Never Say Die
But for activist attorney Marlene Kamish and the eight Pilsen plaintiffs she represents in Cortez v. City of Chicago, diligent reading has paid off. Just as the city was preparing to put the Pilsen TIF into motion at last, Kamish made one final attempt to stop it and came away with an important victory.
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For about a year the Pilsen Eight have been quietly showing up for a circuit court case arguing that the city violated due process in implementing Pilsen’s TIF. Kamish (one of the attorneys who helped acquit Manuel Salazar in the 1984 killing of a Joliet policeman) argued that the city’s public hearing was invalid because people weren’t really allowed to speak–commissioners cut off some speakers after just 30 seconds, and those who spoke Spanish weren’t translated. Cook County Circuit Court judge Lester Foreman agreed and prevented the city from implementing the TIF until valid hearings were held. The city rescheduled hearings but failed to comply with notification requirements, and Foreman ordered it to try again. Finally the city got it right, Foreman dismissed the case in July, and the wheels of the Pilsen TIF began turning once again.
For two years planning department officials denied any linkage between the Pilsen TIF–for the most part an industrial initiative–and the UIC TIF, which was eventually approved as the “Roosevelt-Union TIF.” The city asserted in every hearing that the two TIFs weren’t adjacent and therefore no funds would flow from one area to the other. “On behalf of the department and board of commissioners, I would like to clarify that the proposed UIC TIF…at no point joins or is adjacent to the Pilsen TIF,” said Michael Jasso, the planning department official heading up the Pilsen TIF project, at one of the hearings. “Without adjacency, there cannot be sharing of funds. There is neither an intention of the department nor any plan that the two TIFs would have adjacency.”
According to the city, that shared block along 16th Street was an error. “The mistake that was made was made by the surveyor,” says Jennifer Hoyle, public information officer for the city’s Law Department. “The city didn’t intend for the two TIFs to be together, and never intended that money be moved between the two TIFs. It was a mistake on the part of the surveyor, and he has signed an affidavit to that effect, that he deviated from the instructions we gave him. So when we gave people that information we were acting in good faith. We didn’t know that there had been an error.”
Kamish says she’s uncovered more inconsistencies in the legal description for UIC’s TIF, gaps in the borderline that she hopes will get her another case. “I do think that the Roosevelt-Union TIF is invalid, because the boundaries are not continuous–even the city admitted that today. So I think there’s some reason for optimism that that TIF could be invalidated, and that should set the city back significantly on their heels.” She’s relying on the letter of the law, but the spirit behind TIFs is her real target. “I am totally, unequivocally, and forever opposed to tax increment financing. I think that it takes from people and supports their displacement and gives money to private developers for private interests, and I don’t think it has anything to do with the public good. The public is the people who are being hurt here.”
