Ald. Reilly Drops the Science on TIF Supporters

By Kevin Robinson in News on Nov 19, 2009 3:00PM

42nd Ward Alderman Brendan Reilly, who represents the north end of Chicago's downtown, is opposing efforts by the city's commercial property owners to establish a TIF district in the East Loop, bounded by Wacker, Randolph, Columbus and Wabash. "Owner reinvestment and market forces should ultimately decide ‘winners’ and ‘losers,’ not TIF subsidies,” Reilly said in a press release. “The East Loop TIF proposal appears to provide a competitive advantage to those properties within the proposed TIF boundary. The intent of TIF was never to place surrounding properties at a leasing disadvantage. This proposal would very likely have exactly that effect.” Reilly seems to understand that TIFs were intended to combat blighted neighborhoods, not subsidize established business.

The news that the alderman opposed the TIF seemed to come as a surprise to supporters in the business community. “We didn’t know how the alderman felt about it, and today we found out,” a spokeswoman from the Department of Community Development. Supporters of the TIF district assumed that City Hall would support the East Loop TIF. Without the alderman's backing, however, that seems unlikely. Crain's notes that while "property values haven’t grown as much as the rest of the city, 80% of the parcels have shown deterioration, old water-and-sewer infrastructure exists, and there is high vacancy of older Class C buildings there," Reilly doesn't see it that way. “I do not agree that the needs within the proposed boundary come close to meeting the threshold level of obsolescence or deterioration the Illinois statute was designed to address,” Ald. Reilly said in a letter to Matthew Amato, general manager for the Aon building, which is owned by the global real estate firm Jones Lang and LaSalle.