Illinois Department of Revenue, commissioned as a result of a law passed last year, says that at a minimum, property tax bills should tell you if your property is located in a TIF district, the district number, and a Web site address where you can find out how much money the district is siphoning away from other taxing bodies, such as school districts.

What the bills can't do, the report says, is show you how much more you're paying in taxes as a result of TIFs.

To review, a TIF is a special taxing area designated by a municipality. Once a TIF is passed, the amount of taxes collected in that area by other taxing districts, like schools, is frozen. As the property values increase, and thus the amount of taxes collected in that area increase, the increased amount of taxes goes into a special fund set aside to develop that area. The original idea of TIFs was to provide a stimulus to revitalize depressed areas.

But critics of TIFs, like Cook County Commissioner Mike Quigley, say TIFs have spiraled out of control and are now being used in wealthy areas where property values would go up naturally anyway.

"Oak Brook has a TIF," scoffed State Rep. Paul Froehlich of Schaumburg, who co-sponsored the law that commissioned the study. "I wonder where their blight was."

In Cook County there are more than 300 TIF districts collecting a total of $800 million a year - an amount greater than that collected by any taxing body in the county except the Chicago Public School District, said Quigley.

"That (fact alone) should be on a tax bill," said Quigley.

Quigley and others think that when school districts are not allowed to capture natural tax growth, they are forced to hold referendums to increase their tax base, taking the dirty job of asking for a tax increase away from municipalities.

"It's giving them (municipalities) the ability to raise taxes without taking the grief," said Quigley.

But trying to assess how much your taxes increase as a result of TIFs is a subjective game, the report concludes. Even trying to assess, as the law requests, what the equalized assessed value was before the TIF was created, and what it is today, isn't as easy as it sounds.

"'Initial EAV' and 'current EAV' can be applied to a single parcel or property within a TIF redevelopment area, or an aggregate of all property within the TIF, or a combination of the two," the report notes.

And in areas with multiple TIFs, putting that information on an already-crowded tax bill could be physically impossible as well as expensive to compute, the report notes.

State Sen. John Cullerton, who sponsored the measure, hadn't seen the report Friday, but said that in general it sounds like the report confirmed his concern that not enough is known about TIFs.

Quigley hadn't yet seen the report, so did not want to pass judgment on what it said can or can't be done. But he noted that Marion County, a smaller downstate community, is somehow able to put a dollar amount on tax bills showing how much of each tax bill is diverted to TIFs.

Marion County, however, has just six TIFs, making it an easier computation.