With all the talk of financial crises in Illinois governments, it would be easy to overlook the $1 million that Chicago Public Schools and Cook County officials say state Rep. Monique Davis owes for rent and taxes on her district office. But the standoff between the Far South Side Democrat and her landlords at CPS shows how even minor disputes can grow into hefty bills that might land in the laps of taxpayers.
Bear with us because it’s not easy to follow the dancing debts. And, as we go along, join us in guessing who’s going to get stuck for this fiasco.
The building in question, a single-story office property at 1234 W. 95th St., for years housed a local chapter of the Loyal Order of the Moose. It was a Board of Education district office in the late 1970s, and CPS eventually converted it to rental property. Davis became a tenant in 1988.
In 2002, CPS wouldn’t renew her lease and threatened to evict her, contending that she had failed to pay property taxes on the building, as she was required to do. When Davis lost her lease, the state quit paying rent to CPS. She stayed put.
In 2009, CPS sued Davis for all the rent it says she owes, a figure that has grown to about $600,000, including penalties.
She also hasn’t paid Cook County property taxes that, as of late 2010, totaled another $456,000.
Davis tends to get indignant at the suggestion she should have been paying those taxes. In a 2007 letter to the Board of Ed president, she claimed that “this is a government building and we don’t pay taxes.” The state Department of Revenue says no, the building doesn’t qualify for a property tax exemption.
We’ve tried to talk with Davis about this, but she hasn’t responded.
It’s clear to us, though, that Davis knew from the start she should pay the property taxes. In her first lease, she even penciled in a section saying she wouldn’t pay them until she moved in. And in 1998, the state Revenue Department denied her request to grant tax-exempt status to the building. But why wasn’t the state paying the property taxes from the get-go? Who knows? Maybe somebody didn’t send the tax bills to Springfield.
On one level, these disputes involve two government bodies, CPS and Cook County, trying to get rent and taxes from another government body, the state. Tax dollars fund all three. But CPS and the county shouldn’t have to waste money taking Davis to court because she evidently didn’t live up to her obligation to pay the property taxes. Davis now owes about $100,000 in rent and a similar amount in taxes; the rest of the disputed $1 million, incredibly, is for penalties and interest. Who let this slide for this long?
Now back to our question about who’ll wind up paying for this fiasco. We don’t know. We hope the key players don’t think the logical answer is, “Taxpayers!” Why didn’t CPS proceed to evict Davis back in 2002, or even earlier, if she was in violation of her lease? Did someone look the other way because Davis is a retired CPS administrator, with ties to the Chicago Teachers Union, who did CPS’ bidding in Springfield? Nah, this wasteful saga couldn’t be rooted in cronyism, could it?
We do know there wasn’t this much trouble with the Loyal Order of the Moose.
