The TIF Illumination Project - It's OUR Money

Tax Increment Financing districts (TIFs) are districts created and controlled by local mayors that extract property taxes and sequester those funds in secretive slush funds used to subsidize construction projects that have little or no public benefit. Public schools and other local units of government are deprived of funds and funds are doled out to clouted insiders. This is part of a large-scale transfer of resources from the many to the few. TIFs are found in thousands of cities across 48 states.The Chicago-based TIF Illumination Project (www.tifreports.com) has been investigating and exposing the hyper-local harms of TIFs since 2013. We’ve been invited to present at 75 public meetings. Our work is about bringing people into the urban planning and community development arena directly and powerfully – people see how their public money is being used in the name of “development” and leads to push back and grassroots planning for self-determination.

There are approximately 10,000 TIF districts across the USA in thousands of municipalities siphoning tens of billions of public property tax dollars OFF the table every year. America public education is SUPPOSED to receive about 50 cents of every property tax dollar collected. But TIFs sequester these funds and make them unavailable for local government. Instead, those dollars are placed into slush funds controlled by the local mayor and dispensed in secrecy to insiders and clouted developers. TIFs are a part of a larger story of how wealthy insiders drain public dollars for private gain and capture the economic and community development agendas of local government. How decides how our communities are to be “developed” using what dollars to whose benefit? These are not just questions consuming us in Chicago right now (see https://tinyurl.com/3-Super-TIFs), but is a critical issues across the USA and the globe – as part of the larger “Right To The City” issue and organizing. Our work uses data mining, investigatory journalism, peer-2-peer fueled research, map making, graphic design and community organizing to explain and expose what TIFs do. Our work has engaged thousands of people to engage and act around visioning and controlling their communities.

TIFs impact all property owners and all who rent FROM property owners in a city where TIFs are present. They act as hidden governance, hidden debt and hidden policy. In Chicago they are part of a long and sad history of neighborhood disinvestment in black and working class communities, and part of the way the central business district’s growth has been subsidized by the rest of the city. They were supposed to be used to spur development in so-called “blighted” neighborhoods. In actuality, TIFs have done the reverse and kept public dollars AWAY from blighted and underserved neighborhoods. So, while ALL taxpayers ae impacted wherever TIFs are present, we see the most negatively impacted people are people of color, the poor and the working poor- who often live in fringe or edge communities that are away from the central business districts any other communities of privilege that receive the lion’s share of TIF subsidies. We have involved people from the communities we look at from the beginning – as data gatherers, researchers and organizers of the public meetings where our research is presented. We help attendees take steps in digesting and moving on the information we provide - see www.powerinstitute.us.

The CivicLab’s TIF Illumination Project offers to do a basic “TIF 101” workshop that explains how TIFs work and a more detailed presentation or Illumination which gives the basics PLUS a detailed history of the TIFs in a particular community. We can tell people how much property taxes the TIFs pulled from the community plus what projects got funded by TIFs in the ward or community as well as details on funds being transferred in or out and if there is any debt involved in the local TIFs. Most importantly, we give our estimation of how much money FROM the ward or community is left over the in the TIF accounts at the end of the year.  “This is a critical time in our country’s history and now, more than ever, we need our voters to be able to make informed decisions. That’s where CivicLab’s TIF Illumination Project comes in. Tom will bring your community the undisputed facts about the TIFs in your area, their values and any projects that are funded by those TIFs. This is a resource I invite you to take advantage of and share with your community. You wouldn’t lead an army into battle unarmed. Don’t lead voters to the polls uninformed.” – William L. Smith – Organizer of 34th Ward TIF Town Meeting. We distribute hand-outs with our findings graphically displayed. We then offer workshops in community organizing, running for office and grassroots economic justice for people who want to take their civic engagement to new levels of effectiveness. (see www.powerinstitute.us). We give people a grounding in how their local government is using and abusing public funds for private projects and lifts up issues of economic injustice, disinvestment and grassroots community planning. We seek support to put all this work online and in a format that people can access and interrogate  and use quickly and easily. We use a combination of investigative research, data mining, use of Freedom of Information Act to gain data, coding, map making, graphic design and social media to do our work. See this page for more details: http://www.tifreports.com/tif_illumination. We have not had the bandwidth to follow-up on the 75 public meetings we have presented at. Informal follow-ups have revealed a wide range of activities held after our presentations, including people running for office!

The TIF Illumination Project combines data mining, investigative journalism, crowd-sourced research, graphic design, map making and community organizing in novel and powerful ways. We research, visualize and explain the hyper-local impacts of Tax Increment Financing districts (TIFs) via a web site and via in-person public town meetings we call “Illuminations.” We’ve been invited to present at 75 public meetings since 2013. We’ve also done 25 workshops and private presentations on TIFs. There are tens of thousands of TIF districts across 48 states and they are secretive and sweep billions of public property tax dollars off the table and into slush funds controlled by local mayors. We have not been successful in securing support for this work to scale it up, put in online or to professionalize it with an ongoing staff. We’ve been turned down 28 times by local and national foundations. Nevertheless, our work has been used by local media, union organizers, teacher and parent support groups, and grassroots activist organizations seeking better city services. A number of candidates seeking local office cite our work and we know our work has expanded the civic horizons of Chicagoan and pushed some essential questions into the public sphere – such as “Is Chicago really broke?” Who plans what for who?” and “What, exactly, does a developed community look  like?” We are taking popular education in the civic realm into new heights and places and contributing to a robust grassroots conversation about the future or our great, but troubled, city.

TIF expenditures are a matter of public record. But they are shrouded in secrecy and difficult to access. We use a combination of tools to pry essential data from local municipalities and to bring it to life so the average person can readily understand how their public tax dollars are being used and abused. There is no one source to go to in the USA to get a complete picture of TIFs or to track, compare and chart their use over the years or to drill down and understand what developers and projects are being given public subsidies across time and location. There is a wide and deep body of reporting and academic research that backs up our assertion that this program is out of control, racist and harmful to poor communities and communities of color everywhere it is to be found. In addition to the secrecy and clout-driven nature of TIFs, there is the harm this program does to American public education. Our public schools, on average, use about 50 cents of every property tax dollar collected. So, when property tax dollars are extracted by a TIF, the local public school takes a hit. This is why we see school districts suing their own mayors over TIF districts (https://tinyurl.com/schools-sue-over-TIF). Our work combines tech, visualization, reporting and popular education methods in a powerful way to deliver insights and the results are engaged and activated neighbors eager and equipped to engage in public conversation about the future of their communities.

At the CivicLab we practice civics using the “the ladder of engagement” model described by sociologist Sherry Arnstein in 1969 (see https://www.aacom.org/news-and-events/publications/iome/2015/july-august-2015/Arnstein-bio - https://tinyurl.com/Ladder-Engagement-Author). We believe in encountering people where they are in their civic dispositions and moving them up the ladder of knowledge, skills and abilities through popular education, public engagement, and training. The process is described:http://www.citizenshandbook.org/arnsteinsladder.html. We have conducted over 280 public meetings and workshops since 2013. For two years we operated a civic co-working and meeting space in Chicago’s West Loop which was a very accessible public space. See http://www.civiclab.us/our-work. We’ve directly impacted over 10,000 people. Our civics workshops have trained over 225 people, including 18 candidates who ran for public office (www.powerinstitute.us). Testimony from volunteer organizers is at: http://tinyurl.com/TIF-Organizers-Talk. Video testimony from participants in our 2018 Civic Harambee (Swahili for “let’s all pull together”) is at: https://youtu.be/iieNwylwUjc Cook County Clerk David Orr said this about our book “Chicago Is Not Broke is essential reading for all who have an interest and investment in the future of our city, from City Hall to the residents of each of Chicago’s 77 neighborhoods. This book offers solutions, not only for the city to dig itself out from where it is, but for taxpayers, legislators, and concerned Chicagoans, to learn about the financial state of the city, and provides a progressive and responsible path forward." Our work has expanded the civic imagination of Chicago!

We have directly touched over 10,000 people through our work. That breaks out approximately as follows: 8,000 people attended our public events, forums and workshops and about 2,000 people who came through and used the CivicLab when it was open in the West Loop. Over 200,000 people have viewed our civic presentations on SlideShare (https://www.slideshare.net/tomtee) and it’s difficult to say how many Chicagoans were benefited by our public TIF work (www.tifreports.com). But since TIFs cover about 30% of the city, we can estimate that over 100,000 property owners across the city can access data on their communities that would otherwise be unavailable. In addition, local media reporting on our work – including the TIF research and the book “Chicago Is Not Broke. Funding the City We Deserve” has reached perhaps another 250,000 people. Over 100 stories have been written on our work or covered on the radio and other media (http://www.civiclab.us/press). If we ever get funding to solidly and extend this work, we believe we can investigate, report and impact the Illinois residents across the state inside of one year that would touch some 420 municipalities that have TIFs – which would be approximately 8 million people. In five years, if funded, we could Illuminate and expose every TIF across the USA which would impact literally tens of millions of property owners and their communities. See the sketch for this idea at http://inthesetimes.com/features/ntip.html.

We seek to staff and scale up our TIF work to a routinized national level. We want to survey all the TIFs across the 50 states and places the geographic and financial data online in such a format that would allow research, comparison, visualization and exporting of data and insights. See http://www.tifreports.com/tif-viewer for a very crude sketch of how that might look. We seek to publish this data in a series of gazettes or maps in book form on an annual basis. We see this service as a free online tool and also as a paid subscription service with enhanced features and customized reporting by state or region. We see a major opportunity for recruiting local people to report on specific TIF funded projects in their neighborhoods because that has already happened without advanced technology. Dozens of volunteers have been trained and deployed by the TIF Illumination Project (www.tifreports.com) and their efforts folded into our reporting. Even more than this, we see using the entire TIF Illumination Project as a template for citizen-driven investigation of geographic-specific public policy and public dollar dispensing programs. We see the basic tool sets and organizing approaches as useful for any group of people who want to interrogate local finances across many disciplines – e,g, school budgets, contracts awarded by cities to private vendors, etc. We are combining the best of old and new civic engagement methods to educate and activate new players to take leadership roles in the public life of their communities.

The CivicLab (www.civiclab.us) operated a co-working space for civic engagement and social justice for two years, closing on July 1, 2015. 16 groups worked there, 80 workshops on civic topics were held, dozens of meetings and special events. But we could not get any funders interested in supporting the work (with one exception, the Voqal Fund, which gave us $23,000 over two years). The TIF Illumination Project (www.tifreports.com) was created there and spawned 75 public meetings. That work, in turn, generated the book “Chicago Is Not Broke. Funding the City We Deserve” (www.wearenotbroke.org) which triggered 65 public meetings. The mainstream media here refuse to cover any of that work or attend any of the 130+ public meetings. We’ve been turned down 25+ times by local and national funders and Tom Tresser has been turned down 10 times in pursuit of fellowships for this work. We believe there is a need for CivicLabs in Chicago and other cities. We believe that Tax Increment Financing districts are a modern civil rights insult that needs the same attack and cure as segregation, voter suppression and housing discrimination practices. We believe in a progressive civic agenda that looks at public policy through a social justice lens and which calls out power holders in the civic and philanthropic arena as complicit in modern urban inequity. Our work speaks for itself. Sadly, we can’t get it seriously covered or funded and it will dry up unless someone, somewhere recognizes the value of the work.

After a lifetime in civic engagement and spending the past ten years on a non-stop arc of public work here in Chicago – see Protect Our Parks (www.wesavedlincolnpark.org), No Games Chicago (www.nogameschicago.com), the CivicLab (www.civiclab.us), The TIF Illumination Project (www.tifreports,.com0), the “Chicago is Not Broke” Book Project (www.wearenotbroke.org), The POWER Institute (www.powerinstitute.us) and the Chicago Civics Story (www.chicagocivicvs.org), I’m trying this program at MIT as one last effort to make the case for the solid and oppositional and grounded work that I and my colleagues have done and wish to continue. If you don’t fund this work, I’d love to talk to the decision maker for a debrief as a way of understanding your pedagogy and power analysis of contemporary America. In the meantime, we continue to answer calls from community groups to do trainings and workshops around TIFs and the book, “Chicago Is Not Broke

We were granted our 501 c 3 nonprofit status by the IRS in July of 2018.

When the CivicLab operated its physical space we had two full-time volunteer staff on site. To operate all the other programming we use one full-time volunteer (Tom Tresser) and a range of part-time volunteers to do research, community outreach and event marketing.

We are seeking support to build out the TIF Illumination Project (www.tifreports.com). Tom Tresser is the lead organizer of this project and has been working on TIFs since 2008, and expressly on this project since 2012. He is recognized widely across the city and metropolitan area as a leader in civic education and grassroots organizing around economic justice and civic empowerment in this space. Local political reporter Ben Joravsky wrote in 2015 (he is one of the three local reporters who have covered this work) “Tresser is the north-side activist who formed the TIF Illumination Project, a local watchdog group that holds public meetings where, among other things, he shows local what the city would never show them in a million years. Namely, how the mayor’s spending tens of millions of property tax dollars, year after year, courtesy of the tax increment financing program, which, as we all know, is the mayor’s unofficial slush fund.” Tom has been invited to present on TIFs at 75 public meetings sine 2013 and at 65 public meetings around the book “Chicago Is Not Broke” since 2016. He received a $3,000 grant from the Goldman Investigative Reporting Fund administered by In These Times to investigate TIFs across Illinois – but that work was never published.

The CivicLab has offered to collaborate with the Grassroots Collaborative, Jobs With Justice, The Chicago Reporter, The Hyde Park Herald, the Medill School of Journalism, the Chicago Teachers Union, the RAISE Your Hand organization (support for public education), Chicago Committee for Civil Rights (we steered them to litigate against TIFs here but excluded us from the actual law suit), and the Better Government Association (who we supplied content and background for one of their investigations in to TIF fraud but was then cut from the published story). Only the City Bureau (https://www.citybureau.org) works with us on a regular basis – supplying researchers through their Documenters Program once a year to do our annual data review for the city’s 145 TIF districts. We just did a series of meetings around the book “Chicago Is Not Broke” for the senior staff of SEIU Local 73 (http://seiu73.org) – which purchased 30 books and is using the content to guide their new strategic plan for organizing and public policy. We are presenting on TIFs at the Illinois League of Women Voters 2019 convention  this June and will solicit partnerships with League chapters around the state for partnership work (https://www.lwvil.org).

Our business model blends old school and new school ways to connect with users and constituents. Civic work is hands on, high touch, labor intensive and very much an in-person deliverable. But aspects of civic engagement and public work is amenable to technology and the use of social media platforms. Think of the combination of a physical school with online education and the blend of a coffee house and online social media platform – think of a bland of programming and membership support for a public radio station and a crowd-funded artist or work of art. Think of old fashioned tent shows and lecture circuits combined with an online Kahn Academy devoted to civics. Thinks of the blend of a fun and inviting store-front presence inviting people to events, classes and co-working solutions combined with a membership space similar to NationBuilder or event pages people build when they run or bike for charity. What I’m describing here is what we actually built and operated fort tow years when we operated our physical space in the West Loop (http://www.civiclab.us/our-work). Since 2013 we’ve crowd funded over $22,000 from some 420 donors. We‘ve sold 3,000 books. We’ve been invited to present at over 120 community meetings. We’ve sold training sessions to over 200 attendees and our free online presentations at SlideShare have been viewed over 203,000 times (https://www.slideshare.net/tomtee)! We want to combine our training, research, publishing, consulting, and event production work into a smart and powerful linked calendar of activities and civic products.

We are seeking funding from national philanthropies not rooted in or tied to Chicago’s conservative and narrow-minded charitable eco-system. We continue to do community meetings, fee-based workshops, sell books and offer memberships using the JoinIt platform (https://www.joinit.org/o/civiclab). We are pursuing partnerships with the Service Employees International Union Local 73 and the Illinois League of women Voters to do workshops and trainings, as well as to make large bulk orders of the book “Chicago Is Not Broke.” There is no way around the need for a major donor or Medici to fund this civic workshop of artisans, educators, makers, trainers and fabricators. We have and will continue to innovate revenue streams. For example, in 2017 we produced a comedy show with a team of young improvisors based on the book. The result was  limited run of “Chicago is Not Broke – The Show!” (http://www.civiclab.us/chicago-is-not-broke-the-show) and our long range plans include the capacity for producing original live and recorded civic news and entertainment programming. See the examples of CivicLab Radio podcasts produced in 2015: http://www.civiclab.us/civiclab-radio. When we operated our space we were home to a full media studio and a terrestrial low-power FM radio station QUE4 (http://que4.que4radio.org), We believe the TIF Illumination Project deserves major funding as it is a national issue. If we can get that project off the ground, we believe it will generate revenues from donors, subscribers and consulting engagements.

I need to connect to some bold civic investors who are NOT tied to Chicago’s corrupt, conservative and echo-chamber civic eco-system. I know my work is risky, innovative and challenges established power and special interests. I know I have activated thousands of people to engage in meaningful civic work and have inspired and trained people to be Servant-Leaders for justice and equity. I know I have combined my abilities and experiences as an artist, producer, nonprofit serial entrepreneur, investigator, civic organizer and educator in unique and productive ways. But Chicago is famous for ignoring her own. What I’m seeking from the Solve Program is a little bit of funding and a whole lot of validation and mentoring. I feel that you all get the art and science of large scale game changing civic work. What we seek to do can not be done on a cell phone or in front of a screen. If we want to bring justice to spaces that lack justice and challenge entrenched power – there is no way around doing work face-to-face in places of trust and familiarity to people entering this work. But we must be daring, creative and rule-breaking if we want to overcome decades of civic lethargy and to overcome the gains made by a cadre of loosely orbiting players who seek to drive America back to the 1830’s – where people worked for free, business was unregulated and there was no income tax or strong central government.

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Here are organizations I would love to partner with.

For the TIF Illumination Project: The National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, National Association of Elected School Board Members, National PTA, League of Women Voters for each state, the National Association of County Clerks, The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Good Jobs First, Ford Foundation, Casey Foundation, Knight Foundation

For the CivicLab’s physical space planning and operations: national network of maker spaces (see https://www.nexpcb.com/blog/the-list-of-makerspaces), MIT Media Lab, WeWork, Civic Hall in NYC (patterned after us), Center for Civic Innovation in Atlanta, Stanford’s DesignLab, IDEO and its Human Centered Design Studio, National program of Architects for Humanity, Code for America

For our publishing and content creation work: YES Men, Ken Burns, Second City Chicago, Amy Goodman & “Democracy Now!”, In These Times magazine, Nation Center for Investigative Reporting, Shareable.com, Kahn Academy

For our training and educational work: Midwest Academy, Kennedy Center for Government, Greenleaf Center for Servant-Leadership, Sandford Center for Social Innovation, Highland Center, Wagner School for Public Service at NYU, Tides Center

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Our work is deeply rooted in community connections, meetings, training sessions and direct participation. If we are chosen for support we will be able to place our TIF work online and expand our outreach to communities across Illinois and train people to do their own TIF work and expand this work to other cities. More than simply equipping people across the USA to know how their property tax dollars are being channeled is the NEXT step – and that is, to move people to a place where they are designing their own pictures of what a “developed’ community looks like. We would love to work with community-based planners, direct action organizations and other champions of economic justice to expose how local development is being driven by special interests and to help communities articulate their own shared sense of community future. We have done this already at a very rudimentary level – without staff, office or the ability to keep relationships going - so we know our work is a great trigger for the kind of local visionining work needed for just and equitable place-making.

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The TIF Illumination Project is ALL about getting, visualizing and making civic data accessible and usable for residents of cities and municipalities across the USA. As I’ve said in this application, Tax Increment Financing Districts are a BIG deal and are constantly in the news for scandal and civic conflict and in the academic and policy literature around issues of equity and transparency. There is no hard count of how many TIFs are operating across the 48 states where they are permitted nor any easy to access summary, trend analysis, or Big Picture reflection on hat these taxing bodies are doing to our communities. I believe that as many as 20,000 TIFs may be pulling tens of billions of property tax dollars off the civic table annually. The data is not corralled in any central fashion and often can be found in sets of discreet pdf documents – one per TIF district per year. This is a perfect problem for AI and data mining to tackle. We know, more or less, WHERE to get these documents – we just need some engineering infrastructure and staffing to gather the documents and get them to report out a series of infomatics and spreadsheets that then can be grabbed by reporters, academics, and civic officials. Here is a very crude viewer made by two student volunteers at the CivicLab in 2015 - http://www.tifreports.com/tif-viewer over the course of a few weeks. This sort of easy-to-use access is needed on a state-by-state basis.

If you want to fund innovation, disruption, and transformation, then may I suggest an investment in the CivicLab’s TIF Illumination Project is a very strong bet for results. We’ve been called to present on TIFs at 76 community meetings since 2013 because of our work in civic research and public education. You can view short video testimonials from local leaders who have brought us to their communities here: http://tinyurl.com/TIF-Organizers-Talk. Remember, we have had virtually no funding or mainstream media coverage in Chicago so we have no budget, staff or office and yet we are constantly being asked to come to communities for our work. My TIF work led me to curate and publish Chicago Is Not Broke. Funding the City We Deserve (www.wearenotbroke.org) and that book has triggered 65 public meetings all over the city. Cook County Clerk David Orr said “Tom Tresser’s latest book, Chicago Is Not Broke is essential reading for all who have an interest and investment in the future of our city, from City Hall to the residents of each of Chicago’s 77 neighborhoods.  This book offers solutions, not only for the city to dig itself out from where it is, but for taxpayers, legislators, and concerned Chicagoans, to learn about the financial state of the city, and provides a progressive and responsible path forward."It’s remarkable how much impact our TIF work has had on local elections, grassroots organizing, and the overall civic conversation in Chicago about “what is possible.” This is real disruption!

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