Over the weekend, the Sun-Times published a news article scrutinizing Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's November 1 interview with WBEZ's Alison Cuddy.  Specifically, reporter Abdon Pallasch fact-checked the mayor's fervent defense of his controversial tax increment financing (TIF) network. 

The paper is a little late to the party on this one -- after all, both ourselves and the Reader have already picked apart the month-old interview.  Nonetheless, it's good to see the Sun-Times using its more prominent platform to push back (even if they buried the piece on the Saturday after Thanksgiving).

We particularly liked this passage from Pallasch's piece in response to Daley's claim that TIF doesn't divert public dollars from other taxing bodies, such as the schools, parks, and the city itself:

“No. No. No. No, it doesn’t,” the mayor said.

Actually, yes yes yes. “That's true. They used to deny that, but [Daley] needs to get a better briefing from his financial people. He’s wrong,” [DePaul University professor Woods] Bowman said.

TIFs by their very definition divert money from other taxing districts into TIF funds used to improve the TIF area. In a truly blighted area, school and park districts suffer no loss because any additional tax revenues being raised in the 20-plus-year lifetime of the TIF might not have happened but for the improvements there.

But in booming areas such as downtown where development likely would have happened anyway, that means hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes is off-limits to school and park districts which instead must reach deeper into the pockets of homeowners and and businesses in areas without TIFs.

While the headline of the article reads "Experts have beef with Daley on TIF," it's pretty clear that Pallasch himself shares that beef.  And rightfully so.  Read the whole thing here.