ALTHOUGH THIS CAMPAIGN WAS FUNDED YOU CAN STILL CONTRIBUTE TO OUR WORK AND GET GREAT SWAG!

Tax Increment Financing districts are a BIG deal in Chicago. These secretive units of local government gobble up almost ONE HALF BILLION DOLLARS in property taxes here every year.

What happens to that public money?

Who is helped and who is hurt by this program?

That's what the TIF Illumination Project has been revealing - or Illuminating - for the past three years.

We use data mining, investigatory reporting, map making, graphic design and community organizing to reveal the impacts of TIFs on a community-by-community basis.

When you take one dollar of property tax off the table - other units of local government are affected. Most impacted is our public school system - which, in Illinois, relies heavily on property taxes to function.

Who GETS the billions of dollars that TIFs have mined since the program started in 1986? The vast majority of public dollars collected by TIFs here and elsewhere in America have been showered on private developers and large corporations. 

Starting with our first public meeting in February of 2013 we have been exposing and explaining this program to community groups all over Chicago. We've also done meetings in nearby suburbs and even have started applying our methods to Illuminating how TIFs impact entire school districts outside of Chicago.

Since February of 2013 we've done 36 public meetings that have Illuminated 141 TIF districts across 32 of Chicago's 50 wards in front of over 4,400 people! Nine of those public forums were hosted by candidates running for alderman in the 2015 elections.

When we Illuminate the TIFs of a ward or community we reveal how much property taxes we estimate the TIFs IN that ward extracted and how much money was LEFT OVER in those TIF accounts at the end of the year. We also show WHO GOT PAID from TIFs inside the ward and much more. We plot all this to a poster size graphic that we distribute at the public meeting. In the illustration above we show the results for Chicago's 27th Ward.

We have done training sessions, workshops and even advised two candidates who were running to be mayor of Chicago! Our research revealed that there was $1.7 BILLION in property taxes sitting in TIF accounts at the start of 2014. That fact was confirmed by the city and has become part of the overall civic conversation in Chicago - What is the TRUE state of our finances - and - ARE WE BROKE?

We've launched online petitions - one to put TIF data on property tax bills - and one to get Chicago's TIF accounts flushed and send all that property tax money to the units of local government that SHOULD'VE gotten that money in the first place.

The first petition achieved its goal and in the summer of 2014 - for the first time - TIF takings were placed on over 220,000 Cook County property tax bills. The second demand remains unmet - but at least the Chicago Sun-Times agreed with us!

Now we've done all this with absolutely no budget or paid staff! Dozens of volunteers have gathered the data and there has been no money for research, graphic design or marketing.

We can't keep up this work any longer on a volunteer basis. The stakes are too high and the demand for the data and education is increasing.

We're asking you to help fund the TIF Illumination Project so that we can keep going.

This crowdfunding campaign will pay our bills and enable us to:

• Do the basic research to reveal the full state of Chicago's 2014 TIF activity
• Reveal how much property taxes were sitting in TIF accounts on January 1, 2015
• Reveal the overall impact of TIFs in Cook County
• Reveal how much money Chicago's Department of Planning and Development skimmed from all the TIFs under their management
• For the first time - reveal how how much money we are spending on financing TIF district debt

This is the only way this research is going to happen. No one else is tracking and explaining TIF funds as we do. The local press (with the exception of the Chicago Reader) does not cover TIFs. Local and national foundations that supposedly support civic engagement, innovative journalism and good government have turned us down NINE times.

No, the only way we are going to track and reveal what happens to the hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes suck up by Chicago's TIF districts is if we investigate it ourselves. And that means WE will have to pay to get it done.

What we learn in Chicago is relevant across Illinois. This state has some 1,200 TIF districts across some 550 municipalities, Annually, TIFs extract about $1.1 BILLION every year in Illinois!

Across the USA we estimate that several thousand TIF districts remove as much as $20 BILLION in property taxes from local governments annually!

Please help us Illuminate Tax Increment Financing districts in Chicago and across the USA!