Rahm Emanuel has done one thing reliably in Chicago since taking office. Raise taxes and fees. And then raise them some more.
So Rahm Emanuel piled on even more taxes on top of taxes. He taxed cable, hotels, cigarettes, parking in garages (it’s 22 percent on weekdays) cloud-computing services and Netflix. Water and sewer rates nearly doubled. And more companies left. Many of them blamed the rising taxes.
So time for more of the same to maintain the unsustainable finances of a city stumbling toward bankruptcy.
Emanuel's plan, which would increase the average water and sewer bill by 30 percent over the next four years, was quickly met with resistance from some aldermen who argued the city would be better off adding business taxes or even raising property taxes again to come up with the hundreds of millions of dollars a year needed to keep the city's municipal workers' pension fund from going bust.
Debt rating agencies have repeatedly lowered the city's credit rating in recent years, with one placing it at junk status. The picture at Chicago Public Schools is even worse, with all three major rating agencies terming the district's bonds junk while the Emanuel-appointed Board of Education plans to raise property taxes by $250 million next year to help pay for teacher pensions.
The only problem is that Chicago is running out of taxpayers to subsidize all these municipal employees.
By the end of the four-year phase-in, that same homeowner would pay an additional $226 per year in water and sewer taxes, or $37.65 on each bill.
The average annual water and sewer bill, based on 90,000 gallons of water, currently is about $684. The bills also would rise each year at the rate of inflation.
And it's not like Chicago is California. But it's not like it's the first time Rahm did this.
The taxes will be tacked on to bills that went up when, shortly after taking office in 2011, Emanuel set in motion a series of water and sewer fee increases that more than doubled those bills to upgrade water and sewer systems.
Last year, the mayor pushed through a $543 million property tax increase, phased in over four years, to come up with enough funding for police and fire pensions. No changes were made to the retirement age or contribution amounts for those two unions.
Of course not.