To the Editor:
If you live on or very near Lincoln Avenue between Webster and Diversey (2200 to 2800), you may not be aware of a major proposed tax that we will be expected to pay. It will increase our annual taxes, or the rent that goes toward them, by approximately four percent. And the benefits listed are intended for merchants, being almost entirely aesthetic touches and other nonessentials geared toward attracting more foot traffic.
A public hearing on this proposed Special Service Area (SSA) will be held this Friday, Nov. 4, at 10 a.m. in City Council chambers (121 N. LaSalle, 2nd Floor). If you want some democracy injected into this process—if you want it known that you were not fairly informed of either the positive or negative sides of this question—this may be your last opportunity to let them know. It is very important that concerned neighbors attend this meeting, if only to register your dissatisfaction with the process. But if you cannot make the meeting, please call Ald. Vi Daley at (773) 327-9111 and email me at pete@printchicago.com.
This SSA benefits commerce and is effectively controlled by the chamber: expensive aesthetic embellishments, increased commercial development planning, commercial parking studies, duplicated city services, cleaning and security that the largest bars should be paying for, and optional niceties over which we will have little or no input.
After Friday, the tax will not be stoppable. Though voters have a legal claim to input, there is no obligation to invite their input; they are only welcome to "try" to stop it. This loophole in the law assures that most residents will not be notified of such a tax proposal, and it sets an impossible and probably unconstitutional bar to stopping it: Within 60 days of the hearing, somebody must have 51 percent of voters and 51 percent of taxpayers of record sign a petition. That is far too little time, and far too many people to persuade. Furthermore, it is by design, I believe, that it must be done over the cold and hectic holiday seasons of November and December. My friends, it is impossible. That is why Friday is a very important day. I urge you to attend the meeting and call beforehand for further robust discussion and especially a public referendum on the plan.
The Lincoln Park Chamber of Commerce claims that 84 percent of the tax will come from commercial properties. My own detailed analysis shows that as little as 30 percent of the tax will be paid by merchants, and as much as 70 percent of the tax will come from residents. Furthermore, I have found that if you estimate individual stakeholder interests by a count of occupant units affected, fewer than 23 percent are merchants—the vast majority are homeowners and renters.
The second distortion is the "0.0026" number as the tax-levy multiplier on assessed valuation. Numerically speaking, it may be correct, but presented in the way they have—as a tiny decimal number against a huge basis value (the property's assessed valuation)—the true impact is deliberately concealed in order to obfuscate the fact that it is too high. Nowhere do they clarify what their figure really means: that you will pay four percent more in taxes, which is a significant increase considering that we already pay among the highest in the city. Want to pay $300 to $600 more than last year?
The LPCC's proposed budget spends our money lavishly on such flamboyant luxuries as hanging flower baskets, sidewalk snow plowing, commercial advertising, and of course program management.
LPCC claims "businesses on Lincoln Avenue are increasingly challenged with a decline in daytime foot traffic," but I doubt they did any study on that. The stretch from 2200 to 2600 is thriving with business. What do we really need on our 2200 and 2400 block? Before we discuss how residents will pay for $800 flower pots, the bars and other merchants on these blocks should shoulder the burden of cleaning the streets and alleys of vomit, urine, human feces, noise pollution, and trash every Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. They should also pay for added police details, trash baskets, barricades and porta-potties to keep people from trashing our neighborhood. The millions of dollars annually going into the pockets of the street's bar owners should be tapped for these "special services."
The 2600 and 2700 blocks are slow with business because they are too far from Halsted, Clark, and Fullerton, and from good public transit and major population densities from the high-rises, the hospitals and the university. A mere SSA is not going to fix that. What we really need is a chamber of commerce that will work with residents in good faith instead of trying to do things behind their backs.
Peter Zelchenko
Lincoln Park
|
