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Editor’s note: I’m leaving this story near the top because I am so infuriated at the misleading recorded telephone call I received Friday night asking me to vote for the 10 cent per $100 of assessed valuation tax increase. I don’t mind emotional pitches, but saying voting for a tax will save us money is too, too outrageous to let pass unnoticed.
Since writing this, Fox River Grove Republican Precinct Committeeman has published the table you see below on his blog.
Look near the bottom and, then, the right hand column.
You will see residents in McHenry County are the 25th highest taxed in the whole country when taxes are compared to income. We have the 29th highest property taxes.
McHenry County homes are the 26th highest in the country.
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Written Thursday night, April 4th-
Even as I was listening to the 377 Board tax hike robo-call, I couldn’t believe my ears.
Misleading at best and deliberately deceitful at worst, I concluded.
I dealt with the frustrations of parents with developmentally disabled children the entire sixteen years I served as State Representative, eight years in the 1970′s and eight years in the 1990′s.
“Vote No, Tax Referendum,” reads the generic sign.
I know that the state employees union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), does everything it can to protect state employee’s jobs.
Even if it means housing DD individuals in state facilities which cost $100,000 a year per person, as the robo-caller said.
Cost-benefit analysis does not make any difference to such unions.
It certainly is cheaper, but, more importantly, more humane, to house those who cannot fully take care of themselves in neighborhood locations.
Whether it costs the small amount (which I did not jot down, but seemed low to me ) asserted in the robo-call is true or not, I do not know.
I do know it is not the job of taxpayers in McHenry County to pay for services State government should be providing.
The admonition of the robo-caller to “keep tax dollars right her in McHenry County rather than send[ing] them off to Springfield” is made of the stuff that used to be below my grandmother’s outhouse in Crumpton, Maryland.
No one is going to reduce State taxes on McHenry County residents if people vote to raise their property taxes by ten cents for every $100 of assessed valuation.
And our real estate taxes don’t get sent to Springfield.
The quoted assertion above would never hold up in an open forum.
It is too ridiculous.
It is meant to delude the–what do the pundits call them?–low information voters.
If people vote “Yes” on the 377 Board referendum, State taxes will not be cut for us.
But that is what the robo-caller wants people to believe.
Passage of the referendum will mean property taxes will be increased $9 million next year, with more to come every year thereafter.
$60 for a $200,000 home to start; $90 for a $300,000 home.
More if the real estate market increases the value of your home.
My memory of sixteen years in the Illinois General Assembly tells me that raising taxes in McHenry County for the 708 Mental Health Board encouraged Springfield decision makers to send us less than our fair share.
That’s because State bureaucrats perceived that other parts of the state without local funding needed the state subsidies more.
So, by increasing our property taxes still more for purposes for which the 708 Board funding was created, we will probably be contributing to our getting even less than comes now.
Let me give another reminder of the pushers of this tax hike with memories that do not go back to the late 1960′s when the Mental Health Board was created by referendum.
It was supported by both those seeking mental health funding and those seeking funding for those who were then called “retarded.”
As McHenry County Treasurer, when tax anticipation warrants were issued after the first tax levy was passed, I personally took $25,000 checks to both Pioneer Center, then housed in the old Terra Cotta School, and to Family Services, headquarted down the street toward the Fox River from McHenry East High School’s campus.
The 708 Board got about $15 million last year.
If half of it did not got for DD services, why did the McHenry County Board approve its budget?
The Board members certainly did not have to.
And, if this referendum fails, as I hope it will, the County Board can tell the 708 Board what type of a budget it will approve and what will be unacceptable.
By the way, I fought to shift money from such DD state institutions to community care, finally seeing Governor George Ryan’s Mental Health and DD Department Director Ann Patla, a former head of Pioneer Center, submit such a budget.
That’s the fight proponents of this referendum should be fighting…rather than trying to pry money out of our pockets.
