These are heady times for Aldo DeAngelis, a Republican state senator from Olympia Fields. He founded his own manufacturing company, and he’s risen to assistant majority leader of the Illinois Senate. But now he has finally achieved real distinction.
DeAngelis has been named Tax Villain of the Month by National Taxpayers United of Illinois. He gained this recognition because he had the audacity to sponsor a bill that let local schools keep selling bonds to raise money.
This year, the forward-thinking folks at NTU gave their Tax Renegade of the Year award to a Chicago bank because it had contributed to a not-for-profit group that promotes school reform.
This is what passes for public policy debate in Illinois. It’s one of the reason that so many legislators hide when they’re asked to deal with something like money for schools. They’re petrified of anti-tax zealots.
Now, here’s the result. On Tuesday, 30 school districts in the suburbs will ask voters to approve money-raising referendums. Most of those schools get about 10 to 15 percent of their money from the state. They have to pay the rest of the bills with property tax money, but the legislature capped their property tax hikes to the rate of inflation. If they need more, they can’t go begging to the state. They have to go begging to their neighbors.
It’s easy to tell the schools that they should live within the inflation rate. But in some cases, it’s not so easy for them to do that.
Where my children go to school, the enrollment has shot up by nearly 50 percent in the last 10 years. That’s a big jump in kids, but it has happened in a community that doesn’t have vacant land, so there aren’t a bunch of new homes or industries kicking in more tax dollars.
Barely 11 percent of the school district’s money comes from the state. To make things worse, the state will give the district 10 percent less money this year than it did last year.
So the schools are going for a property tax increase next week. I don’t know how the vote will come out, but I know what a tax referendum tends to do in communities. It pits empty-nesters against parents and parochial-school parents against public-school parents. That turns neighbors into adversaries.
They shouldn’t be giving each other the evil eye. They should be giving the evil eye to the people who put them in this spot: the legislators who cut the state money going to their schools at the same time that they clamped on property tax caps.
All those legislators will give you the bromides about their deep concern for education. They might tell you how eagerly they await the report coming next year from Gov. Jim Edgar’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Education Funding.
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They all know that the report from the commission will be flung on a shelf somewhere because nobody wants to talk about taxes until after the 1996 election. Or maybe it’s the 1998 election. Or the 2000 election.
They might not tell you that they had the answer right in their hands last spring. It came from the tax villain of the month.
Aldo DeAngelis, who is no liberal, sponsored a bill that would have given significantly more money to schools and guaranteed a property tax cut.
It would have increased the state income tax (individual rates would have gone from 3 percent to 4 percent), given all of that money to local schools and required the schools to decrease their property tax levies by about half. The tax caps would have prevented the schools from quickly ratcheting up the local levies.
The income tax would have gone up, but the property tax would have gone down.
The incredibly convoluted formula for passing out education money would have been swept away. Under DeAngelis’ bill, the average cost of educating a student in each region of the state would have been calculated. The state would have provided half of that amount. That’s it.
It was a pretty good deal for everyone. But it was a fabulous deal for those suburbanites whose schools are getting next to nothing from the state right now, and who pay the highest school property taxes. They would have gotten 50 percent of the cost of education from the state. The state would have finally swung the money tap toward their kids, and made their property tax bills drop.
There are 59 members of the Illinois Senate. Only 15 of them voted for this bill. The suburbanites voted 15-3 against it.
After you vote in the school election on Tuesday, after you make the call–hike your property taxes or stick it to the kids on the block–go find
one of those 15 legislators and ask who’s the real villain.