Quote:
Originally Posted by jtown,man
My class got the chance to have a Calumet City official come and speak with us. The FIRST thing she brought up in her presentation was that it was great that they were a "home rule" city, meaning they can do things other cities can't. Her only example? Having a sales tax that is 2% higher than the states.
Huh? Then she went on to talk about their number one goal as a city is to increase tax revenue and keep their retail sector up and going.
She doesn't realize Indiana is literally across the border from them. Residents can easily move or shop there and save tons. The city keeps raising its property taxes to keep the government's income increasing every year despite a population that decreases every year.
How does that make sense? Why is the city's revenue keep climbing while its population is going down? They keep increasing taxes, which then leads to more people leaving, which leads to them to keep raising taxes. Why do they need so much revenue? Because they are running the city as if they had the same population as 20 years ago, despite losing 25% of their population.
It all reeks of a scheme to keep the idiots in their jobs and to keep the machine running.
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This is funny and not surprising. There are a subset of suburbs including Cal City that hit the jackpot in the annexation wars and freeway/arterial building eras in the 1950s-1960s, and grew up around having abnormally large tax bases both from retail sales and the resulting property tax from the valuable commercial real estate. So sure, Cal City may be losing out to Munster and Merrillville, but it's still reeling in disproportionately high tax revenue because it has the River Oaks area around Torrence and I-80.
It's just funny that this outlook has been so deeply internalized within city government. There's also an interesting political battle going on in Cal City right now between the "old guard" and upstarts trying to muscle in, with racial overtones.
Each town has its own quirky history. And the the towns that don't have those lucrative commercial districts have different political dynamics because the money being raised and spent is coming mostly out of homeowners, and as the property taxes go way up, property values stagnate or decline - a problem that has hit many of the south suburbs, which continued high spending and debt accumulation despite weaker and weaker tax bases, and the high tax rates further discourage any commercial development that could soften the blow, particularly when Indiana and Will County are so close.
FWIW, most of the villages along the old Norfolk and Western (now Metra Southwest Service) like Oak Lawn, Worth, Palos, Orland Park, etc. are much more oriented around leaner government, keeping lower taxes, and being "business friendly", rather than milking commercial activity to fund a large patronage gravy train, and have rather different political dynamics.
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