The Crystal Lake City Council has announced the imposition of a new tax–this time one on those who use storage units.
The memo states,
The Storage Facility Rental Tax is a tax imposed upon the privilege of renting or leasing any self-storage facility accommodation within the municipality.
The money will be used to help pay for capital improvements.
In an attempt to make it look like A “user fee,” staff state that “calls for police assistance at self-storage facilities are typically more time consuming than responses for most service businesses. There have been five reports of burglaries at self-storage facilities in Crystal Lake since 2020. .When a burglary to a storage unit occurs, it is not uncommon that more than one unit is affected at the same time. The burglary may not be discovered until the next day or longer. These factors lead to time delays for notifying multiple victims, reports for missing items, scene processing and time lapsed for tracking the perpetrators, which is a drain on police resources.”
No cost to the police department is given for this once year crime.
Annual revenue of about $150,000 from this proposed tax is predicted from the ten locations in Crystal Lake.
At its last meeting, the Lake in the Hills Village Board rejected a similar tax, but one has been enacted in McHenry, not noted in the staff memo.
