Politicians cheer sales tax rollback; businesses say it isn't enough
Elected officials urged shoppers to return to Cook County after a partial sales tax rollback took effect Thursday, but some businesses said the half-percentage-point reduction might not be enough to help them.
"Today we've come together to tell people that we want people to return and do business in Cook County," Cook County Commissioner Timothy Schneider of Bartlett said. "You don't need to drive across county lines to shop anymore. We want your business."
The half-point drop translates as 50 cents for every $100 spent by consumers and pushes the total sale tax rate below 10 percent, "a huge psychological threshold," said Joseph Schwieterman, director of DePaul University's Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development.
"This is a meaningful change. Consumers will certainly notice," Schwieterman said.
Others, however, weren't so sure. "I'll take what I can get, but I think the break in the sales tax has got to be bigger," said Bob Boho, owner of the BP gas station at 11 E. Dundee Road, Wheeling, near the border with Lake County. "It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this out."
Even with Thursday's drop to 9.5 percent, it doesn't compare to some areas of Lake County that are at 7 percent - making a $3 gallon of gas ring up at 7.5 cents less, he pointed out.
The rollback in the county portion of the sales tax is a repeal of half of the penny-on-the-dollar increase Cook County Board President Todd Stroger pushed through in 2008, which increased the county's take from 0.75 percent to 1.75 percent.
The Cook County Board voted last year to roll back half of the increase, cutting the county's take to 1.25 percent, effective today. That dropped the full sales-tax rate to 9.5 percent from 10 percent in suburbs like Schaumburg, Hoffman Estates, Arlington Heights and Elk Grove Village.
Rates across the county vary because towns can impose their own sales tax.
Cook County still has one of the highest sales taxes in the nation. The sales tax within Chicago's city limits will drop to 9.75 percent from 10.25 percent. Even with the decrease, Chicago's tax is still tied with Los Angeles for the highest of any big city in the country.
"It turns out we are no longer simply the highest," said state Rep. Mark Walker, an Arlington Heights Democrat representing the 66th district, who spoke alongside Schneider at a news conference Thursday in Mount Prospect. "Now we're among the top handful. And still that's not enough. It is killing the border communities."
Walker introduced the legislation that gave the Cook County Board the power to override Stroger's veto of the sales-tax repeal by lowering the requirement from four-fifths to a more conventional three-fifths majority.
A series of Chaddick Institute studies showed suburban Cook suffering unusually large drops in sales compared with the collar counties over recent years. However, the most recent study last December showed the impact of the sales-tax increase shrank over time, after having a noticeable initial effect when it was first raised in 2008.
Schwieterman said he expects a noticeable response to the lowered tax rate. "This is unprecedented in recent sales-tax history," he said. "It's a rollback."
Stroger failed in his re-election bid in the February Democratic primary.
Schneider said he will continue to push for rolling back the remaining one-half percentage point, which lost in a 10-7 vote by county commissioners in March.
Both major county-board presidential nominees - Republican Roger Keats and Democrat Toni Preckwinkle - have said they will roll back the remaining one-half percentage point of Stroger's sales tax increase, although Preckwinkle has tied it to finding other forms of revenue.