* Beward of Chamber of Commerce Driven SSA's

Article by PETER ZELCHENKO

Here in the City of Richard, even in the precincts of Ann and Joe, the snow and wind are blowing, and people are bustling about with their plans. It's happening all over Chicago. It's SSA season again.

And lo, ye here in the Park of Wicker, and yea even ye in the Town of Buck, are now to be taxed discreetly. Give ye the gift of money to your chamber of commerce.

For a proposed new SSA in Lincoln Park, I recently testified that although the tax was designed to benefit commerce, the burden would fall mostly on residents.

But you see, that's not what folks were told. SSA consultant Brad Leibov chanted that 84 percent of the tax would come from what he called "commercial properties."

For our Wicker Park-Bucktown SSA, for which Leibov was also the consultant, the figure he has given is 94 percent.

Leibov's information is so skewed as to call the entire tax into question. ( You reading this Ms. Kimmy Bares )

The Wicker Park-Bucktown SSA will follow my Lincoln Park study, in which I demonstrated that probably about two-thirds of the tax will in fact be borne by residents, while business will only pay a third, if even that. You see, Leibov's tally of "commercial properties" appears to have included most of the condos, apartments, and small offices in the taxing area.

He has yet to explain this to me. To make matters worse, since the tax is based strictly on a building's assessed valuation, a single-family homeowner may pay as much or more than the owner of a bar that rakes in millions in liquor sales every year.

Someone go out and put some coal in Brad Leibov's stocking. In no SSA I've observed have I seen honest data and adequate community consensus. The plan is typically only vaguely known and understood by those affected, and organized criticism is almost impossible for several reasons.

When you see meetings and hearings attended almost exclusively by the handful of officials paid to be there, you know it's not because the community loves the idea, but more likely because something went afoul.

Because I know my neighbors better than that. Don't get me wrong; I think SSAs can be beneficial. They're for special things that our regular city taxes can't cover, and they can be developed, controlled, managed, and serviced by anyone who takes the initiative. But many recent SSAs have been concocted by chambers of commerce and developers as sources of additional revenue and influence for themselves, for commercial enhancement projects that come in the form of aesthetic improvements that are impossible to evaluate for their efficacy.

Beware these chamber-induced SSAs

They are packed with lavish projects that they claim will cause business magically to flourish. Yes, a few of these services might be nice to have. But most of those on the typical menus, and even the arguably useful things, are really things that-lo!-a chamber of commerce should be getting its growing roster of member businesses to support voluntarily.

In today's Chicago, chambers of commerce don't grow so much through business recruitment as they do through public taxing initiatives like this. That's because, as the law currently stands, it's far easier for a chamber to push an SSA past a distracted alderman and neighborhood than to recruit new business membership.

Unless a full 51 percent of property owners in the proposed SSA district formally object to the tax, it gets passed. But make no mistake-no matter what they've claimed, the Wicker Park-Bucktown tax is not going to be paid primarily by commercial interests.

It's several million dollars of free money for chamber of commerce initiatives-compliments of residents, renters, and small offices.

Josh Deth is co-owner of Handlebar on North Avenue, which is within the Wicker Park-Bucktown SSA. A city planner by training, Deth also happens to be the new executive director of the Logan Square Chamber of Commerce. Now, down the street from Deth's restaurant lives Evelyn Corona, childcare intake coordinator for Erie Neighborhood House and a very longtime resident of North Avenue. Corona told me she'd not heard about the tax before I spoke to her just a few days ago.

I expected that response because the notification requirements are so loosey-goosey, there's no record that neighbors ever received any notice.

But you can be sure that she would have been upset if she'd known that she was going to be paying several hundred dollars a year in additional taxes for things like hanging flower baskets and Christmas lights.

In fact, although the rationale for the tax was for enhancements for commerce, Handlebar may well be made to pay far less of the tax than Corona will, depending on rent structure and other factors. And restaurants like Handlebar are the ones that will be benefiting most from the increased commercial traffic that the tax will ostensibly bring.

Think that's a shame? Owners of bars like the burgeoning Subterranean may pay only a few dollars a month more than Corona, or they may even pay less. Yet, while Corona and her husband Gabriel pick up plastic cups and beer bottles in front of their little house on Sunday mornings before church, Subterranean rakes in tens of thousands of dollars in liquor income every weekend and its drunk denizens cause the kinds of policing and cleanup problems that this SSA is presumably to solve.

If anyone knew what was going on, a civil war would be breaking out among the various interest groups in our community about this tax.