CHapter 17

The Mayor and all his allies claimed Chicago was broke and needed the 2016 Olympics to ensure prosperity in the future. The No Games crew secured all 164 Annual Reports for Chicago's Tax Increment Financing Districts (TIFs) and opened them up and added up the total balances from each district - a simple act any reporter, policy "expert" or elected official could have done. They discovered $1.4 BILLION in propertry taxes sitting in those accounts at the end of 2008. So - with all those property tax dollars sitting in bank accounts - Chicago could NOT be broke and did not need to risk billions of public dollars to produce an Olympics seven years in the futrue. This was the origin of the TIF Illumination Project.

"Olympic Risk – What will the Olympic bid cost Chicago?" from the August 2009 issue of Insight, the publication of the Illinois CPA Society.