CPS, CTU want to create new taxing districts to raise $100 million from taxpayers
Creating new special service areas for the sole benefit of Chicago Public Schools would mean hitting homeowners with an additional $100 million in taxes.
Chicago Public Schools, or CPS, and the Chicago Teachers Union, or CTU, are crying poor and are looking for new sources of funding to compensate for years of mismanagement and sweetheart deals. Rather than reform, CPS and CTU prefer to seek a bailout from taxpayers.
CPS receives approximately half of the property taxes levied on Chicago residents, accounting for nearly $2.4 billion annually. And now CTU has proposed a plan to create new special taxing districts to bring in an additional $100 million.
These districts, known as “special service areas,” or SSAs, function as “taxation without representation” and fund pet projects throughout Chicago. Unelected appointees, who are not accountable to taxpaying constituents, manage the SSAs. The individuals who pay for these special taxing districts have little say in how the SSAs are set up or run. Even though there are 53 SSAs in Chicago, virtually none of the residents or business owners within these vast swaths of the city know the taxing districts exist.
The taxes levied for SSAs come on top of the property taxes and over 30 different additional taxes and fees imposed by the city, which already make Chicagoans the most heavily taxed residents of any city in Illinois.
CTU has found a City Council ally in Alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, 35th Ward. Ramirez-Rosa has already expressed his support for the initiative and plans to push the council to create these new taxing bodies across the city. The SSAs would be created in “affluent” neighborhoods and in areas with top high schools. This plan would fund those top schools, freeing up money for other schools throughout the city.
What Ramirez-Rosa and CTU fail to acknowledge is that CPS has devoted most of its revenues to employee salaries and benefits, including pensions. CPS spent $3.3 billion of its $5.8 billion 2015 budget on staff salaries and other benefits. Teacher pensions consumed another $634 million of the budget.
This suggested tax increase comes when Chicagoans are feeling the pain of last year’s tax increases. In April, the first garbage fee appeared on water bills, and the record property-tax increase that City Council passed in October 2015 will appear on bills later this summer. Creating these new SSAs is simply throwing good money after bad. It does not solve the fundamental problems facing CPS: the district’s unsustainable salaries and pension benefits and structurally unsound retirement system.
What can taxpayers do?
It is often difficult for taxpayers to determine which taxes they pay and when, and to what ends city officials use those tax dollars. It is even more difficult when the taxing body is not managed by elected officials accountable to their constituents. Knowledge of these taxes will lead to a more informed and active citizenry in Chicago, which is a good first step toward easing one of the highest tax burdens of any major city in the country.
Contact your alderman and tell him or her that you oppose additional taxes controlled by a nonelected body to pay for the continued mismanagement of CPS.