OK, now that the amateurs have lost interest, let’s you and I go vote.
Now that the presidential distraction is done, and with no statewide races for U.S. Senate or governor to energize the dilettantes, let’s put on our windbreakers and go do the deed.
I’m talking tax referendums. Dollars and cents. Here and now.
There will be dozens of referendums, most binding but some advisory, all over the Chicago area Tuesday. There are school referendums, park district referendums, library referendums and, of course, municipal referendums. These last types are my favorites, ranging in subject from whether a certain suburb should impose a quarter-cent sales tax to whether a certain tax-exempt Big 10 university should contribute its “fair share” toward local services.
This, my friends, is the real stuff.
And Tuesday’s primary is shaping up the way we yokels like it. No barrage of slick presidential commercials to stir up the uninformed. No waiting in lines behind people with great thoughts about “the character issue” formed by watching CNN.
Tomorrow it’s mostly us–the voters with something personal at stake–stepping up to be counted on what are, after all, the really tough questions of American politics.
Questions like: Do I want my property taxes raised by $35 a year so my kids, or tougher yet, your kids, can go to a less-crowded school? Or a school with computers that can handle Windows 98?
That’s a hard call. Downright gruesome compared to deciding whether George W. Bush or John McCain is more prone to flying off the handle. Or whether it’s Al Gore or Bill Bradley with the least sense of humor.
National politics in the United States, it has been said, is fought between the 40-yard lines. Lately it’s the 45s, what with general prosperity and post-Cold War dtente reducing the big debate in Washington to what should be done with the budget surplus.
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Not so down here in the trenches. Especially not in Illinois, where our highly partisan, grandstanding state legislature has put local government in a terrible fiscal bind.
Actually the legislators did it back in 1991, though the full impact of state-imposed property tax caps is only now becoming manifest. The caps forbid “non-home rule” local governments (which means most suburbs and virtually all school, park and library districts) to raise their property tax collections by more than 5 percent or the rate of inflation, whichever is lower. Unless, that is, voters approve a larger increase by electoral referendum.
Granted, the locals more or less brought caps on themselves by letting their tax levies rise with the torrid rate of real estate inflation over the previous two decades. But in 1991 nobody could have predicted that year-to-year increases in the consumer price index were about to dive below 3 percent and stay there for the rest of the decade.
Before long a lot of locals were hard pressed to give even token raises to their teachers, librarians and cops. Especially if they had unmet construction needs, perhaps caused by deferred maintenance or, in newer suburbs, an inability to keep up with growing populations and school enrollments. After all, sewers must be laid and schoolchildren seated long before new houses begin generating tax revenues.
That’s why they’re holding referendums down in Plainfield School District 202, Wilmington District 209 and New Lenox District 122. Out in eastern DuPage County, where enrollments are up and ’60s-era schools are cramped and showing their age, voters in Elmhurst 205 and Villa Park-Lombard 45 have tough decisions to make. Same goes for Barrington 220 and Elgin 46 in northwest Cook and Beach Park 3 up in Lake County.
Even in affluent Winnetka, where there’s a high-profile Republican race for an open congressional seat, the hardest choice may be School District 36’s proposal to raise taxes in order to restore cuts in art, music and physical education.
Legislators from these districts took deep bows back in ’91, and the following year Republicans rode tax caps like a horse in seizing a Senate majority.
Only now it’s time for the folks back home to deal with the consequences.
So what’s it going to be on Tuesday? Rope off part of the cafeteria for more classrooms? Or stick yourself with a tax increase?
I’ve got kids in public school so I’ll be voting “yes” on my suburb’s school referendum. Haven’t made up my mind, though, about that Big 10 university. Northwestern does a lot for Evanston. But those college dons with tax-exempt housing and kids in school just don’t seem to get it.
If you feel otherwise, grab our windbreaker tomorrow and cancel my vote. It’s just us this time. You and me. The way we like it.
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