Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Tuesday called it “a mistake” for downtown aldermen to oppose her plan to fast-track a special property tax district for North Michigan Avenue, saying business owners on the Magnificent Mile want to pay into a fund to improve security following looting incidents there and coax shoppers back to the area during the pandemic.
The plan for the expedited extra tax charge to raise $761,000 annually from commercial property owners on Michigan north of the Chicago River got held in a City Council committee on Monday after downtown aldermen Brendan Reilly and Brian Hopkins spoke against it.
Lightfoot on Tuesday said their opposition and their colleagues’ support of that opposition was “aldermanic prerogative at its worst,” referring to the City Council tradition of members of the body following the wishes of local aldermen on issues affecting their wards.
“And so the question isn’t to me, the question is to those aldermen who blocked the will of the business community in their wards who are suffering and hurting and wanted some kind of relief and were willing to tax themselves to do so,” Lightfoot said. “What possible legitimate reason could there be?”
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Reilly and Hopkins on Monday both said they didn’t think the sped-up process the mayor pushed gave enough time to get the pulse of the commercial property owners within the boundaries of the proposed district.
And Reilly said that while business owners who serve on the board of the Magnificent Mile Association business group spoke in favor of the additional tax, many more business owners along North Michigan Avenue opposed it.
Reilly also noted over $200,000 of the proposed budget for the tax revenue was ticketed for administrative costs such as helping pay salaries for Magnificent Mile Association staff at a time many businesses are struggling to come up with the money to pay their dues to the group. The money would be better spent on security measures like bollards on sidewalks, he said.
The mayor had pitched the proposal as a way to improve safety and help convince shoppers to return to the Magnificent Mile despite the one-two punch of the coronavirus pandemic and two separate large-scale looting incidents there in the past several months.
The taxing district would need to be passed by the full City Council at least 10 days before a Dec. 29 deadline for the state to approve it, so Monday’s failure to get it out of committee will make it difficult to get it done this year.
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