Wow! We did it. Or, I should say – 200 of you did it. Because that’s how many people chipped in to our crowdfunding campaign. The book “Chicago Is Not Broke. Funding the City We Deserve” is now available for purchase! Click here to order. Books ship out every few days so your wait will be brief.
You can get a discount if you order five copies or more. We’d LOVE to visit your organization, school or religious institution to do a presentation around the book and its ideas. Use the form below to contact us.
Tom was on “Chicago Newsroom” with Ken Davis on April 7, 2016 to talk civics, TIFs and explain why it was great to NOT get the 2016 Olympics and how Chicago is NOT broke. (46 minutes)
The next stage in the evolution of the TIF Illumination Project is here! Help us raise funds to publish “Chicago Is Not Broke. Funding the City We Deserve.” We’ve got the authors all lined up. Will you pitch in so we can publish 5,000 copies?
Want to get Illuminated? Attend this one hour “TIF 101” webinar on January 6. It’s free. Tom Tresser of the TIF Illumination Project, will present. Please purchase a seat via EventBrite:
What a night at Malcolm X College. About 300 people showed up for the first 2016 Budget Town Hall presided over by Mayor Emanuel and attended by all his department heads. Dozens of folks got one minute to ask a question or make a statement. The room was filled with supporters of the Dyett High Schoolhunger strikers. People young and old expressed their anger and aspirations, stepping up to the mike and demanding that the mayor first meet with the hunger strikers and accept the community-development proposal to transform Dyett into a global leadership and green technology academy.
There were also calls for coming clean on TIFs and releasing TIF funds into the general stream of local government agencies – especially our beleaguered public schools. I asked the mayor to release all documents proving his claim that most of the $1.4 billion sitting in TIFs on January 1, 2015 are NOT available for distribution. The mayor and his budget director actually responded. Budget Director Alex Holt promised Tom a meeting in the near future to answer all our questions on where the money is. Stay tuned.
After two years of jam packed work and hosting 17 social justice and organizing groups the CivicLab must close its doors on June 30, 2015. We’d love to hear from folks who used the space or who found what we did there valuable. Please visit our Facebook page to comment. Thanks!
Michael Stephen of Outside the Loop Radio interviewed Tom on WGN on April 1, 2015. They talked TIFs, what the CivicLab is all about and the need to DO democracy. 17 minutes.
Wow! We did it. Or, I should say – 200 of you did it. Because that’s how many people chipped in to our crowdfunding campaign. The book “Chicago Is Not Broke. Funding the City We Deserve” is now available for purchase! Click here to order. Books ship out every few days so your wait will be brief.
