A New Twist in DePaul TIF Scam

By Jim Vail

The Tribune is reporting that city officials filed a lawsuit seeking to gain control of Lakeside Bank property that is needed to develop the DePaul University arena and a nearby 500-room hotel.

The TIF giveaway of $55 million in tax dollars comes at a time when the mayor says there is no money for the schools, thus leading to school closures and increased class sizes amid huge budget cuts.

Secondcityteacher readers know politicians lie all the time to benefit the rich who pay to get them elected.  Everything Mayor Rahm Emanuel says and does can be traced back to his financial backers.  Same goes for the president and all the other politicians who play by the rules, or get booted.

So No. 1, when they say the city does not have enough money, well, they don't have enough money for we the people - many of us suckers who went out to vote for these fools - but always plenty of money for the 1% who control our political system.

The lawsuit was filed Monday in Cook County Circuit Court for a parcel at Cermak Road and Indiana Avenue, just north of the convention center's West Building, in an imminent domain case where the city has a so-called overriding to take the property.

Now, here we go with total corruption, boys and girls!  

Lakeside Bank is majority owned by the Cacciatore family, whose patriarch, Victor Cacciatore Sr., was a longtime DePaul trustee and whose his family has donated more than $1 million to the university.

Hmm, why did he donate $1 million?  Well, donations usually turn out to be great investments for the rich.  He claims to not want to sell the property (ya, right!) because it is the site of "the banks's best branch office."

There's a bunch of stuff about how the city wanted to take the property in 2008 before its plans for a hotel were halted due to the recession, which cost the city nearly $1.4 million in outside legal fees and expenses, the Trib reports, including forking over $281,286 to Lakeside Bank for attorney's fees (do these poor bank people know how to play ball or what?).

The appraisers, the Trib further reports, valued their land at about $13 million while McPier valued it at about $8 million.

So, Secondcityteachers got a call from Erika Wozniak, that awesome CPS teacher fighting the DePaul TIF scam (blighted properties anyone?).  

She said the bank is standing to make a pretty penny on this, maybe $30 million or so.  The Trib reports that McPier has used nearly $10 million in its expansion bond proceeds for two other parcels on another block, but it does not state how much is being offered to the DePaul trustee!

So how about that $1 million donation!  Wow, the return on Catholic tithing!  Who needs heaven, when you got the money rolling in here.

Wozniak said a DePaul administrative memo recently went out about huge cuts at DePaul because "times are tough."

"How about not taking that money, and donating it for the university," Wozniak said.

Wozniak has been talking to DePaul's director of finance Jeff Bethskey, who keeps telling her DePaul is the little guy here.

"He tells me, 'I beg you, please stop it.' Can you believe that?"

Funny, Wozniak added, Bethskey has children at a Chicago Public School, LaSalle II, who are getting hit hard by Rahm.

But DePaul is in on the scam - and to say DePaul is the little guy, literally robbing the people by getting in on a dirty deal to have tax dollars build a stadium for a private institution when the public schools budgets are being savagely cut, is a joke of course.  TIFs are supposed to be reserved for "blighted areas" of the city, least we forget.

Well, at least this guy is honest about one thing.  He admitted to Wozniak, without saying it, that Emanuel's announcement of the DePaul TIF was right at the time of the school cuts to $%# the union.  In other words, it was perfectly timed to screw public education and the Chicago Teachers Union.

You got to love the people who represent us and God!  When it comes to money, there is nothing like corrupt salvation for those who got it!