Editorial: Sales tax increase still a bad idea for Cook County

If anyone has earned the credibility to justify revisiting a sales tax increase in Cook County, it's Toni Preckwinkle. In almost five years at the helm of the county board, Preckwinkle has done more to bring discipline and respect to Cook County government than anyone in the past two decades. She's wrestled with members of her own party, county department heads and countless special interests to bring a measure of control to a body defined by bloat and unbridled spending.

But, as Cook County Commissioner Timothy Schneider observed this week in an interview with the Daily Herald editorial board, the county still has far to go. Considering that, and considering the devastating effects we saw in the first iteration of a one-penny sales tax increase, a return to that mechanism for Cook County is not justifiable even for Preckwinkle.

That's not to dismiss lightly what she and many county department heads have accomplished. It cannot be pleasant to manage operations in an era of constant annual decline - as most residents and businesses in the suburbs can readily attest.

And, facing up to its pending pension crisis, the county and its employee groups produced reform legislation that is promising and productive, another difficult task.

Even so, a sales tax increase is not the answer for systemic problems that continue to plague Cook County government.

Border suburbs know all too well the potential impact of a sales tax increase. When the Todd Stroger version was in place, businesses watched helplessly as consumers crossed to neighboring counties to make purchases - especially for big-ticket items like furniture, appliances and cars. Mayors in Elk Grove Village, Schaumburg, Hoffman Estates and other suburbs, many with sales taxes of their own, already are running the numbers on the effects of a renewed county increase, with Elk Grove Village's Craig Johnson estimating his town, for one, could lose nearly $1 million a year.

It is particularly galling that the county's ability to manage its pension crisis has become caught up in the partisan scramble over a state budget. Preckwinkle has said she'll back down, at least somewhat, on the state income tax if the legislature passes the county's plan for solving its pension crisis. But Gov. Bruce Rauner is effectively holding up a vote on the legislation, which would likely attract strong bipartisan support, unless Preckwinkle gets behind his Turnaround Agenda. That maneuver, which essentially finds the state dictating terms of a solution to a problem that belongs solely to Cook County, smacks of the you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours politics Illinois ought to be eliminating.

But it shouldn't have to get that far. County board members know that there is still lots of room for consolidation, elimination of redundancies and spending control. The arguments against a sales tax increase are plentiful and varied, but until these structural issues are addressed and every possible efficiency is undertaken, we shouldn't even be discussing the issue.