Quote Originally Posted by TexanOkie View Post
Actually, it does, legally speaking.

And the City staff seems to have met that burden by securing approvals for their actions from the City Council and by obtaining the other approvals the legislature requires through the Local Development Act. The standard here isn't "but/for," it's "difficult but possible with." That's a huge distinction.
This is never the start of a good defense against scrutiny. It simply doesn't matter that what they're doing is legal. Right and Wrong are not beholden to legality and law is not ethics. Impropriety can and often is legal. Of course nobody has even arrived to the point of accusing city officials of impropriety in regards to TIF, so that's a moot point…but your argument is a TERRIBLE defense for the lack of transparency throughout the history of TIF.


The money is not being diverted from public schools if the entire scheme was designed to work this way. Both the Local Development Act and the state school aid statutes explicitly lay out that increment values are not counted against school districts in calculating the amount of aid a district receives. I've addressed previously why this makes sense, logically. The scheme addresses limits on increment values allowed, too, to prevent overuse of TIFs in an attempt to get more state aid than a district may be otherwise entitled to.
That's all well and good, but it doesn't address the heart of what some of us are concerned about:

Tax money that is earmarked for schools is not going to schools, regardless of whether or not the schools are getting money that they need to operate. This isn't in and of itself problematic. Public money is being turned into an incentive and distributed to the private sector. This isn't in and of itself problematic.

The problem is that it's not a very transparent process, and there has been very little attempt on the part of city officials to explain and defend their actions. Hopefully this Panel will be a good first step in the process.