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Tax-free ride to end for Chicagoans who order bottled water, liquor online from outside city

The tax-free ride is about to end for Chicagoans who pay less by ordering cases of water and booze for delivery to their homes and businesses.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot wants to close a legal loophole that has allowed people to dodge the city's five-cents-a-bottle tax on bottled water and the city's sliding scale of liquor taxes by ordering online from places outside the city.

Last month, Alderman Scott Waguespack (32nd) proposed that Chicago restaurants and takeout joints be prohibited from using foam containers and required to provide straws and food utensils only on request.

At the time, Waguespack acknowledged that plastic water bottles were every bit as responsible for "plastic pollution" that's filling Chicago landfills and driving up costs for taxpayers. But he essentially said, first things first.

The mayor's hand-picked chairman of the City Council's Finance Committee hinted strongly that plastic water bottles would be his next target.

Lightfoot is apparently unwilling to wait.

Her ordinance would confront the bottled water problem and encourage Chicagoans to use refillable containers to drink, what City Comptroller Reshma Soni called the "cleanest water in the world" from Lake Michigan.

"You're buying at a neighborhood store and paying over there. But you're not paying to buy it online, even though you're consuming it here," Soni said.

"What we're trying to do is close a loophole and level the playing field.

"The whole point of this is, if the waste is in Chicago, we need to reduce that waste." The nickel-a-bottle tax on bottled water was imposed by the City Council in 2008.

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