Mayor Daley appears to be feeling the pressure to come clean about his plans to spend the city's $1 billion tax increment financing (TIF) surplus.  As regular readers know, the city's unprecedented budget shortfall has opened the door to some long-overdue questions about why the public funds ($495 million in 2009 to be exact) siphoned off the tax rolls each year aren't folded into the public budgeting process. On Friday, Daley went on the offense, citing a recently-renovated bridge as an example of how the TIF system isn't shadowy at all, but rather an expansive public works campaign that's unfolding in plain sight. From the Tribune's report:

Aldermen who want greater control over how tax increment financing funds are used in their wards are "beating the heck out of us" without appreciating how the money has improved their neighborhoods, Daley said at an event to mark repairs on the Cherry Avenue bridge connecting North Avenue to Goose Island. The bridge renovation was funded in part using $3.75 million collected from a special taxing district in the area, where property tax collections were frozen to help finance infrastructure repairs [...]

"Some of the aldermen are questioning it. That's why they're not here today, to be very simple. Because they don't think it should be used for this purpose," Daley said.

For the past year, we've been following the TIF debate very closely and have yet to hear an alderman protest the use of the funds on a public works project. What's come under fire is the fact that the money is being doled out in secret -- and often in the form of corporate welfare --  at a time when public services have been slashed and property owners taxed to the hilt.

Moreover, most aldermen probably aren't so fond of how the mayor uses his control of the TIF honey pot to keep them in line. As the Reader's Ben Joravsky and Mick Dumke explained in their latest investigation, those who cross the mayor can often forget about getting a new school or other public works project in their ward:

By moving more necessary expenditures into the secret budget that he ultimately controls, the mayor also wields even more power over every public entity, from the City Council to the public schools to the Park District. At various times at least half a dozen aldermen have told us that mayoral aides pressure them on key votes—such as the ordinances for funding the Olympics or moving the Children's Museum to Grant Park—by either promising to give their wards more TIF dollars or threatening to take TIF dollars away.

When you consider the amount of power Daley derives from the TIF system, it's not surprising that he continues to make weak pledges regarding transparency, such as his latest promise to put together "a full list of all the examples" of TIF-funded projects. As Greg Hinz recently put it, the mayor needs to "cut the bull" and let the public and their representatives have a look before these public funds are spent.