Wednesday · November 10 2004
Where does the city's $713 million from property taxes go?
Did you know not a single dollar of property taxes paid to the city of Chicago next year will be spent toward the salaries of those who deliver what you might consider the traditional city services: police, fire, garbage pickup and the rest?
No, I did not.
So what pays for those services? All the other taxes. And they're getting a big raise in the 2005 city budget. I suspect this may come up at the bookclub next week.
"About 45 percent of it will be used to pay for the pensions of city employees..."
Isn't that the employees that perform the traditional city services? maybe not.
That's for their pensions which is a given cost that can't be changed by policy (such as laying off workers). This is different than paying current salaries which policy can have an effect on.
There's a difference between pension and salary. You can only lower the pension payments if the former employee and his spouse die (or whatever other fine print is involved there).
It is Chicago, what do you expect?
Mayor Daley needs big bucks to plant flowers everywhere and rip up Meigs Field in the middle of the night...heck, he probably had to pay the Teamsters overtime or at least time and a half for that one!
What it's really about is getting his casino downtown. There's not much room left to push taxes higher, so that will become an obvious source of new revenue.
From Eric Zorn:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ericzorn/chi-0411110104nov11,1,7560807.column?coll=chi-news-col