Sun Times
August 30, 2005

BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter

Downtown property owners are gearing up for a battle royal against City Hall: They're determined to block Mayor Daley's plan to raise their property taxes to cover landscaping, transportation upgrades and the cost of operating and maintaining $475 million Millennium Park.

Daley wants to expand a so-called "special service area" confined to State Street so it would potentially stretch from Grand to Roosevelt and from Lake Michigan all the way to the Kennedy Expy., sources said.

Whether residents or businesses alone would pay the new levy -- at a rate of .025 percent of equalized assessed valuation -- is still a "hot topic" at City Hall. Revenue generated by the massive taxing district would be used to solve a major problem: how to finance the $7.4 million-a-year cost of operating and maintaining Millennium Park. Other possible expenditures include a new busway underneath Clinton Street and other transportation improvements; tenant retention, attraction and marketing, and seasonal programs at the Daley Center and other plazas.

New transit routes urged

But at least one business group is dead set against the park tab.

"Why would you take this tax burden of operating Millennium Park and say that the only people who should pay for this are the businesses and residents in the Central Business District? It's really unfair," said Ron Vukas, executive vice president of the Building Owners and Managers Association of Chicago.

Jerry Roper, president of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, said downtown businesses are "willing to come to the table and discuss absorbing more taxes" -- only if they get something they desperately need in return.

"We're looking for modes of transportation that move people across from the train stations to the eastern boundaries of this city," Roper said.

Connie Buscemi, a spokesperson for the city's Department of Planning and Development, said a subterranean busway linked to a West Loop transportation center could be among projects funded by the expanded taxing district.